Human impact on Oceans Mapped

NPR has a story about a map of human damage to the world ocean, and it has the map, but it doesn't actually offer any quantitative advice as to what the map actually maps or any links. (Hello journalists, it is a web, see, not a fiefdom. Hello???)

A little digging turns up the UCSB site with more details and a Google Earth KML file.

It's not really a scientific result as such. The idea is to make the people conscious of their effect on the oceans. Best of luck on that one...

Austin Energy Eschews Nuke Opportunity

According to today's Statesman, "the Austin City Council is expected today to decline an invitation to invest in two new nuclear reactors".

Some predictable responses are quoted:

"We need more energy, but we don't need to destroy our planet in the process of getting it," said Cyrus Reed, conservation director of the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club.

...

"If you look at the demand for electric power, and likely constraints on carbon emissions," said [Richard] Lester, who helped author a 2003 MIT report, The Future of Nuclear Power, "I just don't see any chance of squaring the circle without a significant increase of nuclear power."

That or carbon capture/sequestration, or both, as I see it. I could be wrong, but here's another case where we need to start with the global numbers and work back to the local, not the other way around.

Globally Sustainable Population and Food

Looks like I poked a sleeping dragon in a passing swipe about the scalability of organic agriculture in an article yesterday.

I'm not sure I'm the right person to lead this conversation, but I'd frame it as "how many people can the earth support indefinitely?"

To make this tractable I begin by making several classes of assumption about diet. So what happens with an American (meat and processed foods) diet adopted universally? A Japanese (wild-caught fish) diet? An Indian (mostly legumes and rice) diet? An organic green-yuppie diet?

Orthogonally, we should consider two cases: energy limited vs. energy abundant.

Then I'd consider the global geochemistry of agriculture. We would need to trace the mass budgets of various elements, as well as fresh water. There may be other terms e.g. representing soil health and erosion.

My guess is that without energy abundance the world is already severely overpopulated. It's not an especially well-informed guess.

I presume there are whole-systems studies of this sort and would welcome any references. I don 't feel especially competent to take this on, but then again I don't have a horse in the race.

Which side of ten billion that number lies is a pretty crucial determinant of our prospects.

I've misplaced my copy of Joel Cohen's book "How Many People Can The Earth Support" which is an admirable place to start.

NIMBYism

I dislike NIMBYism most of the time. I really hate the sort of localism that seems to believe that if everybody opposes undesireable local infrastructure everywhere then global problems will magically be solved.

Even organic agriculture is a flavor of this. The idea is that if every farmer goes organic there will be no more pesticide use seems to trump the fact that if every farmer goes organic most people will have no food.

Clearing out my paper inbox today (finally having a little slack) I came across a NIMBY flyer opposing a new landfill in East Austin. As a new East Austinite, I'm learning to get my back up about everything being sited here. Our local neighborhood association has a fight brewing about 110 assisted living units, the question being "why not on the west side"? (The answer being, duh, there's more property value to threaten there, and duh squared, don't half-crazed veterans want to live somewhere they can catch a bus or buy non-organic foods...?)

This flyer alleges that Travis County, (Austin area) accepts solid wastes from 33 neighboring counties, of which 22 have no landfill at all. Even Bexar county (San Antonio, a much larger city) has only two landfills and sends trash up this way. Or so they claim. Yet the organization ("Don't Dump Travis") offers no way to check their claims and doesn't even show up on Google.

I don't know as county boundaries or even national boundaries are the right way to think about this, but it seems very odd and inappropriate that a new landfill be targeted for the fastest growing and second-most-populous county in the region.

That it's on the east (poorer and flatter) side of town is no surprise.

Why Austin at all, though? I'd really like it to be possible to get more data from more or less authoritative sources. Perhaps the Bexar sites are larger than ours, for instance?

I can't get worked up about this without better information. In any case it's an example of the foolishness of acting locally to the exclusion of acting globally. (circular-filed)

Texas to Certify Creation Science?

Brrr. Received in email.

Dear AGU member,

The Institute of Creation Research (ICR) recently relocated its graduate school program from San Diego, California to Dallas, Texas. The school is attempting to obtain accreditation from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to grant Masters of Science Education degrees in Texas. The graduate school does not teach modern geology, biology, astronomy, or the scientific method, yet graduates of the program receive a Masters of Science Education and would be able to teach science in private or public schools.
A state advisory panel already has recommended that the Board accredit ICR's masters program; however, the Board will vote on 24 April to make a final decision on ICR's accreditation. The Board has delayed the proceedings because of a large public outcry from both proponents and opponents of ICR. If science teachers do not receive an appropriate scientific education they would not be adequately trained to teach the critical foundations of science such as modern biology, geology, and astronomy to the next generation of students.

If you would like to take action on this issue, contact one or all of the following:
* Your Congressional representative in Texas (find their contact information here: http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=agu)
* Dr. Raymond Paredes, Commissioner of Higher Education on the THECB (512-427-6101)
* The THECB (http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/Comments/ to write an email, or visit http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/Board/Members.cfm for phone numbers of members of the Board)

Talking points can be based on AGU's recently revised position statement "Biological Evolution and the History of the Earth Are Foundations of Science" that can be found online at: http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/positions/evolution2.shtml.
The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report on science, evolution, and creationism that reaffirms the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting evolution and the importance of teaching evolution as part of a science curriculum. Information about the National Academies Report can be found at: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11876. The ICR website is: http://www.icr.org

(AGU is not responsible for the T-shirt design, which is available here.)

Denialists Fail to Go Away

Man, the stronger the evidence the more sophisticated the obfuscation gets.

RealClimate has an analysis of the unbearably creepy Lawyers' Science Convention to Debunk Every Known Scientific Body of Significance.

See the full list of the shark jumpers at that last link; Bill Gray, Legates and Spencer is pretty much all they've got right now among actual contributors to climate science. Observationalists all.

Of course, none of them have any actual, um, theory as to why greenhouse gases will conveniently fail to warm the earth, never mind what exact phenomenon is inconveniently warming the earth to the expected degree.

Keeping them company are the illustrious likes of Craig Idso, Stephen Milloy, Benny Peiser and Lord Monckton. Not fooling anybody? Alas, think again.

Also in fan mail (keep those letter coming in, folk) I recently received a link to another egregious effort to play at science. Bleah.

I repeat my two perennial questions about these people:

1) Exactly whom do they think they are cheating? Do they have a plan to move to an alternative planet? Have they really not heard the Midas story?

2) How the hell do they manage to sleep?

I really don't get it.

A Prolonged Economic Relaxation

There's a nice discussion on Dot Earth about overconsumption called "The Endless Pursuit of Unnecessary Things", a phrase, astonishingly enough, attributable to Adam Smith.

My contribution to the thread is to raise the usual gripe about conventional economics. Here is what I wrote in its entirety:

I am thrilled by and grateful for this conversation.

The problem with the realization of the vicious circle of insecurity, overwork and overconsumption is that it butts directly against the dictates of classical economic theory and the contemporary politics that is so driven by it.

I have never met a person educated in a physical science who was comfortable with the idea of endless growth that appears to be dogmatic in most circles.

Indeed, conflated with our concern about energy, ecology and the environment these days is anxiety about “recession”. If we agree that we are striving too hard and consuming too much, a recession is something to welcome and celebrate (though of course it must be managed well).

We need to rethink all of the concepts of economics, which manage well in an open system with ample resources and scarce labor, and lead simply to our bizarre and counterproductive behaviors today.

(I can’t resist pointing out the analogy to Easter Island, whose culture was plainly successful and adaptive until the very end, when it abruptly got out of scale with its environment and maladaptive. See Jared Diamond’s book Collapse for more on this point.)

Your quotation from Mr. Handy illustrates the point perfectly:

“The conundrum is this: All that stuff creates jobs — making it, promoting it, selling it. It’s literally the stuff of growth. What I’d love to ask Peter Drucker is: How do you grow an economy without the jobs and taxes that these unnecessary things produce?”

It is no conundrum, Mr. Handy. You just don’t, that’s all.

Though he seems to be awakening to the fact that there is a problem, Handy can’t bring himself to address the question of whether growth is by definition inconsistent with sustainability. As a person committed to thinking about the economy the assumption is so deeply held that it’s simply invisible to him!

Just as healthy children grow and healthy adults don’t, underdeveloped economies ought to grow and developed economies ought to, well, sustain. Is this such a radical concept? Is this an unreasonable rough cut at what “sustainability” means?

Many of us are bemoaning the disconnect between our circumstances and what politicians and the press (present company excepted) seem to be discussing; issues about energy, ecology and the environment, for example. There’s a fourth “E” word, though: economics. The issues we are discussing here simply don’t map on to conventional economic thought.

The efforts that do exist to break free of the growth imperative at the fringes of) economic theory, with a few notable exceptions (look for Charles Hall at SUNY Syracuse for a good example), have generally been muddleheaded and romantic.

If there were any possibility of real leadership from modern politics, we’d be seeing leaders trying to help us through the establishment of a new intellectual framework for describing and planning the nature of economic activity in the light of new objectives and new constraints.

What we hear instead is almost perfect silence on this matter.

Let me start with my own small contribution to this endeavor, one of nomenclature. In a mature and wealthy society, a period of declining economic activity should not be called a “recession”. I propose the alternative name “relaxation”. Let’s hope that the current relaxation is long and deep, and let’s try to be open as individuals and as a society to helping people who have to make difficult adjustments as a consequence.

In summary, I think the best thing we could all do right now in recognition of the long overdue economic retreat is to take a deep breath and relax.

Have a cup of tea. Listen to some music. Talk to some old friends. Try to find some time to think about something besides your own troubles. Enjoy the fact that we’re doing ever so slightly less damage this month than we were twelve months ago. Look for ways to relax even more.

Update: Don't miss "tidal"'s comment, and check out these people that (s)he refers to therein.

Update: See also Workers of the World, Relax!

Questioning the Superbowl Consensus

A reader sends along a link to an article arguing that there is a greed-driven conspiracy to convince a gullible public that the Patriots lost the Superbowl.

Update: There's a sort of related story on Inkstain.

Best Science Blog Articles of '07

I'm sorry I missed the science bloggers' conference and I hope to make it next year. It sounds like a lot of interesting stuff went on.

In particular there was an articles of the year contest, and Coturnix has links to all the winners.

Highly Allocthonous, who is going to get added to my ever-more-unwieldy blogroll (I promise never to have one of those two hundred link lists, honest) has a wonderful article entitled Testability in Earth Science that applies to us geofluid folks as well as to the rockers.

Charlie Hall and EROEI

"Energy Return on Energy Invested" that is. (corrected per comments; unfortunately we are stuck with the URL)

Thanks to John Mashey who linked to this fascinating presentation [eww, MS PowerPoint] in a conversation on Grist on carbon capture and sequestration.

(As you will see, David has been rubbing me the wrong way on this. I am doubly appreciative of John's coming to my defense because of the fascinating bubble chart on slide 22. Is the nuclear bubble right, though?)

Anyway, there's more great stuff linked from Charles Hall's home page. I don't know why peak oil folks have such a bad sense of design, but anyway the stuff is good if you look past the nasty color scheme and slapdash layouts. Mostly I appreciate that Hall actually thinks about economics like a scientist. That's as opposed to trying to look scientific, as the usual misguided application of thermodynamic entropy by other critics of classical economics do.