Carbon Nation

The Adaptation Follies; or Ignoring the Un-Conceived

2008-05-08T11:43:39Z

Two entries remain in my response to Steven Postrel's remarks over at Inverse Square. I think there's no need to go back into Postrel's language, unless you want to, but I still think two important points should receive more attention, everywhere I suppose. The notion of adaptation to climate change is one of them.

Flooding graphic from the San Francisco Chronicle, "Oceans Rising Fast, New Studies Find," March 24, 2006.

Adaptation is a fairy land that the business-as-usual crowd visits with increasing frequency, a hand-wave in the face of rising ocean waves. Ask yourself, how far does the conversation ever go beyond the word "adaptation"? Do proponents of adaptation define it, suggest how much it would cost, explain how populations might change? Can adapters give a heads up about what places should adapt, and in what ways? To me, "adaptation" sounds more like "reaction." The world is changing beyond anything in our experience. The places that humans have settled for thousands of years -- where rivers meet, atop productive soils, on ocean shores just yards from all the fish they can eat -- may not be such great places to settle in 50 or 100 years. But don't listen to me. Let's go to a reputable source for talking about adaptation, the brick put out last year by the IPCC's Working Group II, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, specifically Chapter 17 (pdf), "Assessment of Adaptation Practices, Options, Constraints and Capacity." Here's what the IPCC has to say about adaptation:

"There are significant barriers to implementing adaptation. These include both the inability of natural systems to adapt to the rate and magnitude of climate change, as well as technological, financial, cognitive and behavioural, and social and cultural constraints. There are also significant knowledge gaps for adaptation as well as impediments to flows of knowledge and information relevant for adaptation decisions."

But there is limited progress, the authors aver.

"While adaptation is increasingly regarded as an inevitable part of the response to climate change, the evidence in this chapter suggests that climate change adaptation processes and actions face significant limitations, especially in vulnerable nations and communities. In most of the cases, adaptations are being implemented to address climate conditions as part of risk management, resource planning and initiatives linked to sustainable development...

"Recent reviews indicate that a 'wait and see' or reactive approach is often inefficient and could be particularly unsuccessful in addressing irreversible damages, such as species extinction or unrecoverable ecosystem damages, that may result from climate change... Knowledge of climate change causes, impacts and possible solutions does not necessarily lead to adaptation. Well-established evidence from the risk, cognitive and behavioural psychology literatures points to the inadequacy of the 'deficit model' of public understanding of science, which assumes that providing individuals with scientifically sound information will result in information assimilation, increased knowledge, action and support for policies based on this information."

Right. So, essentially, despite some isolated hopeful examples, adaptation is poorly defined, difficult to prepare for, and hard to talk about. Adaptation is to climate change what appeasement was in Munich.

The most eloquent and forceful interview I've had on this topic is with David Rind, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Here's what he told Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes From a Catastrophe. This passage comes from Kolbert's May 5, 2005 New Yorker article, "The Climate of Man II: The Curse of Akkad":

One afternoon, when I was talking to Rind in his office, he mentioned a visit that President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, had paid to GISS a few years earlier. "He said, 'We're really interested in adaptation to climate change,' " Rind recalled. "Well, what does 'adaptation' mean?" He rummaged through one of his many file cabinets and finally pulled out a paper that he had published in the Journal of Geophysical Research entitled "Potential Evapo—transpiration and the Likelihood of Future Drought." In much the same way that wind velocity is measured using the Beaufort scale, water availability is measured using what's known as the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Different climate models offer very different predictions about future water availability; in the paper, Rind applied the criteria used in the Palmer index to GISS's model and also to a model operated by NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He found that as carbon-dioxide levels rose the world began to experience more and more serious water shortages, starting near the equator and then spreading toward the poles. When he applied the index to the GISS model for doubled CO2, it showed most of the continental United States to be suffering under severe drought conditions. When he applied the index to the G.F.D.L. model, the results were even more dire. Rind created two maps to illustrate these findings. Yellow represented a forty—to—sixty-per-cent chance of summertime drought, ochre a sixty-to-eighty-per-cent chance, and brown an eighty-to-a-hundred-per- cent chance. In the first map, showing the GISS results, the Northeast was yellow, the Midwest was ochre, and the Rocky Mountain states and California were brown. In the second, showing the G.F.D.L. results, brown covered practically the entire country.

"I gave a talk based on these drought indices out in California to water-resource managers," Rind told me. "And they said, 'Well, if that happens, forget it.' There's just no way they could deal with that.”

He went on, "Obviously, if you get drought indices like these, there's no adaptation that's possible. But let's say it's not that severe. What adaptation are we talking about? Adaptation in 2020? Adaptation in 2040? Adaptation in 2060? Because the way the models project this, as global warming gets going, once you've adapted to one decade you're going to have to change everything the next decade.

"We may say that we're more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it's potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we're not only more technologically able; we're more technologically able destructively as well. I think it's impossible to predict what will happen. I guess--though I won't be around to see it--I wouldn't he shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed." He paused. "That's sort of an extreme view.”

There is a 20-year-wide chasm between the business-as-usual community and current climate science. The central question in all of this is, What does the present generation owe future generations? Is our message to future generations, "React to whatever's coming!"? Certainly seems that way. Otherwise we would have started coping with our emissions a decade ago. Debate over the rights of women and the rights of the unborn have riven this country like no other issue since the Civil War. But how much do you hear about the rights of the un-conceived? Given the state of child care in this country, wanna-be parents actually have to sign up their un-conceived children for day care lists if they want a spot to open up by the time the child is conceived, born, and 3-6 months old. Seems like while we're signing the un-conceived up for private-sector social services we should also think about what the planet's going to look like when they're old.

"Adaptation-only" is a message of self-serving arrogance to posterity.

Second "Whirlwind" Review

2008-05-02T13:52:05Z

This just in from Publisher's Weekly:

Roston, a former Time writer on technology and energy, positively revels [my emphasis -- ER] in the chance to dig deep into the ubiquitous, life-enabling carbon. He begins his first book with the science of this element: how the element first appeared when stars burned helium into carb on; how, before there was life on earth, plate tectonics drove the planet's carbon flow through the atmosphere, land and oceans; and how the development of the earliest organisms reshaped the carbon cycle. Turning to humans' use of carbon and consequent speeding up the carbon cycle, Roston is a whirlwind, explaining carbon's role in the formation of everything from DNA to Kevlar bulletproof vests and, finally, carbon's role in the earth's climate. This is what Roston cares passionately about, and the sum of the parts of his energetic explanations of carbon's uniqueness brings, for dedicated and attentive readers, a crystal-clear understanding of the global warming process. Roston never scrimps on explaining even complicated chemical processes, and the result is a convincing argument that the earth is at a crossroad, the time for denial has passed and the time for smart, innovative solutions has arrived. 20 b&w illus. (July)

A Chill in the Air

2008-05-02T10:33:16Z

In the midst of the Steven Postrel flap, the journal Nature comes out with an intriguing study that tentatively predicts a change in ocean circulation patterns will cool warming trends in the northern hemisphere in the next decade. The study emphasizes the novelty of making such a prediction, and concludes, given a gazillion caveats, that global warming temperature signals could plateau for several years while the ocean's circulatory system undergoes a periodic oscillation.

Blog entries should have pictures even when they have nothing to do with the content, or as in this case, make a visual case that is totally nonsensical to the post.

What's interesting to watch in the blogosphere and media is how poorly public discussion can withstand any level of complexity beyond the zero-sum, binary nature of most national issues: Republican/Democrat, global warming hysteric/denier, tall/short, sea/firmament, etc. Warming and cooling need not be mutually exclusive, as counterintuitive as that sounds. You can have both at the same time, a short term (decadal) cooling signal that masks the anthropogenic warming trend. When the IPCC reviews climate models, it presents the total anthropogenic forcing as net. Notice in this chart from the 2007 IPCC report how aerosols (in blue) reduce the gross radiative forcing:

This is another reason to raise an eyebrow at rhetoric like that which popped up over in the comments section of Tom Levenson's Inverse Square blog (see post below). To talk monolithically about global warming or regional cooling (note, the issue here isn't "global cooling") doesn't provide an adequate picture. It's possible in the next decade the meridional overturning circulation will lower the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere. It's "very likely" to use the IPCC's restrained phrase, that warming will continue after the natural ocean state switches again. Natural climate variability (annual or decadal time scales) shouldn't be confused with climate change, which is happening at the same time, but will also "very likely" go on for thousands of years. The "global cooling" I wrote about yesterday, in the 3rd quarter of the last century, might even have been caused by a similar flip in ocean circulation -- a natural trend toward global cooling masking an "unnatural" warming trend, something I read today (Will add link later, when have materials handy).

Andy Revkin over at Dot-Earth posed a question today about how climate activists will or won't be able to integrate studies like this cooling picture into their own heated rhetoric. Here's my post in his comments section:

“Can Climate Campaigns Withstand a Cooling test?”

Whatever you think about this or that climate campaign, you have to acknowledge the paradox at their core — at the core of any advocacy honestly based on accumulated scientific research. I suppose by definition, campaigns are dogmatic, with focus-group-tested messages and enough Kool Aid to go around. Science on the other hand is this shape-shifting, self-destroying, self-perpetuating bee swarm that eschews dogma (officially, anyway) and drives without prejudice into the unknown (officially, anyway). Staying “on message” must be tough when the swarm must pivot around a new landscape feature.

The hope would be that this interesting paper in Nature leads the more hysterical of the groups both left and right of the meridional overturning circulation (That includes you, Mr. Ebell) to think a little harder about what science is and isn’t, and about what a novel peer-reviewed paper is and isn’t. It’s worth tying this conversation into the groundswell of activities now occurring in the realm of scientific literacy, from the 2005 Rising Above the Gathering Storm report to the end of last year and early this year, when two Hollywood screenwriters signed on pretty much the entire U.S. scientific establishment in support of a debate on science-and-technology issues among the presidential candidates. The latter hasn’t happened, and the initiative has its serious critics, but it’s a sign of how hungry scientists are to let people know what they actually do for a living. [Disclosure: My name is in there someplace among the several hundred thousand blogger-endorsers.]

So, to answer the question, if climate campaigns don’t have enough room to accommodate natural climate variation — and several hundred thousand other issues — into their messaging, a breeze of cooler air, even a virtual one wafting in from an ocean model still in beta-testing, might be the best thing that has happened to this conversation in a while.

...for both climate activists and business school professors. Studies like this are opportunities to deepen understanding of science in general, and climate science in particular, no matter how much added confusion it also leaves in its wake.

A Rhetoric of Irony

2008-04-30T11:46:57Z

Steven Postrel is an assistant professor at the Cox School of Business at Sounthern Methodist University. Things have been hopping over at Tom Levenson's Inverse Square blog. Postrel has left some lengthy comments about the utility and logic of climate change mitigation activities. I'll be addressing these comments in short takes over the next few days.

The thrust of Postrel's comments is that adaptation is the way to deal with climate change. His argument is similar to that of many adaptation advocates who don't appear to have thought through what adaptation actually means (ie, what conditions are you going to adapt to? 2040? 2080? 2100? How do you know what they are? Okay, pick 2100, how do southwestern American cities adapt to possibly not having any water?). More on that later.

In the comments section, and in Tom's response to Postrel, there's been some talk about whether Postrel is engaging in argument, as he contends, or rhetoric, as Tom and Loveable Liberal contend, noting Postrel's use of the phrase "when pigs fly."

There are other reasons that betray Postrel's posts as well-educated (but under-informed) banter, rather than argument. Take this chunk for the moment. Postrel:

"Just one of many issues to consider is the following thought experiment–if there were a provable natural trend toward cooling would anyone be arguing for increased CO2 emissions to balance and stabilize the climate? Answer: When pigs fly. Or if the world were warming up on its own, would anyone propose CO2 emission reductions as a reasonable policy response? Again: Not very likely."

First of all, with the anthropogenic push underway for some time, at this point the world basically is warming up on its own. In many respects, scientists can no longer distinguish natural from anthropogenic forcings, and they don't need to (See Houghton, Richard. "Balancing the Global Carbon Budget." Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 35 (May 2007): 313-347. I would hope that governments would address natural warming or cooling, or any threat to the continuity of modernity. This also applies to meteors -- both natural and, uh, manmade I guess.

Also, global cooling actually isn't a thought experiment. Here Postrel betrays his rhetorical leanings, since he's proposing a hypothetical that a generation ago wasn't a hypothetical, but a provable natural trend. We now know global cooling was largely due to sulfate aerosol pollution, but at the time, both natural and unatural causes were "provable" (a word I stay away from as a practical matter). From Historical Perspectives on Climate Change by James Rodger Fleming:

"By the mid-1970s, global cooling was an observable trend. The U.S. National Science Board pointed out that during the last twenty to thirty years, world temperature had fallen, "irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade." The leading culprits in a global cooling were thought to be particulates from industrial sources, increased cirrus clouds due to jet airplane contrails, and the configuration of the Earth's orbital elements according to the astronomical theory of the ice ages."

So my initial reaction to Postrel's comment was, This is strange. He is making up a theoretical event that has already occurred, and supposing that geo-engineering solutions to it would never emerge, when they had already been proposed. To extrapolate Postrel's logic, pigs must have dominated international airspace during the 1970s. More from Fleming (pp 133-14):

"Modest advances in cloud seeding suggested to some that weather modification techniques might be extended and applied to the climate... One widely discussed proposal involved damming the Bering Strait. The idea was to isolate the Arctic Ocean from the cold waters of the North Atlantic, pump in warmer water from the Kurishiro current in the North Pacific, and melt some of the glaciers. Most scientists believed a milder Arctic would favor the Soviet Union. Mikhail Budyko, a well-respected Soviet climatologist, proposed melting the ice by dusting it with soot from airplanes. Other Soviet scientists favored the use of underground nuclear explosions to cut canals and reroute the course of rivers, saving water and perhaps ameliorating the climate. The most outrageous proposal was that of Valentin Chernkov, who wanted to use rockets to construct of ring of potassium dust around the Earth similar to the rings of Saturn. Chernkov felt this would result in a "perpetual summer" and lead to agricultural improvements. Such uncontrolled experiments, of course, would have indefinite costs and unpredictable effects, and would be likely to generate unwanted side effects."

So if as Postrel contends, he is deploying argument, not rhetoric, his argument appears to be missing some historical context that he might even use to his own advantage. (He emphasized a "provable natural trend toward cooling." A natural cause was only one explanation for which there was evidence. And my personal approach is not to talk about proof in science. You can't even have proof in mathematics after Herr Goedel. So I'm not sure what provability means anymore, except of course in its meaning synonymous with "testability," in which case it is central.)

Coming soon: Adaptation; and the land mine of climate change and cost-benefit analysis.

What Planet Are They on?

2008-04-26T15:46:52Z

I've never really understood Earth Day, sort of in the same way I've never understood other made-up modern observances. But I acknowledge and am grateful that it has grown over almost four decades into a productive force for teaching and awareness of many issues that otherwise attract approximately zero attention. The op-ed I did with Bill Chameides last week was a great opportunity to talk about how the focus of Earth Day should move from the recycling of soda cans to what's in the cans themselves -- and how it got there.

Over at the State Department, they have their own idea of Earth Day:

What Is Earth Day?

Earth Day, April 22, is the annual celebration of the environment and a time to assess the work still needed to protect the natural gifts of our planet. Earth Day has no central organizing force behind it though several nongovernmental organizations work to keep track of the thousands of local events in schools and parks that mark the day. Earth Day is observed around the world, although nowhere is it a national holiday.

I'm glad they emphasize that "nowhere is it a national holiday" and that it "has no central organizing force." I think those are two of Earth Day's most notable qualities, sort of in the way that Thursdays (for example) have no organizing force and are not national holidays. Thanks, State Department! But it gets better. Here's the picture and caption that run on the State Department's Earth Day introductory blurb page:

"The snow-covered terrain of the earth's surface (NASA photo)"

What a beautiful ice-covered planet we have! And, when you click through on the same page to Climate Change and Clean Energy, you learn two main things:

The Earth’s climate system is a complex, interactive process made up of the atmosphere, land, snow and ice, oceans and living things. Two factors change the atmosphere -- natural phenomena like volcanic eruptions and human-induced increases in greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

That's sort of a stab at honesty. It's a little bit like saying that someone who tragically dies by getting hit by a bus has died (a) because everyone dies eventually, and (b) because he got hit by a bus. The Bush EPA has long acknowledged (in the recesses of its Web site) that manmade gases contribute to global warming. Bush has always had two speeches on the topic, the "uncertainty" speech, and the only slightly less deplorable "voluntary change" speech, which he gives internationally. Here's the picture that runs on the State Department's Climate Change and Clean Energy page.

At least the ice is dripping.

First Review!

2008-04-22T15:15:18Z

Kirkus Reviews has published the first review on The Carbon Age:

A high-level entry in the single-element history genre from [former] Time magazine technology writer Roston.
Both human life and civilization depend on carbon, the author avers. We may be mostly water, but by dry weight we’re mostly carbon. Carbon cycling through the atmosphere, oceans and land influences life, and life influences carbon cycling. Roston begins with the Big Bang and in Part I, “The Natural,” ranges over topics from the origins of life to body heat. Part II, “The Unnatural,” covers the past 150 years, during which industry and an expanding population have created an industrial carbon cycle.

Primitive organisms appeared soon after the earth cooled four billion years ago. Soon after came photosynthesis, which uses the sun’s energy, water and carbon dioxide to produce complex carbon compounds and oxygen. This eventually generated enough oxygen to influence the carbon cycle, which means it influenced weather. Most atmospheric carbon (i.e., carbon dioxide) is produced by volcanoes and the weathering of rock; it disappears into oceans and deep into the earth. Carbon dioxide from living things exerted only a modest influence on this cycle until the 19th century, when human ingenuity began reversing photosynthesis on a massive scale: converting oxygen and carbon compounds (wood, coal, oil, gas) back into water and carbon dioxide. It’s pouring into the atmosphere faster than oceans, land and shrinking forests can absorb it, and carbon dioxide acts as an insulator, allowing sunlight to heat the earth but preventing heat from radiating back into space. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen and fallen throughout earth’s history, but no natural process can match today’s spectacular outpouring. Readers searching for a systematic report on global warming should read Al Gore or Bill McKibben. Roston devotes several chapters to the subject, but he maintains a focus on carbon itself: its role in the formation of Earth, earthly life, human life and human industry.

Lucid and occasionally disturbing.

Dot Ehux

2008-04-21T13:20:04Z

Just posted this over on the recent coccolithophore string at Dot Earth, a follow-up note to yesterday's post on Emiliania huxleyi:

The European Journal of Phycology doesn’t have the same ring (or distribution) as the journal Science. But last week, eclipsed by Iglesias-Rodriguez et al, a group of American and Chinese researchers published results from studies in which they tested growth of Ehux under varying conditions of temperature, pCO2, and irradiance, and their influence on each other. They write, “We documented a trend of decreased cellular PIC/POC [the ratio of particulate inorganic to organic carbon] production under greatly increased irradiance in our E. huxleyi strain. If this is the case for most calcifying strains of this ecologically dominant marine coccolithophore, then future mixed layer shallowing could potentially have a large impact on the export of PIC relative to POC into the deep ocean (the marine rain ratio) and on the whole marine carbon cycle.” [p 95]

The heightened irradiance would come from changes in ocean stratification, circulation, cloud cover and sea ice cover, brought about by warming, the influx of freshwater into oceans from melting ice, and changing rainfall patterns. (See Feng et al. “Interactive effects of increased pCO2, temperature and irradiance on the marine coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi (Prymniesiophyceae).” European Journal of Phycology, 43:1, 87-98).

This was pointed out to me by one of the authors of the Science paper, who wrote the other day: “The evidence is not all unanimous for coccos, with some studies showing detrimental effects, others not. For instance, another large study was just published last week, and they found reduced calcification at high CO2, in line with the earlier work and contradictory to our study. And they bubbled with CO2 rather than adding acid, i.e. the ‘correct’ way.”

Ehux lives! We think!

2008-04-20T15:48:26Z

The journal Science last week published a paper that challenges several years of thinking about how an algal species pivotal to the oceans' health will fare under higher atmospheric, and therefore oceanic, carbon levels.

Many factors make coccolithophores intriguing. If nothing else, they are beautiful. Check out this micrograph of one species, Calcidiscus leptoporus:

They are storied little creatures -- plant flakes on the half-shell, basically. Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," wrote a memorable essay about their geological and evolutionary significance in 1868, giving credit to calcifying microorganisms for the great chalk chalk deposits of Eurasia, from Britain, south to Morocco, and east to Syria. Carbon cycle scientists in the second half of the 20th century acknowledged their importance to the healthy flow of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans, down to sediment -- a leg of the carbon cycle thought to be under some strain if coccolithophores fail to adjust well to ocean waters rendered more acidic by industrial CO2 pollution. For their size, coccolithophores have disproportionate influence on the global carbon cycle. They are one of three classes of organisms that together make up less than one percent of photosynthetic biomass, but fix carbon into about 45 percent of total biomass. Coccolithophores are shelled algae that take up carbon both for their soft cellular material, and the calcite coccoliths that shield them, spinning it into the ocean carbon cycle, and contributing significantly to the removal of carbon from the atmosphere-ocean system. Their blooms can cover millions of square kilometers of ocean -- they're one of the few organisms that an only be seen with either an electron microscope or a satellite.

A coccolithophore bloom off Newfoundland, satellite image taken July 21, 1999

Head-turning studies in the early 2000's dimmed the future of coccolithophores' prodigious carbon-munching, particularly that of their most abundant species, Emiliana huxleyi. A study published in Nature in 2000 revealed sickly growth patterns in Ehux populations living in waters more acidic than today's:

Emiliana huxleyi, healthy (left); under simulated acidic ocean conditions (right)

Ulf Riebesell et al wrote in 2000 that ocean acidification caused by industrial CO2 pollution would slow down these algae's ability to make their calcite shields. And given the importance of these shields to the oceanic carbon conveyer, a problem for Ehux could be a problem for the entire global carbon cycle.

The paper published last week sheds new hope on Darwin's Bulldog's chalk-makers. The new experiment takes a different approach to simulated ocean conditions under high CO2 scenarios. The Riebesell study in 2000 made the laboratory seawater more acidic by adding hydrochloric acid. The new study actually bubbled CO2 through the water to attain the desired levels of both alkalinity and carbon content.

The results are dramatically different the species studied. Ehux thrives under these new, more accurately simulated conditions. Between 280 parts CO2 per million parts of air to 490 ppm, Ehux calcifies and grows as expected. From 490 ppm to 750 ppm, Ehux dramatically steps up the amount of inorganic carbon (shell) and organic carbon (fruity interior) that it produces. What's more, ocean sediment samples correlate this simulated increase in carbon uptake among Ehux -- further evidence that researchers are on the right track.

This new study is an important piece of the coccolithophore/oceans puzzle -- and also an indicator of how many pieces remain to snap into place, particularly when we don't even really know how many "pieces" there are. One of the authors of the paper wrote me:

The evidence is not all unanimous for coccos, with some studies showing detrimental effects, others not. For instance, another large study was just published last week, and they found reduced calcification at high CO2, in line with the earlier work and contradictory to our study. And they bubbled with CO2 rather than adding acid, i.e. the 'correct' way.

Let's just be relieved that I hedged this passage in The Carbon Age, in anticipation of a study like this coming out!

Nice TIME, Part II: I'd like to teach the world to sip, in perfect harmony; I'd like to make the world a Coke...

2008-04-22T15:15:50Z

From a new piece I co-authored on TIME.com:

"There's no word for the sound you hear upon opening a can of soda. But the tchk-ptoop-fshchss! of a top being popped is distinctive, immediately recognizable. It is the sound of carbonation — or CO2 — rushing from the can. And it's a sound that brings to mind a technology, much overlooked in the popular press, that could safely recapture and store much of that emitted carbon, and has the potential to prevent an impending climate catastrophe...."

The fastest way to cut industrial carbon emissions immediately would be to stop burning coal and driving cars. However, this would have the unfortunate repercussions of eliminating electricity and individual motorized transportation. Without special pixie dust that magically transforms our energy system into one that is rational and fits within the biosphere, without burning carbon minerals into atmospheric gas, this process will be slow and expensive -- with enormous opportunities for economic growth along the way. The energy business is the largest in the world. Remaking the largest industry in the world is an unprecedented entrepreneurial gold mine.

In electricity generation, energy efficiency is a must. It's just stupid not to. Since when in a capitalist economy is efficiency a bad thing, or one that entrepreneurs don't leap at? (Perhaps since inertia set in for both entrenched corporations and lazy consumers.) Beyond efficiency the major tool in the electricity sector that might help sustain our way of life is called carbon capture and storage. That's a slight (two-syllable) improvement over carbon capture and sequestration, its name until recently. Essentially, CCS catches CO2 from the waste stream of fossil-fuel, particularly coal, power plants and injects it underground for, hopefully, millions and millions of years. Essentially, we'd be re-carbonating the planet. Imagine if the entire Earth were still water, or soda syrup -- we'd just be adding the carbonation.

That's the tack Bill Chameides -- dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences -- and I take in a new Viewpoint article on TIME.com, which you can read here.

According to modeling conducted by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions (and in disclosure, my employer), without carbon capture and storage, there simply is no way to come close to achieving carbon-emission reduction goals set forth in pending legislation, S. 2191, America's Climate Security Act of 2007, or the Lieberman-Warner bill. Here is a chart taken from a policy brief (link is .pdf!) from last October:

The teal section of the chart is the contribution of fossil fuel electricity generation with carbon capture and storage -- more than half of generation. Without it -- at least in this model of this bill -- it's either 3 billion k/Wh of dirty power or half the country goes dark.

Nice TIME: 15 Best Climate/Environment Web sites

2008-04-19T17:22:42Z

You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. First in a two-part online contribution to next week's TIME magazine Earth Day issue.

TIME's top 15 Environment Web sites are (in no particular order):
Grist
TreeHugger
Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth
Climate Change (The Guardian)
RealClimate
Environmental Capital (Wall Street Journal)
Colin Beavan's No Impact Man
EcoGeek
Ecorazzi
NRDC's Switchboard
Rhett A. Butler's Mongabay
Climate Ethics
Joe Romm's Climate Progress
World Changing
PlanetArk

Ice Time: 19th Anniversary Edition, or I'm Sorry, But I Didn't Have Time to Write a Short Post

2008-04-17T21:50:22Z

Life stood still, sort of, before the book packed itself off for the typesetter. Two weekends ago I raked the leaves, which had been lying in piles in the backyard since November. It was gross. This weekend I revisited something I’ve wanted to do since January. Hopefully pretty soon I’ll catch up and will be able to write about events in real time. In the meantime, here is an entry I wrote in January, didn’t post, and then revisited last weekend.

When I introduced myself and my work to my dinner companions at the 2^nd annual North Carolina Science Blogging conference in January, Tom Levenson shared that he had written a book about climate, in 1989. [Paraphrasing:] “You know how much the story has changed since then?” he asked rhetorically. He shrugged his shoulders. “Not much.”

For readers of Tom’s blog, Inverse Square, an interesting place to begin talking about this book, Ice Time, is with Tom’s charming consistency of voice. Ice Time’s narrative rolls smoothly from transfigurations of Earth’s earliest atmospheres and climates--from billions to millions to thousands to hundreds of years ago--through the maturation of climate science, through the modeled futures that scientists ran on what passed for powerful computers in the late 1980s. Nearly 20 years later, Tom’s blog is illustrated with paintings and other artful images. This eye for illustration works its way into the flow of the book. In fact, one of several shared elements between The Carbon Age and Ice Time is their authors’ penchants for dropping art metaphors and passages from literature into explications of scientific arcana -- arcana that otherwise obscure the artfulness and creativity within science. From Ice Time:

Science gets a bad rap because the math is hard, the technology daunting, and the work—digging about in the ice or running a deep ocean drill off some workaday ship—is so prosaic. But ideas in science are as much a creative product as they are in a painting or a book, and they can be judged by the same criteria. [My emphasis -- ER] Do the parts of the reasoning fit together nicely? Is the explanation complete? Does the argument advance with grace, without too many stumbles to account for stray details? Does the idea possess that wonderful clarity that makes it seem like it ought to be true?

Art proper should be judged (arguably) by these criteria. It’s glorious that science can be as well. As it turns out, nature in many instances functions in ways that can and do seem beautiful to our human penchant for simplicity, neatness, and symmetry (see the entry below about Occam’s Razor Carl Sagan’s baloney detector). This attraction to certain “beautiful things” may even be a function of biological predisposition. Bilateral symmetry is probably the first place to look for possible links between various human aesthetics and patterns in nature. Even my high school biology textbook made this point. With the entire world of bilateral symmetry to choose an illustration from, the authors picked a headshot of Lucille Ball.

Ice Time divides into three parts, the deep past, the maturation of climate science, and visions of the future – climatologists’ computer models that “discipline the imagination.” Since this is a blog, and not the New York Review of Books, I’ll limit myself to analyses of how the science of each section has changed -- or largely hasn’t -- since Ice Time was published. In a way, parts of The Carbon Age read (to me) like a 19^th anniversary edition of Tom’s first book.

Back to Durham, in January. When Tom said he’d written a climate book in the late ‘80s, I asked him the title. “Ice Time,” he said and smiled – and then shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not a great title.” I’d like to walk through this door Tom opened for a second, at least in terms of the first part of the book, also called “Ice Time.” Part I drives out of the most distant Earthly past, the collection of dust into pebbles, pebbles into rocks, rocks into asteroids, into planetesimals that slammed into each other, making the volatile viscous soup of early Earth.

The overarching trajectory of science in these early chapters has not changed all that much. By the late 1980s, scientists had determined the planet had vanishingly little atmospheric oxygen for the first half of its existence (“You can nail that to the wall,” John Hayes, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, once put it to me.) Rocks 2.3 billion years old or so show traces of a massive glaciation. The same year Ice Time came out, Joseph Kirschvink of Caltech published a seven-paragraph note in a 1,400-page geology compendium suggesting that climate collapses led to a series of “snowball Earth” episodes 800 million to 600 million years ago. This dramatic phrase later encapsulated this much older global freezing as well, and made the whole topic of study catchy enough for limited mass-media attention. The stories of how oxygen may have accumulated in the atmosphere, and eventually enabled complex cells and multicellular life are regular fodder in the scientific journals.

This first third of the book, “Ice Time,” sets up the myriad interactions among sources and sinks of the global carbon cycle. What’s fun about reading the book today is that climate science was a truly a novelty. Computer scientists were beginning to form institutional alliances with atmospheric chemists and geologists. The time was filled more with intellectual drive and excitement than looming threats. Today, the novelty of climate science captured in Ice Time has worn off, or it’s been supplanted by the astonishing severity and reality of climate change. Evidence was strong 19 years ago that warming was occurring and that it was anthropogenic in cause, but the margins of error – the gap between modeled and observed climates -- were still a concern. That’s no longer the case, and hasn’t been for some time.

At the core of this new science was the interplay of many previously stovepipe disciplines. Institutions needed to draw on many areas of expertise given the dynamism of the Earth system. “Perhaps the single central concept of climate science is the idea of feedback, or more generally, of connections between disparate places and processes, connections that go both ways,” Tom writes. The first part of the book illustrates the regular and irregular processions of climates, the driving effects of tectonics and influences of evolution. The glaciation 2.3 billion years ago was truly an icy time, probably the most severe in Earth history. Many living things probably disappeared forever, unable to cope with the oxygen onslaught and the climate collapse it caused over millions of years.

But here’s the thing. In an absolute sense, there’s never been an ice time on Earth. Mars has seen a literal ice time for probably a couple of billion years. If there was ever organic life on Mars it won’t be coming back under current conditions. Earth has never turned irreversibly into an icehouse or a greenhouse. Microscopic crystal zircon flakes found in Western Australia date to 4.4 billion or 4.3 billion years ago. Oxygen isotope evidence within them suggests that they formed in contact with liquid water. That may mean that Earth has had liquid water on it continuously for 4.4 billion years. Before that it would probably have been too hot from its violent formation for oceans to precipitate. During the paleoproterozoic “snowball Earth” episode, it is estimated that oceans froze 300 meters thick at the equator. Beneath the ice, tectonic processes would have kept spewing heat and minerals into the liquid ocean, and significantly, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This gas would have accumulated and eventually built a new greenhouse that melted the ice and returned life to the surface.

That brings me to a semantic point about how scientists and by extension, everybody else, talk about the atmosphere, and how it has changed since the late 1980s. Anthropogenic global warming was lumped into the general phrase “greenhouse effect” until somewhere in the early- to mid-1990s. Perhaps clarity came from the first IPCC report. An interesting scientific paper to read after reading Ice Time might be “The Greenhouse Effect: Science and Policy” [NB: Link is .pdf!]. Stephen Schneider wrote the paper when he hung his hat at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the history of which takes up much of the middle third of Ice Time. Schneider wrote in 1989: “It is helpful to break down the set of issues known as the greenhouse effect into a series of stages, each feeding into another, and then to consider how policy questions might be addressed in the context of these more technical questions.” In 1989, the stages of the greenhouse effect were breaking down, but not so much that “global warming” or “climate change” became the predominant descriptor of the trend. [True fact ex-Ice Time: Stephen Schneider appears in Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper, which is filmed in part at NCAR’s architectural gem of a headquarters. “In his daily life, Schneider is hardly used to filling an extra’s role, and Allen noticed. ‘He told me,’ Schneider says, ‘he promised me that I would be in the scene, that my grandmother would get to see me. Then he told me not to look at the camera.”]

I was in college in 1989 and remember conversations in which the newly topical, now naive question emerged, “Do you think the greenhouse effect is really happening?” The answer is, Yes, because there has likely been a greenhouse as long as Earth has existed. There is no life (that we know of) on Venus, in part because its 96 percent carbon dioxide greenhouse keeps the surface about 700 degrees C.

The second part of Ice Time, “Electronic Winds,” reads nearly as fresh today and is possibly even more important than it was in 1989, since this time has passed and computer modeling is still treated like a mysterious black box by the vast majority of people.

Ice Time covers the emergence of climate science, specifically the rise of the NCAR. Were it not for Tom’s obligatory references to climate as a “new science,” even though it still is, this material would still be current – just add a few paragraphs here or there, or another chapter, about how computing power continues to grow exponentially, and models become more refined. Tom spent a good deal of time at NCAR in Boulder, Colorado, hanging out with the programmers and scientists who ran what today seem like primitive machines.

“Climate science lives and dies by the computer,” Tom writes at the beginning of Part II, a history of mathematical modeling of weather and climate, going back to Lewis Richardson of Harvard, who 80 years ago produced five equations that describe motion in the atmosphere. The piece de resistance here is the narration of the building of NCAR, and the centrality of computing power to scientific thought on how the Earth system works: “Model-based science forces its practitioners, before they can understand what they see in their results, to dissect how they constructed the thought, the electronic experiment, which allowed them to produce results. The study of climate becomes, in large measure, the study of climate models.” The key words here are “in large measure.” Recently I asked James Hansen why computer modeling remains such a black box for non-scientists, when they are pretty much the fundamental tool that our companies and governments use to limit uncertainties about anything. He suggested that it’s not the modeling that should be placed on the pedestal, but in the case of climate the paleoclimate proxies (ice cores and other physical evidence) that allow scientists to think about models in the first place.

Here’s what climate modeling looked like in 1989. NCAR then used a machine called the Cray-1A, a sort of legend in the annals of climate science. Through sixty miles of wire (two orders of magnitude less than its predecessor) the Cray executed commands in a billionth of second. The Cray took in and spat out the equivalent of 80 white pines of paper a day processing commands.

"Over the past twenty years, however, NCAR has accumulated a library of 14 trillion pieces of data, with the size of the data store doubling every year. Some person has to walk over to a bank of cassettes, locate the right one, grab it off the wall, and load it by hand into a machine that can read the tape and transmit it back to the supercomputer, which is capable of 200 million operations a second once it has something upon which to operate."

Two points here. First is to emphasize that there was niggling uncertainty in climate modeling that made scientists uncomfortable in 1989. Here’s what Stephen Schneider wrote in his Science article that year:

“Despite this array of excuses why observed global temperature trends in the past century and those anticipated by most GCMs [global climate models] disagree somewhat, the twofold discrepancy between predicted and measured temperature changes is not large, but still of concern. This rough validation is reinforced by the good simulation by most climatic models of the seasonal cycle, diverse ancient paleoclimates, hot conditions on Venus, cold conditions on Mars (both well simulated), and the present distribution of climates on Earth. When taken together, these verifications provide strong circumstantial evidence that the current modeling of the sensitivity of global surface temperature to given increases in greenhouse gases over the next 50 years or so is probably valid within a rough factor of 2."

Today, climate modelers tell an entirely different story. Jim Hansen has written, "These consequences [of warming] are no longer speculative climate model results… Our best estimates for expected climate impacts are based on evidence from prior climate changes in the Earth’s history and on recent observed climate trends.” See for yourself the refinement in what climate models allow scientists to understand as computing power has accelerated with Moore’s law. Chapter One of Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis offers a striking visual history of climate modeling from the IPCC’s first assessment report (1991) to its fourth (2007).

This reproduction doesn’t do it service, but gives you a taste of how the resolution has improved. The graphic shows four views of Europe. At first, it’s not even recognizable as that familiar western peninsula of Asia. By last year, the “boxes” that serve as the fundamental units of geography are small enough to give the land its familiar contour.

Not only have the models themselves become more precise – “tunable” to our current climate, paleoclimates, or those of other planets – but these days you (Yes, you!) can run climate models on your own computer. Columbia University hosts NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the professional home of James Hansen, Real Climate’s Gavin Schmidt, David Rind, and many others. Mark Chandler is director of the Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM), a Web resource for teachers, students, and anybody else who is interested in fiddling with the Earth’s climate (in silico). The interface is fairly intuitive. An instructional video shows you how the site works, and how you can adjust parameters to see how, say, different projections of CO2 emission and absorption rates affect models of future climates. It does take a bit of computing power. I ran one, though quite slowly, on my 2003 iBook G3. Newer computers shouldn’t have trouble crunching the data.

By Part III, Tom has established that climate science is both a sub-discipline of computer science and an amalgam of a dozen others. “What follows then,” he writes of possible futures -- imaginations disciplined by computer modeling -- “is a catalogue of disasters, some already in the making, some possible, and one that is, I hope, nothing more than a fairy tale, a grim and monitory fable.”

The “grim and monitory fable” is not global warming. I’ll get to that in a minute. Global warming is one outcome that silicon climates allowed scientists to understand, within a margin of uncertainty now narrowed to practical insignificance. What’s disconcerting about these chapters isn’t anything having to do with the book, but that you could (should) revise and reprint Ice Time today, leave these passages virtually in tact, and it would still be news to many people, particularly people in this White House:

“What is happening is that the by-products of our economic life are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and a number of other rarer compounds… [T]he issue again is one of perspective. We simply don’t have it. Human beings have never in their recorded or remembered history experienced anything like the scale of the change that our ways of life are now imposing on the global climate system. The transition from the last ice age to the current, largely ice-free world in which human society has thrived hinged on a temperature rise of the same, apparently modest scale – several degrees Fahrenheit, no more. One crucial difference is the speed involved. The shift from ice age to interglacial took a few thousand years; this new, human-driven warming will reach the predicted strength, if the climate theorists have it right, in our lifetime, perhaps during the lives of our children, certainly.

“The greenhouse effect is a touchstone, an event so extraordinary that it shapes all the rest of our existence, but the problem is that it is typically an event that happens out of sight. As a part of daily life, the greenhouse effect poses probably the hardest test of the imagination, requiring you and me to leap from the local, our rooted life in a given place, to the grand global abstractions of ‘the atmosphere’ or ‘the climate,’ and then back again to each of the particular patches in which we live.

“But I don’t live in the world; I live in Boston. I don’t change the world; I drive my car five miles to my office, and at night five miles home again, burning about a third of a gallon of unleaded high-test on the round trip. The greenhouse effect, this global transformation, does not fit the ordinary categories of experience, and so unless it can be trimmed to size it will remain remote, an abstraction, until it slams us in the face.”

SPOILER ALERT!

The “grim and monitory fable” isn’t even global warming – “the greenhouse effect” to use the late 80s phrase. It’s nuclear war.

I don’t want to spoil the analysis, writing and conclusions, any more than this. In 1989, the Soviet Union was on its last legs, even if our most esteemed sovietologists didn’t know it at the time. Nuclear war was still the Cold War’s nightmarish, illogical logical end. [By the way, the possibility of a nuclear exchange has only become more likely since then. Just this week, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing called “Nuclear Terrorism: Confronting the Challenges of the Day After.”]

Global thermonuclear war would be a unique geological event. Modernity will have enough trouble against global warming in the long run, also a unique geological event. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. reduced their nuclear arsenals. Ukraine gave its up (to Russia). These hopeful actions demonstrate that rational decision-making can reduce superlative threat. But rational action must be universal. The cold war between India and Pakistan, between North Korea and everybody else, keep the “nuclear option” viable. Levenson:

“Here is the farce: If a global nuclear war that kills ‘only’ two billion people or three or four is not a dreadful enough prospect to bring about some degree of prudence, then it seems highly unlikely that the threat of killing the remainder is going to bring about any startling change in policy or behavior."

The same logic might be applied to global warming, but we are in a time of transition, hopefully one fast enough to make a difference. It's still possible to have startling change in policy or behavior. I'll leave this meandering, discursive trail with this positive note. Tom wrote, “…unless [global warming] can be trimmed to size it will remain remote, an abstraction, until it slams us in the face.” Where are we now? It seems to me we have trimmed it down to size, yet it's still to most people something of an abstraction that, nonetheless appears to be slamming us in the face. People are increasingly working on both levels, changing their lifestyles, however incrementally, to reduce their climate impact, and welcoming government action.

The subtitle of The Carbon Age is How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. I joke half-seriously that the next two books should be about how nuclear weaponry and anti-biotic resistance are also ties for “civilization’s greatest threat.” My brother, Joel, has argued privately that McDonald’s, weekdays, French augmented sixth chords, Sand People, the Modern Novel, and the Cardinal directions might also qualify as civilization’s greatest threat. I leave this open to debate.
The farce of global warming has only grown in the 19 years since Ice Time came out. The threat of nuclear weaponry has receded only in media. Global warming is in the long term just as sobering a trend and one already in progress. Action is accelerating, but no where's near the speed it needs to be to avoid that actual slam in the face.

The Other Atkins' Take on "Carbs"

2008-04-07T12:13:35Z

The Carbon Age and Peter Atkins get a shout-out from Joel Achenbach.

Atkins

And in Other Mendeleev News...

2008-04-04T19:57:59Z

This just in, about Mendeleev's 1877 book (see entry below): Veselin Kostov, a research assistant at Rockefeller University's Program for the Human Environment, in February translated a pivotal chapter on the possible non-biological origin of oil. It can be accessed here.

Mendeleev is already on his way into the 21st century.

Dmitri Mendeleev Hated New York

2008-04-04T18:28:17Z

Dmitri Mendeleev hated New York, but it's possible he just came at a bad time. In 1876, the famed assembler of the Periodic Table and predictor of elements yet undiscovered traveled to the United States, to Titusville, Pennsylvania, on a fact-finding mission for the slow-moving Russian oil industry. A little-known fact about Mendeleyev is that he advised the Tsar on oil-related matters. Mendeleev's work was so important to the Tsar, that Russia's emperor overlooked Mendeleev's bigamy -- really just a technicality. (Pressed on the matter, Alexander II apparently said: "I admit Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev.")

A couple of years ago I obtained a photocopied version of Mendeleev's little-known 1877 book, The Oil Industry in the North American State of Pennsylvania and the Caucasus. I will be translating parts of it on this blog on Mondays ("Mendeleev Mondays"). Parts of it are pertinent to modern discussions of the nature and origin of oil and gas. Parts of it are just hilarious, in retrospect. The Chemical Heritage Foundation obtained an extremely rare, mint-condition copy of the book last year. I gave a talk at CHF yesterday, and spent about two hours perusing the rare book this morning. I'm going to be recruiting Russian-speakers with an interest in this material to help me get the whole book translated faster than I can myself, then hopefully publish it, either online creative-commons-style or in another format.

[Left] Dmitri Mendeleev. [Right] A map of western Pennsylvania's once-rich oil fields from his 1877 book. The dark splotch near the top of the page is Lake Erie.

Mendeleev hated New York in part because he visited during an awful time. New Yorkers split for the beaches and Catskills (or wherever), leaving the city shuttered during the great Russian scientist's visit (He assembled the Periodic Table in 1869). Also, the American economy had fallen on hard times. The depression beginning in 1873 had yet to lift. New York failed to impress him in part because people were suffering, markets and trade had not recovered, and nobody generally was having a good time. New York was in hibernation.

Also, he didn't seem predisposed to liking Americans anyway.

[Alexander II quotation from Brock, William H. The Chemical Tree: A History of Chemistry. New York: Norton 2000.]

"Baloney Detection Kit": Antarctic Nazi version

2008-03-29T17:19:34Z

Last week's collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf sent me reeling -- mostly at the behest of my brother, Joel -- through the history of humans and the Antarctic. A particularly interesting episode (possibly) occurred before and after the Second World War, when a Nazi exploratory militia scoped out the ice sheets east of the Wedell Sea (The Wilkins Ice Shelf is (partially was) to the west of the Sea). In their 2007 article, "Hitler's Antarctic base: the myth and the reality," Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching sort through now-available primary documents that show just what the Germans, British, and Americans were -- and were not -- doing on the coldest continent in the middle of the last century.

Charmingly, their analysis applies to history the analytical tools that power science. In fact, in the methodology section of their historical analysis, they quote Carl Sagan at length. Sagan's "baloney detection kit" is an analytical safeguard against vran'yo (/vrahn-YO/: The Russian word for b--- s---; I'm avoiding the English, and the circular lunch "meat," given the flap over profanity in the blogosphere).

The authors write:

The kit comprises tools for sceptical thinking that are common to any well-trained researcher, detective, or investigative journalist (Sagan 1999; Park 2001, 2003)...

The tools include:

1 Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts;
2 arguments based on authority are not sufficient (they can be wrong);
3 where possible, use quantification: avoid the vague and qualitative;
4 if there is a chain of argument, every link must work [NB: particularly true for hyperlinks -- ER]
5 use Occam's Razor: where there are competing hypotheses to explain the same facts, use the simplest;
6 see if the hypothesis can be falsified. Check out assertions.

The baloney detection kit is our best defense against anyone one with an interest in lying to us, a class that includes all politicians and commentators on them. It turns out correct usage of the word dispositive doesn't necessarily make you credible, as this evisceration of Andrew Sullivan demonstrates.

See Carl Sagan's last interview, in which he slices through baloney with Charlie Rose:

Climate Change to Unleash Otherworldly Horror!

2008-03-28T10:28:29Z

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of one of the great potential disasters of all time. In 1958 — okay, in a movie in 1958 — mid-century American heroes beat back the Blob, the title monster of the horror classic. The blob terrorizes small-town Pennsylvania, having arrived in a meteor strike. It slimes and dissolves townsfolk and their local dining establishments. What's truly frightening about "The Blob" are its last lines. U.S. military forces have scooped up the blob, and dropped it in the Arctic, where the cold temperatures place it in a natural cryogenic freeze.

The movie ends, well, with the titles "THE END." But just before that Lieutenant Dave (Earl Rowe) and Steve Andrews (Steve McQueen) wipe their hands of the blob once and for all -- or have they?:

Lieutenant Dave: At least we've got it stopped.
Steve Andrews: Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold.

This week's collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica raises a truly terrifying question: Will rising temperatures in the Arctic reawaken the Blob? Perhaps the return of the Blob will focus minds in a way that climate science so far has not.

Credit; Thanks, Joel, for the tip!

Roston Corollary to Godwin's Law

2008-03-26T11:35:11Z

Polemics over the new creationist movie, Expelled, have divided not only religious-literalist and scientific communities, but have fractured the latter as well. Chris Mooney, in his Science Progress column last week, and Matt Nisbet elsewhere, have argued against giving the movie's producers what they want, controversy and ensuing publicity.

The movie, apparently, puts Godwin's law into full effect, comparing Darwin to Nazis. According to Godwin's law:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

My response to the "ignore-them" argument comes from a different European dictatorship entirely, the 1917 Soviet revolution. Naive, freedom-loving liberals, the kind of level-headed company who might have been Russia's greatest hope for a sane system of governance, confused democracy with pacifism. Accordingly, the Soviet forces bayoneted every last one of them, and their ideas and ideals perished from Russia for more than 70 years -- or longer depending on how strict you are about defining democracy. (These days, perhaps not so strict.)

So, in the spirit of Godwin, I propose:
"Entwined with political power, dogmatism eliminates reasoned argument from the public sphere and mandates correction at every step, with all available force."
Best not to let religious-literalists swift-boat science's greatest achievement.

"Did you volunteer?" Credit

Correlation as a Rhetorical Weapon

2008-03-22T11:25:15Z

Brian Switek over at Laelaps left the following note after yesterday’s post about ways to rigorously confront anti-scientists in general, creationists in particular:

What comes to mind (and what I forgot to mention) is that Darwin was intimately familiar with Paley's "Natural Theology," and that knowledge shaped what he wrote in On the Origin. He didn't directly confront creationism (it would be seen as a direct attack on revealed religion), but he organized his arguments based upon the favorite examples of the famous theologian, therefore simultaneous undercutting creationism and supporting his own theory of evolution by natural selection.

Internalizing your opponents’ argument and arguing around it, as he states, is indeed a powerful way — given this example, probably the most powerful way — to beat back willful ignorance. The Carbon Age takes a related tack, I think, to the one Brian suggests. By teasing out the interrelatedness of various scientific disciplines, it’s easy to create problems galore for anti-scientists. Not "believing" that carbon dioxide absorbs heat, has all sorts of ridiculous implications — implications that they may not be able to see, given the stove-piped categorization of scientific disciplines. By smashing the silos of a dozen scientific disciplines into a single edifice, simply, "Carbon Science," I have tried to use dynamism and the correlations among all these disciplines (as such) to embolden and strengthen all of them, so that deniers of evolution, climate change, or what have you must face a host of implications of their willful ignorance.

For example, take those who, for whatever reason, don’t believe or don’t understand that carbon dioxide absorbs heat, a fact that has been demonstrated experimentally since 1859. Well, heat is electromagnetic energy. Physicists and chemists have for a long time had a pretty good handle on how electromagnetic radiation interacts with matter. If carbon dioxide doesn’t absorb infrared wavelengths (heat), then how does rhodopsin help us see, why do radio astronomers pick up wavelength signatures of gas-phase molecules in dense interstellar clouds, and how does chlorophyll channel solar protons into chemical energy? Correlations, at the general level of public discourse, are a powerful weapon against ignorance and confusion.

One example I thought of last year explicitly shows a huge problem that anti-scientists must face if they believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years or so old. I published this on Huffington Post last year, and it’s in an endnote to Chapter Two of The Carbon Age. Here’s the bit last year from Huff Post, which drew a welcome response:

Three Republicans raised their hands at a recent presidential debate when asked if they do not recognize evolution. The obvious joke here is that the act of raising their hands will eventually be proof of natural selection as they are whisked from the national stage.

A reasonable follow-up question to the troika would have been, "Do you believe the Earth is several thousand years old, and if so, do you also acknowledge the implication that nuclear weaponry does not and has never existed?" The science of the two are more closely linked than you might expect.

The Earth is 4.54 billion years old, give or take 100 million years. Physicists determined this date by studying the uranium and lead composition of dozens of terrestrial rocks and meteorites.

Uranium is a chemical element, one of those 90 (or 118, depending on how you count) fundamental kinds of matter, each of which has its own characteristic atom. A single element can claim atoms of varying mass. Some masses, or isotopes, are stable. Some are not. Certain elements' isotopes are known to decay, or emit radiation, at known rates. For example, carbon-14 is used to date objects made from once-living matter that is no more than 50,000 years old. It has been shown to both prove and disprove the ancient age of the Shroud of Turin. (Long story.)

Uranium atoms come in two sizes, U-238 and U-235. Over time much of it has decayed into lead, Pb-206 and Pb-207. Geologists know how fast uranium decays, and assume that lead and uranium were equally dispersed around the Solar System at its inception. By measuring the modern ratios of lead isotopes in the Earth and meteorites, they can count backward to a time when no uranium had yet decayed into lead: The beginning of the solar system. The answer, from more than 70 rocks, comes to 4.54 billion years ago.

Nuclear weaponry takes advantage of the instability of uranium isotopes. U-235, or highly enriched uranium, made up the core of the bomb used to destroy Hiroshima in August 1945. It lies at the heart of more powerful hydrogen bombs, which incorporate U-238 fuel as well.

Uranium is uranium. Lead isotopes, Pb-206 and Pb-207, indicate the previous existence of uranium. The properties of this element have guided scientists to both estimate the age of the Earth and build nuclear arsenals. That's why the notion of a "young Earth" is incompatible with believing that nuclear bombs exist. If scientists understand uranium well enough to set off a bomb, it's credible to date the age of the Earth with it, too. If the Earth is only 6,002 years old, then uranium isotope dating does not work, and by extension, nor should atomic and hydrogen bombs.

Drawing a distinction between the uranium in nuclear warheads and in old rocks isn't even splitting hairs. It's splitting atoms.

Science communicators should look at the implications of anti-scientist nonsense. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that undermines them – just by extending their own arguments to their (il)logical conclusion.

Keeping the Science in Science Writing

2008-03-19T23:33:01Z

I feel some compulsion to weigh in on Brian Switek's post about whether scientists and writers should confront anti-and pseudoscientists, a discussion that Chris Mooney launches in his latest Science Progress column, headlined "The Enablers."

I am caught in the middle of the two of them. Chris argues that science journalists shouldn't waste their time attending to anti-science nonsense. This instinct goes to the fundamental organizing principle of my research for The Carbon Age. The book is based almost entirely on peer-reviewed journal articles. I chose this route for some very specific reasons.

First, peer-reviewed articles are primary documents, and I didn't want the noise of media or other commentary. I reached out to many people for help, and read much non-peer-reviewed literature, but stayed away from media for the most part.

Second, I wanted to emphasize that science is, at its core, at least in this day and age, a professional endeavor. Scientists are people who get out of bed, go to work, and try to solve problems, don't finish, go home, and have to come back the next day. The problems they are trying to solve aren't how to market new-and-improved widgets, or why my car's power steering broke, or if Mr. Mustard did it in the kitchen with the candlestick. They are trying to understand their own tiny corner of nature. In the book I write about the intrigue of discovery, the inquiry, its rewards and frustrations.

Third, this research approach sets me up to not talk about religion or anti-science or pseudoscience almost at all. In fact, I can think of only five or six instances in the entire book where I use a word or invoke some thought about religion. Two of these instances are in endnotes. There just isn't much talk about intelligent design or non-anthropogenic climate change or religion in general in the peer-reviewed literature (conspiracy theorists, please light your sirens here!), so there is none of it in The Carbon Age. I just never came across any paper that said anything resembling, say: "The calcite crystal failed to impose chiral selection on aspartic acid in a 0.5 percent solution, so we raised the aspartic acid concentration to one percent and stopped eating pork."

Finally, the most important reason for basing a book's research only on science, and not on the boring this-and-that of science v. religion, is that these polemics obscure the fundamental relationship among science, technology, and economics. Rather than setting up science as a foe of religion, it would make much more sense, given the Gathering Storm and all, to set up science as a friend of technology and economics -- in fact, as their driver.

That leads us to Brian's criticism of Chris' column, and another recent post, in which he thumbs through John Brockman's The Third Culture. Brian writes in these posts about the rarity of good popular science books. I felt the same way, which is how I got into this position (authorship) in the first place. Covering energy and climate, and just about everything else, I thought it was funny (funny-strange) that everyone seemed to talk about "carbon" all the time, be it in the atmosphere or in high-end carbon-fiber tennis rackets, without the enriching overall context. Carbon is the central organizing element of life and civilization, so perhaps we should smash the stove pipes and look at this world of ours dynamically, just by following the carbon.

May I Have a Blurb-Roll, Please...

2008-03-19T23:25:10Z

Many people helped me down the long road that led to The Carbon Age. (Hence the five-page Acknowledgments.) The people I am grateful to most recently are authors and scientists, and author-scientists, who have supported the work publicly in a format I am unable to either say or write without quotation marks around it: the "blurbs."