Category: Energy/Environment

Plant Protein Levels Adapt to Allow “Flourishing” Near Chernobyl

(p. D3) In April 1986, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine exploded and sent radioactive particles flying through the air, infiltrating the surrounding soil. Despite the colossal disaster, some plants in the area seem to have adapted well, flourishing in the contaminated soil.
This ability to adapt has to do with slight alterations in the plants’ protein levels, researchers report in a study that appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
“If you visit the area, you’d never think anything bad had happened there,” said Martin Hajduch, one of the study’s authors and a plant geneticist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Slovakia.

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “OBSERVATORY; Plants Near Chernobyl Appear to Grow a Shield.” The New York Times (Tues., September 21, 2010): D3.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 20, 2010.)

Global Temperatures May Have Flattened, Justifying Global Warming Scepticism

TucumcariWeatherStation2011-11-10.jpgTucsonParkingLotWeatherStation2011-11-10.jpg“Well-sited weather stations, like the one at top in Tucumcari, N.M., are more reliable than others, such as one in a Tuscon, Ariz., parking lot.” Source of caption: print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below. Source of photos: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A2) “Before us, there was a huge barrier to entry” in the field of analyzing temperature numbers, says Richard Muller, scientific director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team and a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Many scientists are giving the Berkeley Earth team kudos for creating the unified database.
. . .
“I’m inclined to give [satellite] data more weight than reconstructions from surface-station data,” says Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician who writes about climate, often critically of studies that find warming, at his website Climate Audit. Satellites show about half the amount of warming as that of land-based readings in the past three decades, when the relevant data were collected from space, he says.
Such disputes demonstrate the statistical and uncertain nature of tracking global temperature. Even with tens of thousands of weather stations, most of the Earth’s surface isn’t monitored. Some stations are more reliable than others. Calculating a global average temperature requires extrapolating from these readings to the whole globe, adjusting for data lapses and suspect stations. And no two groups do this identically.
. . .
Calculating a global temperature is necessary to track climate trends because, as your TV meteorologist might warn, local conditions can differ. Much of the U.S. and Northern Europe has cooled in the last 70 years, Berkeley Earth found. So did one-third of all weather stations world-wide, while two-thirds warmed. The project cites this as evidence of overall warming; skeptics aren’t convinced because it depends how concentrated those warming sites are. If they happen to be bunched up while the cooling sites are in sparsely measured areas, then more places could be cooling.
. . .
Any statistical model produces results with some level of uncertainty. The Berkeley Earth project is no different. That uncertainty is large enough to dwarf some trends in temperature. For instance, fluctuations in the land temperature for the past 13 years make it extremely difficult to say whether the Earth has been continuing to warm during that time.
This possible halting of the temperature rise led to a dispute between members of the Berkeley Earth team. Judith Curry, Mr. Muller’s co-author and a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told a reporter for the Daily Mail she questioned Mr. Muller’s claim, which he published in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.” She said that if the global temperature has flattened out, that would raise new questions, and scientific skepticism would remain warranted.

For the full story, see:
CARL BIALIK. “THE NUMBERS GUY; Global Temperatures: All Over the Map.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., November 5, 2011): A2.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Animals Thrive at Chernobyl

WolvesRadioactive2011-11-09.jpg“PBS’s “Radioactive Wolves” returns to a contaminated site.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C6) In the months since the Japanese tsunami, we’ve heard a lot about Chernobyl as a worst-case example: here’s how bad Fukushima could have been. Now PBS’s “Nature” offers another vision: Chernobyl as a best-case demonstration that life abides . . .
. . .
. . . the prognosis, coyly withheld until the end of the hour, is positive. . . . While the rate of slight birth abnormalities is twice as high as normal among the zone’s growing animal population (but still in the single digits), overall health appears to be fine. It wouldn’t be an acceptable situation for humans, but the dormice and eagles and gray wolves don’t appear to be bothered.
. . .
The concrete high-rises of the city of Pripyat sit like islands in a green sea of towering trees; plants force their way up through the floors of empty schoolrooms.
Within this strangely pastoral setting the animals go about their business, sometimes finding uses for what we’ve left behind. The wolves rise up on their hind legs to peer through the windows of houses, looking for routes to the rooftops, which they use as observation posts for hunting. Eagles build nests in fire towers.
And beavers, forced out decades ago when the landscape was engineered for collective agriculture, have already undone much of man’s work and restored one of central Europe’s great marshlands. Just think what they could do if they had the whole planet.

For the full commentary, see:
MIKE HALE. “In Dead Zone of Chernobyl, Animal Kingdom Thrives.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., October 19, 2011): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 18, 2011.)

Huge Variance in Estimates of Number of Species

(p. D3) Scientists have named and cataloged 1.3 million species. How many more species there are left to discover is a question that has hovered like a cloud over the heads of taxonomists for two centuries.
“It’s astounding that we don’t know the most basic thing about life,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
On Tuesday, Dr. Worm, Dr. Mora and their colleagues presented the latest estimate of how many species there are, based on a new method they have developed. They estimate there are 8.7 million species on the planet, plus or minus 1.3 million.
. . .
In recent decades, scientists have looked for better ways to determine how many species are left to find. In 1988, Robert May, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, observed that the diversity of land animals increases as they get smaller. He reasoned that we probably have found most of the species of big animals, like mammals and birds, so he used their diversity to calculate the diversity of smaller animals. He ended up with an estimate 10 to 50 million species of land animals.
Other estimates have ranged from as few as 3 million to as many as 100 million. Dr. Mora and his colleagues believed that all of these estimates were flawed in one way or another. Most seriously, there was no way to validate the methods used, to be sure they were reliable.

For the full story, see:
CARL ZIMMER. “How Many Species? A Study Says 8.7 Million, but It’s Tricky.” The New York Times (Tues., August 30, 2011): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 23 (sic), 2011.)

Global Warming Benefits Commerce by Opening Northeast Passage

NortheastPassageMapB2011-11-04.jpg “The Northeast Passage Opens Up. The Arctic ice cap has been shrinking, opening up new shipping lanes. This has given access to oil and gas fields, as well as fishing in international waters that were not accessible before.” Source of caption and map: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) ARKHANGELSK, Russia — Rounding the northernmost tip of Russia in his oceangoing tugboat this summer, Capt. Vladimir V. Bozanov saw plenty of walruses, some pods of beluga whales and in the distance a few icebergs.

One thing Captain Bozanov did not encounter while towing an industrial barge 2,300 miles across the Arctic Ocean was solid ice blocking his path anywhere along the route. Ten years ago, he said, an ice-free passage, even at the peak of summer, was exceptionally rare.
But environmental scientists say there is now no doubt that global warming is shrinking the Arctic ice pack, opening new sea lanes and making the few previously navigable routes near shore accessible more months of the year. And whatever the grim environmental repercussions of greenhouse gas, companies in Russia and other countries around the Arctic Ocean are mining that dark cloud’s silver lining by finding new opportunities for commerce and trade.
Oil companies might be the most likely beneficiaries, as the receding polar ice cap opens more of the sea floor to exploration. The oil giant Exxon Mobil recently signed a sweeping deal to drill in the Russian sector of the Arctic Ocean. But shipping, mining and fishing ventures are also looking farther north than ever before.
“It is paradoxical that new opportunities are opening for our nations at the same time we understand that the threat of (p. B13) carbon emissions have become imminent,” Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, said at a recent conference on Arctic Ocean shipping held in this Russian port city not far south of the Arctic Circle.
At the same forum, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia offered a full-throated endorsement of the new business prospects in the thawing north.
“The Arctic is the shortcut between the largest markets of Europe and the Asia-Pacific region,” he said. “It is an excellent opportunity to optimize costs.”

For the full story, see:
ANDREW E. KRAMER. “Amid the Peril, a Dream Fulfilled.” The New York Times (Tues., October 18, 2011): B1 & B13.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 17, 2011 and has the title “Warming Revives Dream of Sea Route in Russian Arctic.”)

VladimirTikhonovTankerBeringStrait2011-11-04.jpg“The tanker Vladimir Tikhonov in the Bering Strait.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Easter Island Was Ravaged by Rats, Peruvian Slaving Parties and Nonnative Diseases, Not by Ecocide

Statues-That-WalkedBK.jpg

Source of book image: http://0.tqn.com/d/archaeology/1/0/g/L/1/Statues-That-Walked-sm.jpg

The natives call Easter Island “Rapa Nui.”

(p. C5) With the forest gone, Rapa Nui’s soil degraded; unable to feed themselves, Mr. Diamond argued in his best-selling “Collapse” (2005), Easter Islanders faced “starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism.” The fall was abrupt and overwhelming; scores of giant statues were abandoned, half-finished. Roggeveen had discovered a ruin–and a powerful eco-parable.

Books and articles by the hundred have pointed to Rapa Nui as the inevitable result of uncontrolled population growth, squandered resources and human fecklessness. “The person who felled the last tree could see it was the last tree,” wrote Paul G. Bahn and John Flenley in “Easter Island, Earth Island” (1992). “But he (or she) still felled it.” “The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious,” Mr. Diamond proclaimed. “The clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources,” he said, Rapa Nui epitomizes “ecocide,” presenting a stark image of “what may lie ahead of us in our own future.”
No, it doesn’t, write archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo in “The Statues That Walked,” a fascinating entry in the pop-science genre of Everything You Know Is Wrong. Messrs. Hunt and Lipo had no intention of challenging Mr. Diamond when they began research on Rapa Nui. But in their fourth year of field work, they obtained radiocarbon dates from Anakena Beach, thought to be the island’s oldest settlement. The dates strongly indicated that the first settlers appeared around A.D. 1200–eight centuries later than Heyerdahl and other researchers had thought.
Wait a minute, the authors in effect said. Rapa Nui is so remote that researchers believe it must have been settled by a small group of adventurers–a few dozen people, brave or crazy, in boats. The new evidence suggested that their arrival had precipitated catastrophic deforestation “on the scale of decades, not centuries.” The island then probably had only a few hundred inhabitants. Some ecologists estimate that the island originally had 16 million palm trees. How could so few people have cut down so much so fast?
. . .
The real culprit, according to “The Statues That Walked,” was the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), which stowed away on the boats of the first Polynesian settlers. In laboratory settings, Polynesian rat populations can double in 47 days. Throw a breeding pair into an island with no predators and abundant food and arithmetic suggests the result: ratpocalypse. If the animals multiplied as they did in Hawaii, the authors calculate, Rapa Nui would quickly have housed between two and three million. Among the favorite food sources of R. exulans are tree seeds and tree sprouts. Humans surely cleared some of the forest, but the real damage would have come from the rats that prevented new growth.
“Rather than a case of abject failure,” the authors argue, “Rapa Nui is an unlikely story of success.” The islanders had migrated, perhaps accidentally, to a place with little water and “fundamentally unproductive” soil with “uniformly low” levels of phosphorus, an essential mineral for plant growth. To avoid the wind’s dehydrating effects, the newcomers circled their gardens with stone walls known as manavai. Today, the researchers discovered, abandoned manavai occupy about 6.4 square miles, a tenth of the island’s total surface.
More impressive still, about half of the island is covered by “lithic mulching,” in which the islanders scattered broken stone over the fields. The uneven (p. C6) surface creates more turbulent airflow, reducing daytime surface temperatures and warming fields at night. And shattering the rocks exposes “fresh, unweathered surfaces, thus releasing mineral nutrients held within the rock.” Only lithic mulching produced enough nutrients–just barely–to make Rapa Nui’s terrible soil cultivable. Breaking and moving vast amounts of stone, the islanders had engineered an entirely new, more productive landscape.
Their success was short-lived. As Messrs. Hunt and Lipo point out, the 18th and 19th centuries were terrible times to reside in a small, almost defenseless Pacific nation. Rapa Nui was repeatedly ravaged by Peruvian slaving parties and nonnative diseases.
. . .
Easter Island’s people did not destroy themselves, the authors say. They were destroyed.
. . .
Oral tradition said that the statues walked into their places. Oral tradition was correct, the authors say. By shaping the huge statues just right, the islanders were able to rock them from side to side, moving them forward in a style familiar to anyone who has had to move a refrigerator. Walking the statues, the authors show in experiments, needed only 15 or 20 people.
In a 2007 article in Science, Mr. Diamond estimated that hundreds of laborers were needed to move the statues, suggesting that the eastern settlements of the island alone had to have “a population of thousands”–which in turn was proof of the island’s destructive overpopulation. By showing that the statues could have been moved by much fewer people, Messrs. Hunt and Lipo have removed one of the main supports of the ecocide theory and the parable about humankind it tells.

For the full review, see:
CHARLES C. MANN. “Don’t Blame the Natives; It was a rat that caused the sudden collapse of Easter Island’s civilization.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JULY 30, 2011): C5-C6.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)

Source of book under review:
Hunt, Terry, and Carl Lipo. The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island. New York: Free Press, 2011.

Nuclear Energy Much Safer than Previously Thought

(p. A14) ROCKVILLE, Md. — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is approaching completion of an ambitious study that concludes that a meltdown at a typical American reactor would lead to far fewer deaths than previously assumed.

The conclusion, to be published in April after six years of work, is based largely on a radical revision of projections of how much and how quickly cesium 137, a radioactive material that is created when uranium is split, could escape from a nuclear plant after a core meltdown. In past studies, researchers estimated that 60 percent of a reactor core’s cesium inventory could escape; the new estimate is only 1 to 2 percent.
. . .
Big releases of radioactive material would not be immediate, and people within a 10-mile radius would have enough time to evacuate, the study found. The chance of a death from acute radiation exposure within 10 miles is therefore near zero, the study projects, although some people would receive doses high enough to cause fatal cancers in decades to come.
One person in every 4,348 living within 10 miles would be expected to develop a ”latent cancer” as a result of radiation exposure, compared with one in 167 in previous estimates.
”Accidents progress more slowly, in some cases much more slowly, than previously assumed,” Charles G. Tinkler, a senior adviser for research on severe accidents and one of the study’s authors, said in an interview at a commission office building here. ”Releases are smaller, and in some cases much smaller, of certain key radioactive materials.”

For the full story, see:
MATTHEW L. WALD. “N.R.C. Lowers Estimate of How Many Would Die in Meltdown.” The New York Times (Sat., July 30, 2011): A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 29, 2011.)
(Note: I am not sure the whole article appeared on p. A14—only saw the online version.)

Solyndra Debacle Illustrates Why Feds Should Not Pick Tech Winners

The clip above is embedded from the Jon Stewart “The Daily Show” episode that was aired on Thurs., September 15, 2011.

Government “industrial policy” is likely to fail for many reasons. One is that the government decision makers are unlikely to know which future technologies will turn out to be the best ones. Another reason is that even if they know, government decision makers often decide based on what is politically expedient or what is beneficial to their friends.

Solyndra is a case in point, as Jon Stewart hilariously reveals.

Natural Causes of Rapid Temperature Change

(p. C4) Some three decades after Laki, 1816 was known as the “year without a summer” thanks to a big eruption in Indonesia. Even Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 caused a brief, though small, drop in world temperatures.

Other abrupt coolings have been bigger but less explicable. Earlier this year, two scientists from Brown University used lake sediments to conclude that the sharp cooling in Greenland during the late Middle Ages, which extinguished the Norse colonies, saw temperatures drop by seven degrees Fahrenheit in 80 years, much faster than recent warming there. Conversely, Greenland’s temperature shot up by around 13 degrees in 50 years as the world came out of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and the ice sheets of North America and northern Europe retreated–again, unlike today’s slow increase.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; Will Volcanoes Cool Our Warming Earth?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., AUGUST 6, 2011): C4.

Gas Lighting Did Not Appeal to Those Who Had Servants to Light Their Candles

(p. 123) Gas was particularly popular in America and Britain. By 1850 it was available in most large cities in both countries. Gas remained, however, a (p. 124) middle-class indulgence. The poor couldn’t afford it and the rich tended to disdain it, partly because of the cost and disruption of installing it and partly because of the damage it did to paintings and precious fabrics, and partly because when you have servants to do everything for you already there isn’t the same urgency to invest in further conveniences. The ironic upshot, as Mark Girouard has noted, is that not only middle-class homes but institutions like lunatic asylums and prisons tended to be better lit – and, come to that, better warmed – long before England’s stateliest homes were.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.