April 30, 2010

Sucker Punched Very Slickly

Filed under: Politics,Science — PolitiCalypso @ 10:27 am

As any writer of Southern literature would tell you, the central Gulf Coast is a tragic place. It is the final destination of many terrible hurricanes, including Katrina, Ivan, Camille, Betsy, Audrey, Andrew, and a plethora of unnamed hurricanes in the early 20th century that caused devastation equivalent to that of their named brethren. It has been and continues to be the laboratory for the experiments of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, which incidentally are at least peripherally to blame for the damage from Katrina in New Orleans. The Gulf of Mexico itself has had a biological “dead zone” for several years from chemical runoff in the Mississippi River. Coastal wildlife, too, is constantly under threat, with various birds and seashore creatures perennially on the endangered species list and the coastal wetlands under assault. The threat of inundation from sea level rises from global warming looms in the future.

And yet, the coast has managed to maintain a certain charm. Visiting some areas is like living in a Jimmy Buffett song. Taking a tour of historical sites—those that have survived the onslaught of hurricanes—brings one into a bygone era of simplicity, a certain kind of elegance (even for the more rustic historical sites), and closeness to nature. Visiting one of the many wildlife sanctuaries on this coast and observing the unique plants and animals that live there can make an environmentalist out of anyone but the most hardened plutocrats, even though (or especially since?) such jaunts are darkened by the inevitable signs indicating that some creature is critically endangered. And anyone who has ever taken a walk on the white beaches of Alabama or far western Florida at night can attest to the subtropical marine beauty of the Gulf. The coast is its own travel advertisement.

Were it not for the hurricanes, and the fact that they have a much higher tendency to make landfall at devastating intensities on the Gulf Coast (and southeast Florida) than the subtropical Atlantic coast, I would consider living as close to the shore as I could manage.

But once again, the Gulf Coast has been sucker punched.

I’m not going to go into depth about the science of this oil spill or the technological requirements of damage control. Mechanical engineering and petroleum engineering are not my specialties, nor have I read much of anything about them in my life, and unlike many bloggers, I’m not inclined to make an ignorant-sounding fool out of myself by pretending that I know something about a topic when all I’ve done is to read about it on the news and maybe check a Wiki article or two. Not to mention that I, quite frankly, no longer believe one word coming out of the mouths of anyone protecting BP, the various supporting industries such as Halliburton (though I haven’t believed them in eight years), or the White House. You simply cannot believe any source except scientists if it has an agenda to protect that relates to the topic at hand, and sometimes even certain scientists lose sight of the fact that they are supposed to accept the truth even if it is not what they wanted. This is going to be an absolute disaster; bits of information are trickling out now to indicate just how thoroughly these entities tried to lie to the American public about the scope of this, and like the spill itself, the trickles are only going to get worse.

It is incredibly hubristic to imagine that one could prevent the truth from getting out about something as large-scale and catastrophic as this, but power knows no boundaries in its arrogance. Though history is littered with the figurative corpses of former power-brokers who thought they could get away with massive lies, each new set thinks it is invincible until put to the test. BP’s reputation is shot. And the White House may well try to do damage control by implementing a temporary ban on offshore drilling, but that does not erase the fact that the president broke a major campaign promise by getting out there and supporting this type of thing in the first place and then sent a spokesman to say that the spill didn’t change his mind. (The time to act like George W. Bush is when you are trying to get a piece of legislation passed in a non-watered-down form, not when you have just witnessed the American Gulf Coast experience a disaster on your watch that could have been either mitigated or entirely prevented. Heck of a job.) People will pay a price for dishonesty.

As for the pathetic, deranged “progressive” South-haters who will say in so many words that the people of the Southern coast (we’ll ignore the innocent wildlife for now) got what they deserved for voting for politicians that support offshore drilling, well, to dignify this bigoted bile with a response is beneath me.

The only remotely positive outcome I can think of is that of disaster-as-catalyst. It is far past time for the world’s economy to get away from fossil fuels. If I believed that God destroyed innocents on Earth in order to teach the survivors a lesson, I would say that the oil spill and the recent tragic coal mining disaster are one heck of a message. As it is, I think it’s just a terrible coincidence. Still, we can always choose to take a lesson from it even if the events themselves have no greater meaning. We are in the 21st century. We should not have our civilization so utterly dependent on the compressed or liquefied remains of prehistoric life forms. Do I think that this will serve as a catalyst to finally get away from the intravenous drip of oil and the crack pipe of coal? Not really. But then, I’m a cynic and a pessimist. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, both about the impact of the spill and about our future.

I do love the Gulf Coast, after all.

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April 8, 2009

Geoengineering Is On the Table!

Filed under: Sci/Tech,Science,Weather — PolitiCalypso @ 10:58 pm

It gratifies me to read that the President’s science advisor, John Holdren, is a proponent of geoengineering as a possible option to counter atmospheric global warming. I have long held the position that going green is not going to be sufficient, and for two reasons: Granting that I am a pessimist, I still don’t think that humanity as a whole can do it fast enough, and secondly, global warming would still continue because of the carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere. It’s going to be there for centuries, because it takes that long for the earth to filter it out in the absence of geoengineering techniques.

We as a species created this mess, and it’s our responsibility to clean it up. The earth can clean itself up, eventually, but in the meantime, countless other inhabitants of the planet could die off. The most recent TIME Magazine, in fact, has a cover story about the “mass extinction” that some scientists say has already begun here. The most recent National Geographic has an article about vanishing amphibian populations. The earth could indeed clean up the mess that Homo sapiens made of its atmosphere, but at what cost? No, this is our moral imperative. (Read more…)

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February 16, 2009

Carbon Dioxide Emissions Are Accelerating

Filed under: Sci/Tech,Science,Weather — PolitiCalypso @ 5:21 pm

Despite several years of intensive focus on anthropogenic climate change, including a media blitz about “green” technologies that regular people could adopt (e.g., CFL bulbs) easily, carbon emission rates are accelerating. In fact, the current rate of CO2 emission was apparently not even considered in the IPCC climate change report of two years ago.

Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5 percent per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9 percent per year in the 1990s, Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“It is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities” considered in the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, he said. The IPCC and former vice president Al Gore received the Nobel Prize for drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.

The worst-case scenario of global warming is thought to be a mass extinction comparable in scope to the great Permian extinction of about 251.4 million years ago. (Think of the lack of almost all life in the Pixar cartoon WALL-E. Global warming was a strong undercurrent of that movie, despite the stated focus on garbage.) Indeed, current research into that event is strongly suggestive of its also being triggered by a form of CO2-induced global warming, albeit volcanic in origin. That is not thought to be a risk today because the earth’s mantle is much less active today than it was then, but it looks as though the human species can more than make up the difference with our own activities.

I have long been pessimistic that we humans can stave this (“this” meaning whatever scenario we are creating for ourselves, up to and including a mass extinction event) off by energy efficiency and conversion to green power. I just don’t think there is enough time, and moreover, even if we could do it in time, global warming would still continue. The reason is that the carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere for many, many years. And ironically enough, the CO2-containing emissions that are causing all this are actually mitigating themselves to a certain degree. Smoke particles and other particle-matter pollutants create misery for those of us who are prone to asthma and allergies, but when released in large enough amounts, they have an atmospheric cooling effect by blocking sunlight. It’s much shorter-term than the warming effect of CO2, because these are heavy particles, but it does exist. If we stop using these technologies, then we would indeed drastically cut our CO2 emissions, but we’d also cut the cooling particle pollution. What is currently in the atmosphere would be filtered out relatively quickly, but the CO2 that is currently there would not. Because of this phenomenon, it’s distinctly possible, even likely, that global warming might hit an exponential rate if we somehow cut CO2 emissions down to a safe level. I have read, in fact, that the CO2 that is currently in the atmosphere is likely to be there for one thousand years. That’s how long it takes to filter back to earth.

What, then, can we do?

The climate change mitigation community is becoming divided into the “go green” people and the “geoengineering” people. Given my pessimistic outlook on it (and my general inclination in favor of technology), I am firmly in the geoengineering camp. What is geoengineering, you may ask? Here is an overview of it. The general idea is to take active, rather than passive, measures to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Carbon capture/sequestration is one example of what it might entail. Personally, I think that geoengineering technology will be necessary if we want to prevent a catastrophe. Strong language, but I’m convinced of it.

I also am very strongly in favor of what I’d call “disaster engineering.” The purpose is to shore up communities against the weather disasters that are thought to be most likely for them—hurricanes for the Gulf coastal cities, drought for the interior of the Southeast, etc. It is possible to model this for large areas, and it seems reasonable that as science develops a greater understanding of the climate change process, these predictions can be further refined.

Needless to say, geoengineering and disaster engineering would create countless jobs, many in the sci-tech arena, but many also in construction and production.

None of this is to say that I think “going green” is a waste of time. Certainly, it should be attempted, if for no other reason than because the types of energy that generate the most CO2 are also the most likely to be nonrenewable. Even if climate change wouldn’t nab us, we would eventually run out and have to find some other way of producing energy. But as a panacea for curing the ills of anthropogenic climate change, I think going green by itself is far too passive. Too much damage has already been done, I think. We made this mess, and it won’t clean itself up—at least, not in a short enough period of time for us to feel confidence that we actually saved the planet.

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March 13, 2007

Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

Filed under: Katrina,Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 7:12 am

Have they learned nothing from New Orleans?

The Bush administration will allow some development in flood plains without formal environmental reviews.

Predictably (and rightly), the move has enraged environmentalists, who have been advocating for the disappearing wetlands for decades now, mostly in vain. This move allows developers to build on small tracts of land, and it places minimal restrictions on what can be built. Types of buildings to be permitted include residential homes, shopping venues, hospitals, prisons, and schools.

If you were a resident of low-lying Louisiana who had experienced Hurricane Katrina (or evacuated and returned to find your community in ruins), wouldn’t it make you feel nice and cozy to know that your kids’ new school could be built on a filled-in marshland that had flooded before–as long as the school was small and the entire development didn’t take up over half an acre? (In some parts of rural Louisiana, that’s not out of the question.)

(Oh, and is due to be reclaimed by the sea in a few decades because of global warming-induced rising seas, another problem that is not being addressed in the coastal “recovery.”)

And if you were, perhaps, a researcher of endangered species–maybe even the elusive Ivory-billed Woodpecker–wouldn’t you be pleased to know that developers could pull the same sort of stunt that the timber industry did in the 1940s, when it completely stripped clear the last confirmed habitat of Ivorybills?

Oh, sure, the Endangered Species Act would provide protection for areas where the birds are known to roost. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? They are hard to find, and with recent potential sightings in Arkansas and Florida, there’s a possibility that they might be in pockets all over the Gulf states. However, those two sightings are increasingly being called into question since the scientists involved have not produced good video or photography yet. If other potential areas are wiped out before the birds could even be found, it opens the floodgates for the areas in Arkansas and especially Florida to be given similar treatment.

And, from the same article, this is just disgusting:

Another part of the regulations, approved in coordination with other federal agencies and the White House, waives the formal environmental reviews entirely for coal companies when they bury or reroute streams with their mining wastes.

So okay, if your friendly neighborhood coal company decides to dump waste product in a stream, completely cutting off the flow of water with the trash, no one has to run it through any sort of review process.

I’ll make sure to drink bottled water when I am in Louisiana.

This bit of news was certainly a very unwelcome addition to my e-mail inbox this morning.

I have made this blog mostly about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, yes, but frankly, I’m tired of having so much material to write about.

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February 16, 2007

Global Warming Would Drown the Coastal Hurricane Defenses

Filed under: Katrina,Science,Weather — PolitiCalypso @ 6:24 pm

The barrier islands of the Gulf Coast are an important defense against hurricanes. Mostly uninhabited, they are the first landforms that a Gulf Coast hurricane strikes. While they do not weaken the hurricanes (they aren’t large enough), the islands take the brunt of the hurricane’s storm surge, diffusing it somewhat before the eye makes landfall on the mainland. They are also an important defense against tsunami, a real (if little-known) threat. Significant seismic activity has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico fairly recently.

Global warming is predicted to melt part of Greenland and/or West Antarctica, raising sea levels worldwide up to 20 feet (more if all of Greenland and some of West Antarctica melted). This would have horrific consequences on coastal cities around the globe, of course. This blog, however, will focus on one specific area — the United States Gulf Coast. (Ha, doesn’t it always?)

If global warming raised sea levels as predicted, most of low-lying Louisiana — as well as the critical barrier islands — would be underwater. The low-lying swampland of Louisiana, which has been receding for years now, is another natural barrier for the coast, as well as an environmental treasure. It too would be covered in water.

The coastline would lose its natural defenses against hurricanes.

And, as research is indicating, global warming would also intensify the hurricanes themselves.
The EPA produced a series of pictures showing the coastal areas that are most at risk from global warming-induced inundation. Red indicates areas that are less than 1.5 meters above sea level. The images can be clicked on to show a larger view.

Here is an image of Louisiana and Texas:

And here’s one of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida:

It’s hard to see on these maps, but the barrier islands are the thin trail of red south of the main coastline. They would be underwater.

More disturbingly, from the National Environmental Trust, here is a QuickTime movie of how Biloxi, MS (and its barrier island) would be affected by a rise in sea level. (WARNING for dial-up users: 3 MB file!) I’ve linked to the movie from this graphic I’ve made showing how the coastline would be inundated.

The barrier island protecting the city would no longer exist. Sure, the projection of the land would still exist underwater, and would serve to slightly lessen the impact of a storm surge, but it isn’t at all the same as having a true island above the sea. A dry, projecting landmass stops the flow of water, at least temporarily, and breaks the waves. A former island that has gone underwater obviously doesn’t keep the water from flowing.

Also, as you can clearly see, the city itself would be partially underwater. This includes the glitzy new development that is taking place on this part of the coast in response to Hurricane Katrina — very shortsightedly, I ought to add. Whether this is because of the government of Haley Barbour, who is very likely a global warming skeptic, or because the businesses are aware of the risk but decided to hedge their bets, I do not know.

The Katrina recovery and rebuilding process is not taking global warming into account at all. When the next really bad hurricane strikes, its impact could be compounded by the effects of global warming. The coast will be farther inland due to rising waters, there will be fewer natural barriers, and the hurricane itself is likely to be stronger and wetter than it would be without global warming. And, as unfortunate as it is for me to say this, at this point it’s not enough to simply drive less, replace incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent, cross our fingers, and hope that we’ve stopped the problem.

I absolutely support cutting carbon emissions. If we don’t, the consequences will be even more horrendous than the scientists are daring to predict right now. But we’ve reached a point where it would be nothing short of grossly irresponsible to fail to look into preparation for the potentially disastrous changes that we have brought upon ourselves.

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February 12, 2007

Global Warming and Methane Under Pressure

Filed under: Science,Weather — PolitiCalypso @ 12:07 pm

When I first watched An Inconvenient Truth, I went to the special features on the DVD and watched the follow-up interview with Al Gore. He spoke about recent research about global warming that had come out since the shooting of the film, such as information about a link between hurricane intensity and global warming. But far more disturbing than that was a discussion of how global warming could cause the tundra to thaw enough to release methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further compounding the problem.

Think of it as twisting the cap too fast on a soda bottle that has been shaken. After that seal is broken, the carbon dioxide in the bottle rapidly bubbles up, and nothing can stop the inevitable horrid mess. You just want to get out of the way of it.

Obviously, that’s not an option for us if the permafrost thaws.

But I wanted to see for myself. Gore’s interview didn’t go into great detail about what might happen if this occurred, and I wanted to see just what the ramifications of it could be.
This article from the Energy Bulletin was written in late 2004, so the science isn’t brand-new by any means. But the article was far more horrifying than Gore’s interview:

A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and “burp” into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There’s 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra – enough to start this chain reaction – and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren’t talking about.

An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists? Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at least twice before.

The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years.

The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on Earth.

Uh, what?

The great Permian extinction was nothing new to me. Although less famous among the non-geologist non-paleontologist set than the Cretaceous extinction that killed the dinosaurs, anyone who’s ever read many National Geographics knows about this event. And I knew it was probably triggered by a rapid change in climate. However… methane releases causing it? I had to see if this was based in fact.

Well, it appears that it was.

The Wikipedia article on the Permian-Triassic extinction offers a list of explanations for it, along with descriptions of the likelihood and evidence for each. Here they are:

  • Continental drift: When the continents joined into one massive landmass, this affected the oceans, causing extinction of some marine life. However, it’s considered insufficient to account for close to 95% of life on Earth dying.

  • Impact of a celestial body: An asteroid, meteor, or comet may have struck Earth, as happened at the end of the Cretaceous era. There is no direct evidence of this, though, and apparently everything claimed as evidence has fallen into serious question.
  • Supernova: A star could have supernova’d relatively close to the solar system, causing radiation that would wipe of most of the life on the planet. It’s possible, but there is no astronomical evidence that one occurred.
  • A spike in volcanic activity, causing global warming that disrupted the climate system, shut off oceanic currents, deprived the ocean of oxygen, and triggered the release of methane trapped in the sea. That Energy Bulletin article says that methane is far stronger than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and it would have caused an additional 5 degrees Celsius rise in temperature on top of what the volcanism-induced global warming had already caused. What’s more, there is considerable geological evidence to support this theory, as compared with the rest of the extinction theories. It’s all in the article, and it would amount to quoting the entire piece if I put the relevant parts here. It’s there; read it for yourself and be freaked out just as I was.

Of course, nothing like that could happen again.

Right?

…

Well, realistically, that probably is a doomsday scenario. It’s only happened once in the entire history of life on Earth, although there was another pretty bad event that took place in the Cenozoic Era. However, the central theory behind the foreign and domestic security policy of the United States has been to prepare for the most minuscule possibility of a worst-case scenario. Ron Suskind wrote a book about this idea called The One Percent Doctrine. I don’t know about you, but — without any intention of minimizing terrorist activity — as far as I’m concerned, the mass extinction of most life on Earth is a bit larger of a potential problem than a terrorist attack. If ever there’s an appropriate use of “the one percent doctrine,” it would be to prevent a mass extinction.

In Al Gore’s interview about this problem, he says that “it’s not a good thing” when methane is released into the atmosphere. I would nominate that for understatement of the year.

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October 26, 2006

Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers Likely Found in Florida

Filed under: Science — PolitiCalypso @ 6:50 am

Sometimes you just have to take a break from blogging politics.

My younger sister, who is studying biology and specializes in ornithology, informed me of this piece of good news.  In a world where the world’s great experiment in democracy decides to grant dictatorial power to an illegitimately installed war criminal executive branch, it’s the small things that still give hope.  I take heart in this news release from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

Avian biologist Geoffrey Hill of Auburn University in Alabama says his team has collected sound recordings and sight records that show ivory-bills may inhabit the Florida panhandle in the Choctawhatchee River basin.

This is in addition to the reports last year of the woodpecker (which was long thought extinct) living in a remote area of Arkansas.  The bird was once reported all over the Southeast and as far north as the Ohio River, but due to habitat destruction, its population has apparently dwindled to a very few small locations of undisturbed forests.

I have read over all the public evidence and am inclined to believe the accounts, and if they are true, it speaks to the urgency of protecting the birds in this area.  The Florida Panhandle has been hit by several major hurricanes since the birds were thought to have become extinct in the 1940s — most recently, by notorious Category 3 landfalling Frederic, Ivan, and Dennis.  If a hurricane like Katrina were to make landfall on the birds’ location, it would surely wipe out this pocket with its storm surge.  That seems highly unlikely to happen this year with the onset of El Niño conditions, which suppress hurricane activity, but it is a concern nonetheless.

The scientists were not able to obtain good photographs of the birds, but they had 13 credible sightings (several of more than one bird), over 200 bird calls that match Ivorybill calls recorded in the 1930s, and 99 “double knocks,” the distinctive sound that the bird makes while rapping on trees.  These sounds are not associated with other bird species that exist in this area.  Additionally, they found cavities in trees that are too large to have been made by other woodpeckers and were confirmed by bill markings to have been made by birds rather than other animals.  Ivorybills carved out and nested in such large holes.  [Source, Auburn University professor Geoffrey Hill]

This bird requires undisturbed old-growth forest land in which to nest and forage.  Such land is exactly what Republican administrations want to cede to big industry.  In fact, the last proven photographs of the bird taken in the U.S. were in Louisiana in a spot of land called the Singer Tract, owned by the sewing machine company.  The logging rights to the land had been sold, and the land was wiped clean despite efforts by the Audubon Society to save it.

When the sightings in Arkansas were announced last year, the Bush Interior Department publicly played along with conservationists, mainly because it would’ve been terrible press not to.  In the meantime, the administration has supported environmental policies that would harm the prospects of this and other endangered species.  This is what Republicans do time and time again:  photo-op for political benefit, but support destructive actions after the cameras shift away to something else.

The land in Arkansas had been bought by the Nature Conservancy, an organization dedicated specifically to buying tracts of land to preserve wildlife.  The Arkansas habitat is also an extremely large area of land in comparison with the Florida habitat, which covers only about two square miles.  The land is owned by the state of Florida.  The small size of the habitat makes it that much more vulnerable to environmental destruction around it, and the need to preserve it is thus that much greater.

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