June 20, 2009
Mouthless Screams
Sagebrush chat. The sagebrush communicated and cooperated with other branches of themselves to avoid being eaten by grasshoppers, Karban said. Although the research is in its early stages, the scientists suspect that the plants warn their own kind of impending danger by emitting volatile cues. This may involve secreting chemicals that deter herbivores or make the plant less profitable for herbivores to eat, he said. What this research means is that plants are "capable of more sophisticated behavior than we imagined," said Karban, who researches the interactions between herbivores (plant-eating organisms) and their host plants. "Plants are capable of responding to complex cues that involve multiple stimuli," Karban said. "Plants not only respond to reliable cues in their environments but also produce cues that communicate with other plants and with other organisms, such as pollinators, seed disperses, herbivores and enemies of those herbivores." This isn't news, despite the semi-breathless tone of the PR. I've known of this for years...
June 19, 2009
Aerosol Cooling
Aerosols - small particles suspended in the atmosphere - have a variety of effects that directly or indirectly affect climate concerns. Not all aerosols have the same effects. Aerosols that scatter — such as sulphates, nitrates and organic carbon — tend to cool the Earth by sending some incoming radiation back into space, while absorbing aerosols, such as black carbon (formed from the incomplete burning of fossil fuels), heat up the Earth’s atmosphere. Scattering aerosols also can affect plant growth, for example by allowing more light to penetrate below the canopy and promote growth at lower levels without reducing growth in the canopy. Absorbing aerosols fall out and alter the albedo of land and ice, and have been cited as culprits in arctic melting. . . . calculations based on satellite measurements assume that the relative concentrations of different aerosols in the atmosphere have remained constant throughout the industrial age. This is a problem because calculating the cooling effect...
June 17, 2009
Outrageous Hypotheses
In the spirit of Nickel Famine and Ironed Out, which speculated about the causes of the the great oxygenation event about 2.5 billion years ago, consider the life span of the biosphere. It is a given of astrophysics that stars like the sun get brighter over time. So in the Earth’s early history, three billion years back and more, the sun must have been distinctly fainter than it is today – so much fainter that, were the Earth then to have had an atmosphere anything like today’s, the planet’s surface would have frozen solid. . . One of the ideas spurred by this observation was that the Earth could have a rough and ready sort of thermostat. In the presence of water, the rocks of the Earth’s crust will react with the carbon dioxide continuously pumped out of the planet’s innards to form carbonate ions that end up incorporated into more rocks. The warmer the planet, the more vigorous...
June 06, 2009
Modelizers
I once read a story about Mick Jagger noting that he always and only slept with models. Asked why he replied "because he can". It may be that this has something to do with the state of climate science. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance. And there you got a very strong feeling for how uncertain the whole business is, that the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the...
May 30, 2009
Modus Vivendi
A number of recent posts have mocked currently fashionable nonsense and political advocates who seek to impose nonsensical controls on society in service of those fashions and enthusiasms. The ideas advocated don't pass intellectual muster, as even the most cursory examination reveals, but the advocates press on in bloody minded faith that they can pummel opposition with brute force, and then, and then, well, they are underpants gnomes. Some argue that it isn't just that none of the totalizing systems on offer are viable, it is that totalizing systems are inherently wrong, inappropriate for humans. If all political struggle is underpinned by myth, if all progress is theological residue, what does [John] Gray suggest [in Gray’s Anatomy, a selection of his articles and essays published over the past 30 years] in its stead? ‘[W]e need an ideal based not on the best way of life, nor on reasonable disagreement about it, but instead on the truth that humans will...
May 19, 2009
Working Backwards
I often skip to the end of an argument or paper and read the conclusions first. The writer had the conclusion in mind from the beginning and worked backwards from there, offering evidence or arguments to support that conclusion, so it makes sense to read that way too. It makes it easier to see where the writer goes astray, succumbing to confirmation bias or simply fudging the tricky bits - then a miracle occurs - in order to reach desired conclusions. For example, the answer is “biofuels”. a bipartisan group of 42 members of Congress has decided to tell EPA what scientific methods it should use to evaluate the carbon dioxide footprint of biofuels, based on its judgments as to the scientific merit of those methods. . . The answer is “biofuels”. Thus, the science needs to be produced in such a way as to support that answer. I won't repeat all of my arguments why biofuels are not...
May 08, 2009
Global Monsoon
Cycles within cycles. the global monsoon exists through all geological history since at least 600 million years ago. It covaries with various geological cycles including those caused by the geometric changes of the Earth's orbits. The 20,000-year precessional cycle of the global monsoon, for example, is responsible for the collapse of several Asian and African ancient cultures at ~ 4000 years ago. The same cyclicity is seen in the chemical composition of the air, such as methane concentration and isotope composition of air-bubbles captured in ice cores. Now Wang found that the long-term cycles in the oceanic carbon reservoir also has a global monsoon origin. This 400,000-year cyclicity related to "long eccentricity" of the Earth's orbit, is best seen in carbon isotope compositions of calcite test of foraminifera, a single-cell animal in the ocean. The rhythmic changes in oceanic carbon reservoir were likened to "heartbeat" of the Earth system. This cyclicity becomes longer since 1.6 million years ago, displaying...
May 07, 2009
Ironed Out
In Nickel Famine a paper was discussed that proposed an explanation for the great oxygenation event about 2.5 billion years ago. The researchers found that nickel levels in the BIFs began dropping around 2.7 billion years ago and by 2.5 billion years ago was about half its earlier value. "The timing fits very well. The drop in nickel could have set the stage for the Great Oxidation Event," says Papineau. "And from what we know about living methanogens, lower levels of nickel would have severely cut back methane production." What caused the drop in nickel? The researchers point to geologic changes that were occurring during the interval. During earlier phases of the Earth's history, while its mantle was extremely hot, lavas from volcanic eruptions would have been relatively high in nickel. Erosion would have washed the nickel into the sea, keeping levels high. But as the mantle cooled, and the chemistry of lavas changed, volcanoes spewed out less nickel,...
May 06, 2009
Once Again
There's a set of old ideas that are getting some recent attention. I think it’s possible to have a dynamic concept of sustainability … but then it becomes resilient sustainability. Or at least that’s what I teach my MBA students, that true sustainability is in fact resilience. One crucial aspect of resilience in a complex “system of systems”, whether it’s a network of computer systems or a network of individual economic agents interacting in a network of markets (or the intersection of the two!), is the extent to which the different parts of the systems are “coupled”. That’s what I’ve been mulling over for the past week — loosely-coupled systems. Loose coupling is a term of art in computer systems. Interestingly, its Wikipedia entry caught my eye for the precise reason I wanted to incorporate it into this post: Loose coupling describes a resilient relationship between two or more systems or organizations with some kind of exchange relationship. Each...
April 23, 2009
Hard Truths
I pick on the phoney-baloney Euro-weenie climate angsters - and their US fellow travelers - because they live in bizarro world where reality is inverted, magic still works, and everyone is forever young . . . or at least childish. This isn't just harmless delusion. Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still. We don’t control the global supply of carbon. Ten...
April 08, 2009
Nickel Famine
A few days ago, in comments for another post, I threatened to write somethong about Oliver's chat with James Lovelock. Jim is, among many other things, a master of analogy, and I was struck by a new one that he was road testing – one that mixes catastrophe and optimism in a way that chimes with his new book, but which is not I think spelled out there. The analogy is between oxygen and intelligence, and the creatures — cyanobacteria and humans — which brought these new and terrible entities to the world. In both cases, there were precursors. There are non-biological processes which produce free oxygen, and there is intelligence of various sorts elsewhere in the animal world. But in both cases there was at a specific point a quantitative shift so huge as to be qualitative and then some. Cyanobacteria really did overturn the biosphere 2.45 billion years ago, and they and their descendents have shaped it...
April 07, 2009
Word Fog
A lot of muzzy thinking seems to come from statements that have qualities we admire. The music is good, the ideas aren't jarring, the sentiments seems admirable, but they are false. There is a kind of higher-order public good you can call “trust,” “cooperativeness,” or something else. The idea is that some communities are able to overcome certain kinds of challenges involved in coordinating group behavior. The capacity successfully to solve collective action problems at a large scale, with a large population, is the Holy Grail of human society. If you can do this, you can do anything… which is a point I don’t think ideologues have really been able to get their heads around. What are called collective action "problems" are usually just the desires of ideologues rather than actual problems. It is a very good thing that getting societies goose-stepping about with their fists in the air is difficult. It is a truism that if you can...
April 06, 2009
Weak Science
This may be another example of kaleidoscope twirling. Yeast may seem unlikely subjects for a study of cooperative behavior, but in fact they are perfectly suited to such studies. . . Unlike humans, yeast have no emotions or thoughts that interfere with rational decision-making; their actions are solely driven by their genetic response to the environment. . . Sucrose is not yeast's preferred food source, but they will metabolize it if no glucose is available. To do so, they must secrete an enzyme called invertase, which breaks sucrose into smaller sugars that the yeast can absorb. Much of that sugar diffuses away and is freely available to other yeast cells in the environment. In this scenario, yeast that secrete invertase are known as cooperators, while those that don't secrete invertase and instead consume the simple sugars produced by others are called cheaters. If all of these simple sugars diffused away, with no preferential access to the yeast that produced...
March 28, 2009
Spidey Sense
I've almost completely ignored the AIG flap, especially the recent brouhaha about executive pay. It seemed to me to be just another meaningless opportunity to air biases and old grudges by all participants - political jockeying and tactical skirmishing in service of various enduring strategies. They want to fight and any excuse will serve to justify a dust up. Boring. But, Timothy has found a way to winkle something of value from the dross. I think the more social or economic power you have as an individual, the more culpable you are for how you use it. (Consider this the Spider-Man theory of society.) Because I know I have this bias, I also agree that it’s important to look at the institutional, systematic and habitual worlds around the powerful. I’ve long argued that this is one of the problems with cultural studies, cultural anthropology and social history. Those fields often act as if the social and institutional contexts of...
March 11, 2009
Undue Pessimism
Most of the schemes advocated for perfecting society assume a supernatural authority of last resort that can resolve conflicts, guarantee outcomes and make the wounded whole again. Those of a religious mind sensibly locate this authority and the promised satisfactions beyond space and time, and so beyond mundane verification. Those who can't so believe, less sensibly try to relocate supernatural authority to government institutions. This basic defect is overlooked in the hurley burly of wonkery. Policies and institutions that can't possibly work are theorized, designed and implemented anyway. When they fail, causal analysis ignores the basic defect and focuses on irrelevant details that can be altered in a new round of unrealistic implementations. These facts are very occasionally explored, recently in discussion of a new movie adaptation of the comic book series Watchmen. The question of ultimate authority and watching the watchers bubbles fitfully in social consciousness. The problem for those of us who are not religious is that...
March 10, 2009
Boobathon
I don't get it. Why are people surprised that we have mendacious morons in government? Obama apparently said, in response to the idea that he’s trying to do too much at once.: President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. WTF? (1) Roosevelt probably prolonged the depression. (2) Fighting WWII was most certainly a choice, and maybe not the best one. (3) Kennedy did nothing much by way of advancing civil rights other than voting against Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act. (4) There was no point whatsoever in going to the moon. Obama wants us to believe that not accepting his package deal of uneccesary programs is a “luxury” we cannot afford, which is even more ridiculous than the historical examples he picked. When it comes to responding to the basis of the actual...
March 09, 2009
Angry Onions
It sounds like a joke, but plants do respond to abuse. The scientists found out that the new electrical signal they called "system potential" was induced and even modulated by wounding. If a plant leaf is wounded, the signal strength can be different and can be measured over long distances in unwounded leaves, depending on the kind and concentration of added cations (e.g. calcium, potassium, or magnesium). It is not the transport of ions across cell membranes that causes the observed changes in voltage transmitted from leaf to shoot and then to the next leaf, but the activation of so-called proton pumps. "This is the reason why the "system potential" we measured cannot at all be compared to the classic action potential as present in nerves of animals and also in plants", says Hubert Felle from Gießen University. Action potentials follow all-or-none characteristics: they are activated if a certain stimulus threshold is reached and then spread constantly. The "system...
March 05, 2009
Ultramafic Rocks
Natural CO2 sequestration. Ultramafic rocks generally form in earth's mantle, starting some 12 miles under the surface and extending down hundreds of miles. Bits of these rocks—peridotite, dunite, lherzholite and others-- may be squeezed to the surface when continental plates collide with oceanic plates, or, less often, when the interiors of continents thin and develop rifts. Because of their chemical makeup, when the rocks are exposed to carbon dioxide, they react to form common limestone and chalk. . . Another rock, common volcanic basalt, also reacts with CO2 . . . The major drawback to natural mineral carbonation is its slow pace: normally, it takes thousands of years for rocks to react with sizable quantities of CO2. But scientists are experimenting with ways to speed the reaction up by dissolving carbon dioxide in water and injecting it into the rock, as well as capturing heat generated by the reaction to accelerate the process. . . One model is to...
March 05, 2009
Pre-Dawn
Political machinations about economics and environmental issues are similar. Matthew Yglesias’ posts emphasizing the interconnectedness of the global economy and the need for coordination, like this one, are quite correct in pointing out that economies are not contained in little national boxes with policy levers nation-states can pull to goose aggregate demand, brake the rate of job loss, and so on at will. Indeed, having a sound sense of the extent of global economic interconectedness is tantamount to admitting rather hard limits on the ability of national monetary and fiscal interventions to fix things. . . given globalization, effective stimulus is a lot like effective carbon-reduction policy: it requires overcoming incredibly difficult international coordination problems. One might argue that the global policy coordination problem is easier to solve if the U.S. is willing to be the first mover. But then one should also admit that the domestic efficacy of American stimulus is conditional on things beyond the control of...
February 24, 2009
Vadose Zone
That's the area between the soil surface and the water table. Tiny sediment grains are covered with a very fine-grained, complex mixture of minerals in an open fabric that results in a large surface area in contact with water between the grains. Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) are studying this microscopic layer and finding that the mineral composition of these coatings on sediment grains in the unsaturated zone (i.e., between land surface and the water table) can have a substantial effect on the retention of nitrate and sulfate. . . "The unsaturated zone is potentially a large reservoir for anions (negatively charged ions) like nitrate and sulfate. . . Nutrient storage in the very fine-grained mineral coatings on the sediment grains was attributed to a complex combination of chemical and physical storage mechanisms. Sounds like biochar doesn't it? It's good to recall that soil scientists and ag practitioners have been working these issues from a variety of...
February 14, 2009
Little People
According to Huxley [via] The propounders of what are called the ” ethics of evolution,” when the ‘ evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments, in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, th’ere is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call...
February 13, 2009
Brute Force
I've been listening to a multi-blog conversation about liberaltarianism, a political neologism for the views of a number of smart folks who find little of value in the current political coalitions in the US. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are factions of a single political party variously described as some type of fascism (e.g participatory fascism), which is in turn a flavor of socialism ("we are all socialists now"). This excerpt from one of several articles and blog posts by Will Wilkinson strikes somewhere in the vicinity of the heart of the issue. I’m not that interested in short-term partisan politics. I’m interested in a much longer-term project. I want to help create the possibility of a popular political identity that takes the value of human liberty, in all its aspects, really seriously. As I see it, this project involves an attempt to reunify the separate strands of the American liberal tradition. . . . . . the...
February 10, 2009
Bloody T-Shirt
A few economists and camp followers have been arguing lately that part of the apparent muddle in macroeconomics is due to misunderstandings of broad theory, and arguments against the broad theory using comparative minutiae. For example, market theory is often taught in broad outline without reference to the conditions where the theory breaks down. This, it is argued, is good pedagogy since it allows the student to grasp the bigger picture before considering the fine points where there are exceptions. Conversely: . . . textbook theory doesn’t have any politics in it. In macroeconomics textbooks, government is a benevolent central planner beyond politics. It is assumed, for simplicity’s sake, that governments can act in perfect compliance with theory. It is also assumed that theory is settled before coming to a policy problem, that motivated disagreement over theory is not an essential element of democratic policymaking. But of course, there is politics, which trashes hope of either consensus on or...
February 03, 2009
LTP
Heritable epigenetic effects due to nutrition seem well established - you are what your mother and grandmother ate - but it may also be that you are what your mother played when she was a child. . . . in young mice, brief exposure to a stimulating environment — including new toys and opportunities for exercise and social interaction — enhanced long-term potentiation (LTP), which is thought to form the cellular basis of memory. In the current study, Feig and his colleagues found that the offspring of mothers who had experienced environmental enrichment before adolescence also showed enhanced LTP, despite never experiencing the stimulating environment themselves. . . Just as environmental enrichment enhanced memory at the cellular level, it also enhanced memory at the behavioral level. . . "A striking feature of this study is that enrichment took place during pre-adolescence, months before the mice were even fertile, yet the effect reached into the next generation," said senior author...
January 26, 2009
Naomi Died
She was 96, or so it was said, though I wonder if even she knew her real age. She was tiny, as was more common in those days, perhaps due to epigenetic effects - you are what your grandmother ate - though very old people shrink in size as their worlds contract with age. She flagged me down one day a couple of years ago as I rode past her house on a one lane dirt road on my quad. I was looking for a suspected leak in the main water line that supplies our local irrigation cooperative. She declared that she could no longer keep up her yard the way she liked, and that even her grandchildren were too old, or too busy with their own families, to help her any more, and that I seemed a likely candidate for lawn boy. And so, I was press ganged on the spot. She fascinated me. She was not just...
January 19, 2009
Yet Another
Nutrients washed down to the sea from cities and farms are bad right? Historically, the Nile would flood the delta every fall, irrigate nearby agricultural land, and flow out to the Mediterranean, carrying with it nutrients to support a large and productive fishery. Construction of the dam stopped the flooding, and the fishery collapsed. "That's when fertilizer consumption in the country skyrocketed," said Oczkowski. "The Egyptians were fertilizing the land, and then fertilizing the sea with the run-off. It also corresponded with a population boom and the expansion of the public water and sewer systems." As a result, landings of fish in coastal and offshore waters are more than three times pre-dam levels. While increased fishing effort in recent years may have played some role in the recovery, Oczkowski's findings indicate that anthropogenic nutrient sources have now more than replaced the fertility carried by the historical flooding. . . These results have raised questions among many scientists about the...
January 18, 2009
Dirt Neeping
The focus of climate alarmists and environmental miserabilists has been on rising temperatures. A recent paper claims that this will result in food shortages. Higher growing season temperatures can have dramatic impacts on agricultural productivity, farm incomes, and food security. . . We used historical examples to illustrate the magnitude of damage to food systems caused by extreme seasonal heat and show that these short-run events could become long-term trends without sufficient investments in adaptation. The paper has been characterized as politicized scare mongering by some 1,2, but the base claims shorn of wild eyed rhetoric are plausible: agriculture will need to adapt to a warming world. This isn't a daunting problem since food crops are very adaptable: they grow in a range of temperatures wider than projected future changes and can be adapted to grow in even wider ranges. If demand rises for such heat tolerant crops they will be developed and marketed. Some exist already but there...
January 13, 2009
Cattle Cycle
Razib talks about a subject I've dealt with many times before, but he does it with more authority and precision: Science is rational; scientists are not Just a small point. I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why? Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the cumulative and self-correcting rationality of the scientific community. It is the "wisdom of the crowds" at its apotheosis. Additionally, the domain which science addresses is generally skewed toward those which are amenable to abstraction...
January 10, 2009
Medea Hypothesis
As opposed to the Gaia Hypothesis. The story of life on earth, in Ward's reckoning, is a long series of suicide attempts. Four of the five major mass extinctions since the rise of animals, Ward says, were caused not by meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions, but by bacteria, and twice, he argues, the planet was transformed into a nearly total ball of ice thanks to the voracious appetites of plants. In other words, it's not just human beings, with our chemical spills, nuclear arsenals, and tailpipe emissions, who are a menace. The main threat to life is life itself. "Life is toxic," Ward says. "It's life that's causing all the damn problems." Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington and a scholar of the earth's great extinctions, calls his model the Medea Hypothesis, after the mythological Greek sorceress who killed her own children. The name makes clear Ward's ambition: To challenge and eventually replace the Gaia Hypothesis, the...
January 04, 2009
This Year's Girl
More Edgey stuff. "Geoengineering" technologies for counteracting some aspects of anthropogenic climate change — such as putting long-lived aerosols into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do, or changing the lifetimes and reflective properties of clouds — have to date been shunned by the majority of climate scientists, largely on the basis of the moral hazard involved: any sense that the risks of global warming can be taken care of by such technology weakens the case for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. I expect to see this unwillingness recede quite dramatically in the next few years, and not only because of the post-Lehman-Brothers bashing given to the idea that moral hazard is something to avoid at all costs. As people come to realise how little has actually been achieved so far on the emissions-reduction front, quite a few are going to start to freak out. . . But what I see as world changing about this technology is not the extent to which...
December 26, 2008
Earthrise
Oliver Morton, the chief news and features editor of the journal Nature, had an interesting op-ed a few days ago. The photograph of that earthrise by the astronaut Bill Anders forms part of the Apollo program’s enduring legacy — eclipsing, in many memories, any discoveries about the Moon or renewed sense of national pride. It and other pictures looking back at the Earth provided a new perspective on the thing that all humanity shares. As Robert Poole documents in his history, “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” that perspective had deep cultural effects, notably in the emotional resonance it offered the growing environmental movement. Seen from the Moon, the Earth seemed so small, so isolated, so terribly fragile. It takes nothing from the beauty and power of the image, though, to point out that it was the photographer, far more than its subject, who was isolated, and that the fragility is an illusion. The planet Earth is a...
December 18, 2008
People Power
Human geoengineering is being linked to past climate change. That idea, debated for the past several years by climate scientists, holds that the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases — methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests — into the atmosphere. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming. . . "Between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, both methane and carbon dioxide started an upward trend, unlike during previous interglacial periods," explains Kutzbach. Indeed, Ruddiman has shown that during the latter stages of six previous interglacials, greenhouse gases trended downward, not upward. Thus, the accumulation of greenhouse gases over the past few thousands of years, the Wisconsin-Virginia team argue, is very likely forestalling the onset of a new glacial cycle, such as have...
December 10, 2008
Bug Me Not
As a confessed bug man (see Gut Check for a recent example) I couldn't pass on this one. Microbes, it is safe to say, are sadly neglected in most discussions of climate science. . . All our food is produced in alliance with complex communities of the organisms, as are many other life-sustaining materials. In fact, 90% of the cells in our bodies are microbes, and 99% of the genes in our bodies reside in these microbes. . . Crucially, microbes have the capacity to alter the environment in profound and lasting ways. Historically they are the most effective geoengineers and biogeochemists. . . Microbes could have various positive and negative feedback responses to temperature change, but the magnitudes of these are inadequately understood. This lack of knowledge is probably the reason why microbial activity is missing from most climate change models. Regardless of the reasons for this neglect, climate change models that fail to factor in microbial activities...
December 03, 2008
Gut Check
There's been a flood of information about microbes lately that I haven't fully digested. The study briefly mentioned in the earlier post Parfait, and other work that it links to note the prevalence and implications of atmospheric bacteria and fungi. The little buggers are everywhere and we breathe them, sometimes to our detriment. We aren't actually independent of that pervasive microbial world. They are under us, around us and in us. Trillions of microbes make their home in the gut, where they help to break down and extract energy and nutrients from the food we eat. Yet, scientists have understood little about how this distinctive mix of microbes varies from one individual to the next. Now, by cataloging the microbial species in the guts of lean and obese, identical and fraternal female twins and their mothers using a new generation of powerful DNA sequencers, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered that each individual...
December 03, 2008
PSA
As an aid to cat bloggers I'll post this today so that they can get their own stuff up by Friday. "It is usually assumed that efficiency is what matters in evolution," said Daniel Schmitt, a Duke associate professor of evolutionary anthropology. "We've found that's too simple a way of looking at evolution, because there are some animals that need to operate at high energy cost and low efficiency." Namely cats. In a report published online Nov. 26 in the research journal Public Library of Science (PLoS), Schmitt and two former Duke co-researchers followed up on a scientific hunch by measuring and videotaping how six housecats moved along a 6 yard-long runway in pursuit of food treats or feline toys. Long-distance chase predators like dogs can reduce their muscular work needed to move forward by as much as 70 percent by allowing their body to rise and fall and exchanging potential and kinetic energy with each step. In contrast,...
December 02, 2008
Lethe
Epigenetic changes can allow expression of previously silenced genes as well as silencing those that were previously expressed. Many organisms, from worms to humans to plants, have learned to tame transposons by epigentically "silencing" them: if they can't express their genes they can't jump. If they can't jump for long enough, their DNA sequence slowly accumulates errors, and they become molecular fossils. Most transposons in most organisms are silenced in this way, but some remain quite active. In previous studies from the laboratory of two of the article's authors, UC Berkeley professors Damon Lisch and Michael Freeling, with the support of the National Science Foundation at UC Berkeley, epigenetic silencing was triggered in maize. Once triggered, the maize plant "remembers," and keeps the transposon "silenced" generation after generation, even after the trigger is lost. "However, we have found that at some positions in the genome, this is not the case. At these positions, although the trigger works fine, and...
December 02, 2008
Parfait
In an old post I waxed lyrical, in a geeky sort of way, about soil life. When I walk my fields I entertain fantasy visions of walking on a spongy mass of wriggling, ravenous microbes. It helps that my fields - or at least those I've had the management of for a couple of years - are in fact soft and yielding since they are rich in organic matter and living material so that even when bone dry they remind some of walking on a firm mattress. The infection doesn't stop at the soil surface, that's just the bottom layer. "... different organisms populate different sizes of dust particles, and different sizes vertically segregate in the airstream. "If you were going to be a pathogen in a snake you wouldn't want to be high in the air, but for camels you want to be on a smaller particle. Heaven knows the dynamics of how they do that!" I knew...
December 01, 2008
Living Rivers
We continue to improve our understanding of the carbon cycle. Microorganisms in rivers and streams play a crucial role in the global carbon cycle that has not previously been considered. . . Microorganisms such as bacteria and single celled algae in rivers and streams decompose organic matter as it flows downstream. They convert the carbon it contains into carbon dioxide, which is then released to the atmosphere. . . Recent estimates by Battin's team and others conclude there is a net flux, or outgassing, of carbon dioxide from the world's rivers and streams to the atmosphere of at least two-thirds to three-quarters of a gigatonne (Gt) of carbon per year. This flux has not been taken into account in the models of the global carbon cycle used to predict climate change. . ." they are missing from all global carbon cycling, even from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports. Rivers are just considered as inert pipelines, receiving...
November 30, 2008
Bullies
The previous two posts advocated increasing production of both energy and food as a strategy that serves multiple environmental purposes while also improving the human condition. These are related issues when we consider the current state of the planet and changes expected in coming decades. We are taxing the biosphere now without producing enough for the development of much of humanity, more so as time passes and population increases. Just as there is energy and climate inertia, there is population inertia, or perhaps momentum is a better analogy. The political approach is too often regressive, destructive and based in short term unproductive habits of mind. Rather than talking in terms of increased production to satisfy un met needs, they talk of redistribution. They are bullies who either man up, or gang up, and beat it out of others rather than producing to meet their own needs. The result is increased need. When they have their way even less is...
November 27, 2008
Hybrid Dysgenesis
This is really a story about epigenetics - hereditary information transmitted from parents to offspring via a crust of proteins etc. that cling to, and alter the function of, DNA without changing the DNA itself - but the discovery of a new mechanism is particularly interesting. When lab-bred female flies are bred with male flies caught in the wild, their progeny are sterile or unable to produce offspring -- a phenomenon called hybrid dysgenesis. But the genetically identical offspring of wild-caught female flies and lab-bred males are fertile. The genetic difference between the lab-bred and wild flies is a single transposon, which is absent in lab strains. In hybrid dysgenesis, the transmission of the transposon by a parent induces sterility in the offspring unless the offspring also inherits a factor that suppresses the transposon and maintains fertility. Since the phenomenon had only been seen when the transposon-transmitting parent was male, the suppressing factor was thought to be maternally transmitted....
November 19, 2008
Carbon Conscious
One of the reasons that I'm suspicious of climate hysterics is that they seem to know so little about the carbon cycle and initial conditions. They don't seem to know the current state of things and don't seem to understand the dynamics of the system. They have a hugely simplified view of reality. A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions. A new Cornell study, published online in Nature Geosciences, quantified the amount of black carbon in Australian soils and found that there was far more than expected, said Johannes Lehmann, the paper's lead author and a Cornell professor of biogeochemistry. The survey was the largest of black carbon ever published. As a result of global warming, soils are expected to release more carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, which, in turn, creates more warming. Climate...
November 14, 2008
Studied Ignorance
Uniformed journalists. If only wood could be converted to biofuels, there would be no need to wait a million years for the trees to be buried and become oil. Wood is indeed convertible to useful chemicals, because termites do it every day, causing $1 billion of damage every year in the United States. It's no trick to turn wood into biofuel, it is biofuel. For most of the world it is the primary biofuel. What this dullard may mean is that he doesn't know how to turn wood into liquid fuel for transportation. But that too is known technology - just heat it up in an oxygen free container. This yields all sorts of gases which we know how to crack and combine in various ways to make all sorts of chemicals including liquid fuel for transportation. The residue of this process is chared carbon - biochar - which can be used as a stable soil amendment that sequesters...
November 10, 2008
Too Fast
There's a theory that has been around for several years that a way to combat resistant disease bacteria and viruses is to increase their natural rate of mutation and evolution. They are already pretty fast - that's one of the reasons that they are resistant. But if they change too fast they can't maintain a breeding population. The term for this theory was error catastrophe New tools are in development. The study, which is available online and slated for publication in the journal Physical Review E, offers the most comprehensive mathematical analysis to date of the mechanisms that drive evolution in viruses and bacteria. Rather than focusing solely on random genetic mutations, as past analyses have, the study predicts exactly how evolution is affected by the exchange of entire genes and sets of genes. "We wanted to focus more attention on the roles that recombination and horizontal gene transfer play in the evolution of viruses and bacteria," said bioengineer...
October 31, 2008
Spooky Spots
Do astrologers consider sun spots? Pablo Mauas and colleagues at the University of Buenos Aires and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology have shown that the Rio Paraná’s flow at Corrientes – about 900 km upstream from Buenos Aires – is strongly correlated to the number of sunspots visible on the surface of the sun at that time (Phys. Rev. Lett. 101 168501). . . According to Mauas, the flow of a major river is a good indicator of how much precipitation has fallen over its basin because – unlike other ways of measuring rainfall – it smoothes out local variations. Mauas believes that the increased rainfall could be caused by higher temperatures in tropical regions during periods of high solar irradiance. This, he believes causes greater evaporation in the tropics with this moist air transported southward to the Paraná basin. The team is now working on a way to use sunspot number and the el Niño index, which...
October 29, 2008
Predataxis
I'm a bug man - or more precisely, a microbe man. I'm attuned to the largely invisible world of bacteria and fungi where you observe their actions by noting the effects they have, and infer their presence from such effects. When I walk my fields I entertain fantasy visions of walking on a spongy mass of wriggling, ravenous microbes. It helps that my fields - or at least those I've had the management of for a couple of years - are in fact soft and yielding since they are rich in organic matter and living material so that even when bone dry they remind some of walking on a firm mattress. I further imagine that these microbes are my coworkers helping me to make and maintain lush pastures. That's not much of a stretch and is consistent with the view of cattle as coworkers too. Together we all have the same grand purpose though we have individual responsibilities and...
October 13, 2008
Panspermia
Robin says: "This news does it for me; much more likely than not, life on Earth came from life elsewhere." A bug discovered deep in a goldmine and nicknamed "the bold traveller" has got astrobiologists buzzing with excitement. Its unique ability to live in complete isolation of any other living species suggests it could be the key to life on other planets. . . "The fact that the community contains only one species stands one of the basic tenets of microbial ecology on its head," says Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, who was not involved in Chivian's DNA analysis but whose team made the initial discovery that there were microbes living in this particular fissure two years ago. Evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson says the discovery is so important he will at once begin to mention it in his lectures on biodiversity. That's from an article Robin linked. This is the part that I find fascinating....
September 21, 2008
Plant Chat
One of the benefits of kerfuffle about AGW and emissions is that we are learning a lot about natural emissions. For example, we have only recently learned that plants emit methane. No one had ever thought to test for that before. It was assumed not to occur since it violated some priors about how methane is produced. It seems that they also emit aspirin. Researchers had not previously thought to look for methyl salicylate in a forest, and the NCAR team found the chemical by accident. They set up specialized instruments last year in a walnut grove near Davis, Calif., to monitor plant emissions of certain volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These hydrocarbon compounds are important because they can combine with industrial emissions to affect pollution, and they can also influence local climate. When the NCAR scientists reviewed their measurements, they found to their surprise that the emissions of VOCs included methyl salicylate. The levels of methyl salicylate emissions increased...
September 15, 2008
Woke Up
With wood. More than 125 years ago Charles Darwin first reported that most plants grow in a spurt during the night, not the day – and this week, scientists are reporting the discovery of the genes that control this phenomenon. . . This advance was made possible largely by the use of DNA microarrays and bioinformatics, most of which was done at OSU. This technology allows powerful computers to be combined with more conventional biological research to examine thousands of genes in an organism, in a very short period of time, and determine which ones are active and what their role is. . . A glowing enzyme, luciferase, was attached to the genes that were identified as responsible for rhythmic growth. And it would glow, on and off, as the genes began functioning to create the hormones responsible for growth in the dark of night. The research program also learned that most of the genes involved in this process...
August 17, 2008
Six Sigma
You cannot make financial markets idiot-proof, because they'll just build a better idiot....
August 16, 2008
Aw Nuts
The days are getting shorter - it's dark in the morning now - and the first acorns have begun to fall. Intimations of mortality and decline creep around the periphery of thought. It's time to start preparing: winter is coming. I've already started cutting fire wood, though it's still so hot that the labor is killing and seems inappropriate. Last year I did some investigation of the oak Mast Cycle in an attempt to resolve some folk myths about the prescience of trees. For much of American history the mast cycle was less important than now because of that marvelous species the American Chestnut. Ecologists have long bemoaned the destruction of the American chestnut, but the general public has been far less aware of the magnitude of the blight's effects. As Freinkel appropriately points out, nearly everyone noticed the downfall of the American elm, because it was an urban shade tree, whereas the loss of the chestnut was most...
August 11, 2008
Testing, Testing
Several earlier posts have discussed the questionable data yielded by unrealistic experiments that slam some environmental change into an ecosystem in a bottle rather than phasing anticipated changes in at a more realistic pace. More on that. They found that the rate of manmade climate change will not exceed background climate variability over the next few decades. What’s more, the predicted rates of change are too subtle to be mimicked experimentally at present. The team says this is because phytoplankton need time to respond, and therefore adapt, to any change in climate. "For adaptation to change to occur, the change must be sustained," explained Boyd. Most studies to date into the effects of climate change on organisms either use results from global model simulations or perform experiments in which the environmental properties of seawater containing phytoplankton are altered rapidly. . . "We have to reassess our current way of doing experiments to look at climate change – where we...
August 05, 2008
Bearly
I get on real well with kids, dogs, and animals of all sorts. Mothers complain that their babies would rather have me hold them, put them to bed and get them up again after nap time. Actually, they fall asleep in my arms with their ears pressed against my chest above my heart, which beats very slowly when I'm at rest, probably because of a life of hard physical activity that makes it beat so fast and hard much of the time. But that can't be the whole story since I get on just as well with wild critters that never sleep in my arms. My theory about them is that I'm alert and respectful. I notice them at a distance, hear their small sounds, and react with deference. They have as much right to their space as I have to mine. Wild turkeys nest nearby. They sun themselves, and take the shade, sitting on the board fence by...
July 30, 2008
Land Rush
Are the wheels coming off the global warming bandwagon? The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of its food production. Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century. I have little or no confidence in the IPCC since it is so politicized. Their estimates are instrumental rather than predictive but that doesn't seem to be the worst of it. Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images...
July 13, 2008
Gas Passers
Among the nuttier things heard from climate activists are claims that point source x, y or z emits copious methane and so we should do something about that since methane is a far more potent GHG than CO2. Rice paddies and cow belches have been cited as intolerable emitters, even though the methane attributed to them would happen even if they didn't exist. It's all just natural anaerobic decomposition of organic matter and will take place so long as bacteria still live, no matter whether they live in wetlands, animal guts or rice swamps. It's even sillier than that. The numbers have never added up. We don't know where all the methane comes from. We recently learned that trees emit methane, something thought to be impossible, and now this. A new pathway for methane formation in the oceans has been discovered, with significant potential for advancing our understanding of greenhouse gas production on Earth, scientists believe. A paper on...
July 07, 2008
Cheap Thrills
Why is it that a fresh, big eyed, smiling face is tonic for humans - especially for mothers? Strathearn and his colleagues asked 28 first-time mothers with infants aged 5 to 10 months to watch photos of their own babies and other infants while they were in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The machine measures blood flow in the brain. In the scans, areas of increased blood flow "light up," giving researchers a clue as to where brain activity takes place. In some of the photos, babies were smiling or happy. In others they were sad, and in some they had neutral expressions. They found that when the mothers saw their own infants' faces, key areas of the brain associated with reward lit up during the scans. The areas stimulated by the sight of their own babies were those associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. Specifically, the areas associated included the ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra regions, the striatum, and...
June 26, 2008
Immoral Reasoning
In the earlier post Moral Reasoning I noted that: Whenever I encounter someone who makes political arguments claiming that they are based on moral arguments I know that I've entered the twilight zone where reason has no force. It's worse than that in many ways. Of course my affluence enables me to be concerned more about animal welfare than about obtaining sufficient calories. Isn't it fantastic that I am affluent enough to care? Actually, she doesn't care, except in an anemic sort of way. She apparently doesn't get sufficient calories to think hard about the subject, or care deeply about large system issues. Claiming a moral basis for clearly erroneous ideas, as if that inoculates them in some way, and so removes their errors, is immoral in my view. It is dishonest and perhaps worse. Morality lies in doing the best you can with what you have. Given that I do have the luxury of finding delicious vegan food...
June 11, 2008
Breathe Deeply
Will wonders never cease? Marine bacteria have the capacity to take up and capture carbon dioxide with the help of sunlight, say researchers at Kalmar University in Sweden in collaboration with colleagues in Spain, Australia, and Russia. This can be compared to a simple form of photosynthesis, where marine bacteria use energy from sunlight to absorb carbon dioxide. It was previously known that bacteria in oxygen-starved lakes can have this capacity, but it's new knowledge that bacteria in the open seas can do so as well. This challenges earlier knowledge that algae are the only organisms that capture carbon dioxide in the surface water exposed to sunlight. It remains unknown just how much carbon dioxide is captured by these bacteria. "Even if it turns out that only a tiny fraction of carbon dioxide is captured by the bacteria, this can have an enormous impact, since more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide is captured daily by algae through...
June 01, 2008
Rock Hounds
Every resource appears to have consumers. Once considered a barren plain dotted with hydrothermal vents, the seafloor's rocky regions appear to be teeming with microbial life . . . Surprised by this diversity, the scientists tested more than one site and arrived at consistent results, making it likely. . . that rich microbial life extends across the ocean floor. Santelli and Edwards also found that the higher microbial diversity on ocean-bottom rocks compared favorably with other life-rich places in the oceans, such as hydrothermal vents. These findings raise the question of where these bacteria find their energy, Santelli said. "We scratched our heads about what was supporting this high level of growth," Edwards said. With evidence that the oceanic crust supports more bacteria than overlying water, the scientists hypothesized that reactions with the rocks themselves might offer fuel for life. In the lab, they calculated how much biomass could be supported by chemical reactions with the rocky basalt. They...
June 01, 2008
Right Now
A bird in hand. "It seems that sexual appetite causes a greater urgency to consume anything rewarding," the authors suggest. Thus, the activation of sexual desire appears to spill over into other brain systems involved in reward-seeking behaviors, even the cognitive desire for money. "After they touched a bra, men are more likely to be content with a smaller immediate monetary reward," writes Bram Van den Bergh, one of the study's authors. "Prior exposure to sexy stimuli may influence the choice between chocolate cake or fruit for dessert." The authors believe the stimuli bring men's minds to the present as opposed to the future. "The study demonstrates that bikinis cause a shift in time preference: Men live in the here and now when they glance at pictures featuring women in lingerie. That is, men will choose the immediately available rewards and seek immediate gratification after sex cue exposure." Is this news?...
May 25, 2008
Informational
Freeman Dyson reviews A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies by William Nordhaus, and Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto edited by Ernesto Zedillo, and finds them strangely silent on some important issues. There is a famous graph showing the fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it varies month by month and year by year (see the graph on page 44). It gives us our firmest and most accurate evidence of effects of human activities on our global environment. The graph is generally known as the Keeling graph because it summarizes the lifework of Charles David Keeling, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. . . The graph has two obvious and conspicuous features. First, a steady increase of carbon dioxide with time, beginning at 315 parts per million in 1958 and reaching 385 parts per million in 2008. Second, a regular wiggle showing a yearly cycle of growth...
March 23, 2008
C Cycle
Part of the reason why I took such a dim view of the nonsense discussed in Dimonomics is that so little is known about the carbon cycle, and so little of what is known is understood. Political posers hawk policies that elevate their power, claiming that they are justified by allusions to carbon. What is factual is that humans emit a variety of carbon gasses, and their atmospheric concentrations have increased. But until recently we couldn't make the connection empirically. Using data from the SCIAMACHY instrument aboard ESA's Envisat environmental satellite, scientists have for the first time detected regionally elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide – the most important greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming – originating from manmade emissions. . . Dr Michael Buchwitz from the Institute of Environmental Physics (IUP) at the University of Bremen in Germany and his colleagues detected the relatively weak atmospheric CO2 signal arising from regional ‘anthropogenic’, or manmade, CO2 emissions over Europe by...
March 23, 2008
ABCs
Warming spew. Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego atmospheric scientist V. Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg Carmichael, said that soot and other forms of black carbon could have as much as 60 percent of the current global warming effect of carbon dioxide, more than that of any greenhouse gas besides CO2. . . “Observationally based studies such as ours are converging on the same large magnitude of black carbon heating as modeling studies from Stanford, Caltech and NASA,” said Ramanathan. “We now have to examine if black carbon is also having a large role in the retreat of arctic sea ice and Himalayan glaciers as suggested by recent studies.” . . . Between 25 and 35 percent of black carbon in the global atmosphere comes from China and India, emitted from the burning of wood and cow dung in household cooking and through the use of coal to heat homes. Countries in Europe and...
March 20, 2008
Natural Nanoparticles
Now that we're mucking about with them, we've noticed that mother nature is a grand master. Minerals have an enormous range of physical and chemical properties due to a wide range of composition and structure, including particle size. Each mineral has a set of specific physical and chemical properties. Nanominerals, however, have one critical difference: a range of physical and chemical properties, depending on their size and shape. "This difference changes our view of the diversity and complexity of minerals, and how they influence Earth systems," said Michael Hochella of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va. The role of nanominerals is far-reaching, said Hochella. Nanominerals are widely distributed throughout the atmosphere, oceans, surface and underground waters, and soils, and in most living organisms, even within proteins. Nanoparticles play an important role in the lives of ocean-dwelling phytoplankton, for example, which remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Phytoplankton growth is limited by iron availability. Iron in...
March 14, 2008
Facultative Societies
It depends . . . Cooperation is central to many major transitions in evolution, including the emergence of eukaryotic cells, multicellularity and eusociality1. Cooperation can be destroyed by the spread of cheater mutants that do not cooperate but gain the benefits of cooperation from others1, 2. However, cooperation can be preserved if cheaters are facultative, cheating others but cooperating among themselves2. Several cheater mutants have been studied before, but no study has attempted a genome-scale investigation of the genetic opportunities for cheating. Here we describe such a screen in a social amoeba and show that cheating is multifaceted by revealing cheater mutations in well over 100 genes of diverse types. Many of these mutants cheat facultatively, producing more than their fair share of spores in chimaeras, but cooperating normally when clonal. These findings indicate that phenotypically stable cooperative systems may nevertheless harbour genetic conflicts. The opportunities for evolutionary moves and countermoves in such conflicts may select for the involvement...
March 03, 2008
SYMRK
AKA, SYMbiosis-Receptor-Kinase gene. About 80% of all land plants have a symbiotic relationship with fungi of the phylum Glomeromycota. The fungus penetrates cells in the plant’s roots, and provides the plant with phosphates and other nutrients from the soil. This kind of symbiosis is called an arbuscular mycorrhiza, and evolved more than 400 million years ago. Professor Martin Parniske and colleagues started their study by looking at genes known to be involved in arbuscular mycorrhiza, to see whether they could find evidence of any specific genetic differences in plants that form symbioses also with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. . . It had already been speculated that genes involved in the arbuscular mycorrhiza symbiosis might have been recruited for nodulation, as these symbioses both involve intracellular relationships. One clue was that several genes, including the so-called “symbiosis-receptor-kinase-gene” (SYMRK), are involved in a genetic program that links arbuscular mycorrhiza and one form of bacterial nodule symbiosis. And the analysis of SYMRK in several...
February 26, 2008
Sleeping Dogs
Biocontrol. Or perhaps genetic algorithms. MIT biologists have provoked soil-dwelling bacteria into producing a new type of antibiotic by pitting them against another strain of bacteria in a battle for survival. The antibiotic holds promise for treatment of Helicobacter pylori, which causes stomach ulcers in humans. Also, figuring out the still murky explanation for how the new antibiotic was produced could help scientists develop strategies for finding other new antibiotics. The idea of fighting fire with fire, life with life, is an old one that has had spectacular success as well as not infrequent failure. There's no way to predict the outcomes of such conflicts. The combatants have their own agendas and sometimes choose a different path than the one naively hoped for. The attackers, for example, might choose to engage with a different opponent. This has happened with insects introduced to prey on agricultural pests. They find some other target that is easier or more desirable in some...
February 23, 2008
Castro Kerfuffle
Timothy complains: There’s part of me that just wants this whole discussion to go away, or at least to feel like history and less like a record needle skipping in place. It is history: Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian Cuban totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: "While freely conceding that the Soviet Cuban regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian Cuban people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement." It was nonsense then. It is nonsense now. When we abandon our principles to expedite creation of some ideal society,...
February 21, 2008
Cosmic Coincidence
Being a little bit OCD at times - estimating, counting, measuring, noticing whether any number that innocently occurs in my life is a prime or at least has some interesting factors - an interesting number day is worth a post. First, I regaled Hipbone with the Tozier tale of the Ebay sale of a low Erdos number and now this. The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10122. . . which is bigger than the number of particles in the Universe — keeps popping up when several of the physical constants and parameters of the Universe are combined. 1040 also gets some discussion. A similar ‘large-number coincidence’ was noted in the 1930s by the astronomer Arthur Eddington and the physicist Paul Dirac. They saw that several other combinations, such as the ratio of the electrostatic attraction between an electron and a proton to the gravitational attraction, are equal...
January 10, 2008
Butterfly Effect
Again. A few years ago, Todd Palmer, an ecologist at the University of Florida, was walking past a fenced-off research site in Kenya when he noticed something curious: instead of thriving, acacia trees protected from leaf-eating elephants and giraffes were withering and dying. . . The acacias and a species of ant that colonize them live together in an arrangement ecologists call mutualism. The ants nest in the trees’ bulbous thorns and sip on their nectar; in return, they swarm out ferociously, ready to bite, when a tree is disturbed by an elephant, a giraffe or other grazing animal. But somehow, Dr. Palmer said, the trees seem to sense when no one is munching on their leaves and, after a year or so, seemingly decide “we are going to reduce our investment in ants” by not producing so many roomy thorns or so much tasty nectar. The ants’ responses to depleted nectar and nesting sites — lassitude is one...
January 04, 2008
Shorter M&M
The history of every millennial movement starts out quietly enough. At first only those who have heard voices or received messages by moonbeam come stumbling in through the tent flap. Shortly they are followed by academics who have finally found someone who understands their theories and will popularize them. Then, as the crowd swells, come the curious, lost, desperate, and heartbroken. Soon follow the peddlers who sell peanuts, popcorn, and crackerjacks to the rapt crowd; then the pickpockets, hangers-on, con artists, and small-time grifters. In the latter stages come the political entrepreneurs, demagogues always on the lookout for ready-made crowds ripe for the leading. Finally come the lawyers, regulators, and venture capitalists to turn it all into an industry....
December 30, 2007
Callipygian Hind
In the hindsightian sense. About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. . . Take a snapshot of the old world 15,000 years ago. Except for bits of Siberia, it was full of a new and clever kind of people who had originated in Africa . . . They were “hunter-gatherers”. On the whole the men hunted and the women gathered: a sexual division of labour is still universal among non-farming people and was probably not shared by their Homo erectus predecessors. This enabled them to eat both meat and veg, a clever trick because it combines quality with reliability. Why change? I'm sure they didn't decide to change. There we're almost certainly individuals aflame with various notions about better living through, errr, whatever, but there is no record of them. Perhaps...
December 21, 2007
Things We Know
That ain't so. For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased. That is, "the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001". The word statistically might benefit from some unpacking. The explanation for the standstill has been attributed to aerosols in the atmosphere produced as a by-product of greenhouse gas emission and volcanic activity. . . Other explanations have been proposed such as the ocean cooling effect of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation or the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. These explanations aren't compelling since they would have to be synchronized...
December 18, 2007
Authorized Fashion
The refuge of paleo-environmentalists who finally twigged to the foolishness of model based command and control systems for society was to drop any pretense of predictability or controllability and baldly advocate visions, and so openly became cultists proselytizing received wisdom. As a cult priestess Donella Meadows put it: For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can't understand, predict, and control, what is there to do? Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however—waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of "doing." The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Other's are still wrestling with their control demons. On the one hand, we are convinced, as are many, that it is time to give up on the...
December 17, 2007
Super Models
Arnold wonders: There are conservatives and libertarians who believe in CO2-caused global warming. As far as I know, there are no liberals who are skeptics. I wonder why this is the case. It's an interesting question. Politics is the obvious answer - statists see this as a stalking horse for their socio-economic agenda and hope to ride it to power and dominance. Other's fear that this is so. One of Arnold's possibilities is more interesting. [I]n economics the belief in the macro-econometric models of the 1960's tends (or tended) to be higher among liberals than among conservatives. I think that liberals have a genetic defect that allows them to believe that they can model complex systems effectively, while conservatives and especially libertarians see limits to knowledge. It's not likely a genetic problem and not clearly a defect, but the idea has merit nonetheless. I've posted about the problems in paleo-environmentalism that arose from the unquestioning belief in simplistic models...
December 11, 2007
Organic Nitrogen
Academic understanding of carbon and nitrogen cycles is improving a bit. “Everything is integrated, not only the nitrogen, carbon and climate, but also we looked at land cover and land use changes,” Jain said. “A lot of deforestation and also aforestation and reforestation are going on, and that has a direct effect on the carbon dioxide release or absorption.” The model accounts for different soil and vegetation types, the impact of climate and the inadvertent nitrogen deposition that results from fossil fuel and biomass burning. Interestingly, warming temperatures in response to rising carbon dioxide levels could make more nitrogen available, said Xiaojuan Yang, a doctoral student in Jain’s lab. This factor must also be weighed in any calculation of net carbon dioxide load, she said. “Previous modeling studies show that due to warming, the soil releases more carbon dioxide through increased decomposition,” she said. “But they are not considering the nitrogen effect. When the soil is releasing more CO2,...
November 26, 2007
Real Reality
Ecologists - and the whole nativist, pseudo-religious, fashion-victim, activist community - engage in a largely content-free discourse. Ecologists pay too much attention to increasingly rare "pristine" ecosystems while ignoring the overwhelming influence of humans on the environment . . . "Ecologists go to remote parts of the planet to study pristine ecosystems, but no one studies it in their back yard," said Ramankutty, assistant professor in McGill's Department of Geography and the Earth System Science Program. "It's time to start putting instrumentation in our back yards – both literal and metaphorical – to study what's going on there in terms of ecosystem functioning." . . . "Over the last million years, we have had glacial-interglacial cycles, with enormous changes in climate and massive shifts in ecosystems," said Ramankutty. "The human influence on the planet today is almost on the same scale. Nearly 30 to 40% of the world's land surface today is used just for growing food and grazing...
November 23, 2007
Don't Ask
Don't even think. [C]osmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos. The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe,” Prof Krauss tells New Scientist. [via Synthstuff] Ignorance, by this analysis, is not so much bliss as longevity. Or, at least it would seem so I suspect. It's a good thing that the singularity is near, or in progress, so that we can deal with these cosmic issues with brain power...
October 07, 2007
Robust Control
As opposed to optimal control. The tendency to employ panaceas may well be a reaction to the extremely difficult task of making decisions under conditions of pervasive uncertainty. Robust control, a methodology that seeks to develop control policies that maintain performance within a given set of uncertainty bounds, can be used to help avoid this tendency. Robust control can help analysts think in terms of robustness– vulnerability trade-offs to inform a management and learning process rather than finding the optimal solution given a particular characterization of uncertainty. Statistical decision theory and dynamic optimization techniques assign probabilities to uncertain events. This is often impractical or impossible. Worse, I think, such assigned probablilities often reflect biases that may or may not be consciously recognized. The world is not just uncertain, it is ambiguous. It sometimes seems that stuff is just made up, SWAGs, that can tell us something about those who made the assignments, but not much about the systems they...
September 30, 2007
Mast Cycle
I've been evaluating the weather prediction skills of oak trees for the past few years. There are folk stories, myths apparently, that the volume of acorns produced anticipates germination and growing conditions in future. A sparse crop, or mast, indicates a dry winter ahead, and abundance indicates great expectations for good growing conditions. The crop around here is middling this year but the nuts are larger than usual, thus emphasizing the truth that the world is not just uncertain, it is ambiguous. What the heck kind of weather forecast is that!? Perhaps it's not. Many scientists now believe the mast cycle is an evolutionary adaptation; that over the eons oaks and other nut-bearing trees have developed an on-and-off mast cycle to ensure their reproductive survival. The theory makes sense. If oaks produced a consistently healthy crop of acorns every year, populations of nutloving animals would rise to the point where all the acorns would be eaten no matter how...
September 19, 2007
Soul Butter
Long ago in a far away blog post I linked this article by David Gessner. Observe that freakish character -- The Incredible Shrinking Nature Writer. If you drew us to scale and made Thoreau a giant, and placed Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson at about his shoulder, you could keep drawing us smaller and smaller until you sketched in me and my crop of peers at insect size. It may be, as some suggest, that our time marks a renaissance of nature writing. But it's a renaissance of ants. If nature writing is to prove worthy of a new, more noble name, it must become less genteel and it must expand considerably. It's time to take down the "No Trespassing" signs. Time for a radical cross-pollination of genres. Why not let farce occasionally bully its way into the nature essay? Or tragedy? Or sex? How about more writing that spills and splashes over the seawall between fiction and nonfiction?...
August 24, 2007
Sophomoric Reason
Back in the day I called it new knowledge when youngsters first begin to grapple with the world at large in their first tentative steps outside the creche. Long, passionate arguments based on minute amounts of knowledge within a tightly bounded domain are common dorm room events. Some never grow larger. Animal cruelty, like abortion, implicates a boundary question. Insofar as the answer to that question lies outside libertarian theory proper, different answers to it could yield very different policy prescriptions from the same libertarian principles, with neither being more or less libertarian. . . I will note of existing animal cruelty laws that most contain specific exemptions for agriculture and various other industries, in ways that seem hard to justify. At any rate, I'm having trouble coming up with some coherent view on which "Tender meat is tasty" counts as a justification for the appalling way we treat veal calves but "I like watching violent bloodsports" is no...
July 19, 2007
Wild Claims
We are plagued by sensationalized pseudo-science as researchers pander to political hysterics in hopes of gaining favor and funds. It has always been so, but it seems worse than in the past. Consider this: Elevated CO2 is considered to be a serious catalyst of global change. Its effects can be felt throughout the ecosystem, including the insect-plant food chain link. Safeguarding highly-usable crops is of great importance to many local and national economies. Many plants have inherent enzyme-based defenses that are released during insect attack. This study found that when soybeans (Glycine max) were exposed to elevated amounts of CO2 the plants became more susceptible to attack by Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica). Furthermore, as these beetles consumed the weakened soybeans, the insect’s invasive abilities were intensified. This sounds preposterous. Why would plants become less able to defend themselves when a major nutrient (CO2) is in ample supply? It may be that this is false. The model explains observed CO2...
June 24, 2007
Acquired Taste
I like strong flavors, intense experiences, and unusual combinations. This may not be your cup of tea, but I enjoy it. If IQ really correlates with the ability to flourish in an industrial society (and I'm quite prepared to believe that), then it is, as I said last time, a measurement of the ability to navigate paper-pushing bureaucracies — to learn to manipulate arbitrary abstract explicit rules, and to do so on command. Presuming that people who don't manage to pull off at least some minimum level of this make very unattractive mating partners, and so have below-average reproductive success, then those of us in developed countries have spent the last one or two centuries breeding for docility, in both senses of the word. But, begin at the beginning. This is a test....
June 01, 2007
Local Optima:
Or, "So long, and thanks for all the fish." Mistaking political realities for physical reality, as discussed in Blowing Smoke, or mistaking media and activist rhetoric for reality, as discussed most recently in Try Again, gives a skewed and dysfunctional view. One symptom of this is an oscillation from overshoot to undershoot as those seeking to differentiate themselves and so get attention - either as votes or product sales - try to grab headlines. Wasn’t it surprising how the media communicated the findings of the latest IPCC reports? . . . a competition among media reports was launched exacerbating the consequences of climate change, one overbidding the other. The logical consequence of this is that sooner or later we end up at a point which cannot be topped. Where to go from there? The answer is what we are just experiencing now. The same media (in part the same journalists) announcing ‘the end of the world’ on the title...
May 31, 2007
Bio Bang
A variant of the infinite monkeys trope The plausibility of different models for the origin of life on earth directly depends on the adopted cosmological scenario. In an infinite universe (multiverse), emergence of highly complex systems by chance is inevitable. Therefore, under this cosmology, an entity as complex as a coupled translation-replication system should be considered a viable breakthrough stage for the onset of biological evolution. So evolution didn't evolve and there was no RNA bootstrap. It just happened here in this corner of the multiverse. Could be I suppose. I find the idea that the plausibility of your hypotheses depends on your cosmology to be attractive....
May 22, 2007
Nuclear Fungi
Well, radiation powered is more accurate. Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth. "The fungal kingdom comprises more species than any other plant or animal kingdom, so finding that they're making food in addition to breaking it down means that Earth's energetics—in particular, the amount of radiation energy being converted to biological energy—may need to be recalculated," says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of microbiology & immunology at Einstein and senior author of the study, published May 23 in PLoS ONE. The ability of fungi to live off radiation could also prove useful to people: "Since ionizing radiation is prevalent in outer space, astronauts might be able...
April 22, 2007
Lagrangian Skeletons
In an earlier post, Mysterious Meanders, I ventilated a bit about the nagging doubts I sometimes have that anyone knows anything. Unfairly, I chose some difficult problems as examples, including meanders and turbulence. Cosma had an amusing take. The story is told of many giants of modern physics, but most plausibly of Heisenberg, that, on his death-bed, he remarked that the two great unsolved problems were reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, and turbulence. "Now, I'm optimistic about gravity..." If people must find analogies for society, ecosystems, etc., from physics and engineering, turbulence is probably a better one than feedback. So, it can be seen as heartening to hear that there may have been some progress . . . at least on turbulence. To picture the skeleton of turbulence, the MIT researchers analyzed experimental data obtained from co-authors Jori Ruppert-Felsot and Harry Swinney of the University of Texas at Austin. The Texas group used water jets to force water...
April 17, 2007
Sad Sachs
I have a special disdain for professional pessimists, people who exploit the very real problems and threats the world faces to advance themselves and their objectives. They are like skunks, making bad smells to disorient and confuse others and so make their own situations easier. Jeffrey Sachs has probably done more to shape contemporary low horizons on global poverty than any other individual. . . For Sachs, the key problems facing the world today are rooted in overpopulation: ‘Our generation’s unique challenge is learning to live in an extraordinarily crowded world.’ He argued that the world is ‘bursting at the seams in human terms, in economic terms and in ecological terms’. So for Sachs every human being is, literally and metaphorically, another mouth to feed. The mass of humanity is leaching the planet of its resources and destabilising the world. This isn't unique. It is the age old story, the normal condition of humanity. Crowding on a local scale...
April 09, 2007
Climate Stew
Oliver "MainlyMartian" Morton is ticked. There's a nice new paper in Nature by some NASA Ames and USGS people (including Bob Haberle, who used to have a sign saying "Commander of the Solar System" taped to his office door) on the link between climate and albedo on Mars. As my colleague Katharine Sanderson reports, they found that warming of darker patches creates winds that move the lighter dust around so that the darker patches grow and get warmer still -- a nice positive feedback that is presumably reset by global dust storms and the like. This provoked me to a little venting on the Nature website about the absurd climate skeptic riff that there's warming going on all over the solar system and that since the thing all the warming places have in common is the sun that must be the cause. Well, there does seem to be evidence that it is at least part of the cause. Over...
April 04, 2007
Cheap Thrills
The dynamics of doubt. My interest in bias is indirect: what I really want is the truth, and bias gets in the way. One subtle effect of bias is its effect on movements (political or otherwise). Once a movement forms to the degree where it is an identifiable entity, it seems to almost inevitably become an echo chamber. Even its original inspiration is true, it will be amplified into falsehood. I've made this point in the past, noting how and where the nearly universal concern for environmental quality was turned into the false and ugly environmental movement which repels and excludes vast swathes of humanity. At this point it is merely a political interest group dealing in dirty deeds, and is happy to sacrifice the environment for political gain. That it is also a marketing strategy for products of dubious worth is an additional consideration. But, I'm at a loss as to how a properly truth oriented stance can...
March 25, 2007
Not Enough
Sometimes scientists seem utterly clueless. "In essence, the data in the article strongly supports a new explanation for why the world contains so many species," said Tilman. "It shows that plant diversity is directly related to the number of limiting factors (such as soil moisture, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and water)." It also helps explain why grasslands, lakes and rivers that are polluted with nitrogen and phosphorous (usually from agriculture) have fewer species. The reduction of species where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico is one of the best known examples of this phenomenon. The findings are based on experiments carried out at the University of California?s Sedgwick Reserve in the Santa Ynez Valley, where the researchers applied combinations of nutrients and water to plots of grassland. Plots that received all of the resources had the fewest species and highest productivity. They combined this with analysis of the 150 year old Rothamsted Park Grass Experiment. Both supported...
March 15, 2007
Texas Flood
Mars could have a devastating sea level rise. A spacecraft orbiting Mars has scanned huge deposits of ice at its south pole so plentiful they would blanket the planet in 36 feet of water if they were liquid, scientists said on Thursday. The scientists used a joint NASA-Italian Space Agency radar instrument on the European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft to gauge the thickness and volume of the ice, which covers an area larger than Texas. The deposits, up to 2.3 miles thick, are under a polar cap of white frozen carbon dioxide and water, and appear to be composed of at least 90 percent frozen water, with dust mixed in, according to findings published in the journal Science. And that ain't the half of it. Dr. Plaut, part of an international team of two dozen scientists, said a preliminary look at this data indicated the ice deposits at the north pole were comparable to those at the south...
March 13, 2007
Biotech Century
Some say that the 21st century will be as noted for biology advances as the 20th century was for physics. Could be. I find the subject fascinating and it becomes ever clearer that there's a lot we don't know, and that we have only recently discovered the extent of our ignorance. We used to know more, before we learned a little. Most of what we know about the biochemical diversity of microbes comes from the tiny fraction that submit to lab investigations. Not until scientists determined that they could use molecular sequences to identify species and determine their evolutionary heritage, or phylogeny, did it begin to become apparent just how diverse microbes are. We now know that microbes are the most widely distributed organisms on earth, having adapted to environments as diverse as boiling sulfur pits and the human gut. Accounting for half of the world's biomass, microbes provide essential ecosystem services by cycling the mineral nutrients that support...
February 23, 2007
Panarchy
Read. ABSTRACT Hierarchies and adaptive cycles comprise the basis of ecosystems and social-ecological systems across scales. Together they form a panarchy. The panarchy describes how a healthy system can invent and experiment, benefiting from inventions that create opportunity while being kept safe from those that destabilize because of their nature or excessive exuberance. Each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, protected from above by slower, larger levels but invigorated from below by faster, smaller cycles of innovation. The whole panarchy is therefore both creative and conserving. The interactions between cycles in a panarchy combine learning with continuity. An analysis of this process helps to clarify the meaning of “sustainable development.” Sustainability is the capacity to create, test, and maintain adaptive capability. Development is the process of creating, testing, and maintaining opportunity. The phrase that combines the two, “sustainable development,” thus refers to the goal of fostering adaptive capabilities and creating opportunities. It is therefore not an...
February 21, 2007
Fast Lane
Several previous posts have extolled the virtues of soil fungi for nutrient transport - especially phosphorous and nitrogen but also carbon and water - as well as their ability to sequester carbon in a durable form: a boon to the soil as well as our atmosphere. They do another neat trick too. Fungal hyphae play a greater role in the spread of bacteria in the soil than was previously suspected. . . For the first time, scientists have been able to prove that bacteria are able to travel through the soil on the mucous membrane of living fungi. . . . . . fungi are some of the world’s greatest biomass producers. A single gram of field soil can contain up to 100 metres of mycelium. . . “For the bacterium a harmful substance is not harmful,” explains Wick. “It simply breaks down the carbon compounds, producing the energy and substances that it needs to live.” But before it...
January 23, 2007
Weather Bleater
The boys at the cafe asked me what the exended forecast was for us. They think that since I'm a net guy that I have a direct line to the weather gods or something. Whatever. I told them that the mild El Nino seems to be peaking now. That means that we may have a wetter spring than normal in Feb. and March. My gut feel is that we will soon have a change from this cold and dry pattern to a warrmer and wetter one. Like normal, but more so. Clean the leaves out of the gutters. Patch the roof. Get your firewood and hay tarped. Grade your roads and buy a pair of rubber boots. Spring is coming....
January 19, 2007
Lavender Nurses
Lavender is more than a nice smelling herb. The Greeks and Romans favored it in their bath water. Its name is derived from the Latin lavare, "to wash." It was used extensively in Europe during the 17th Century to mask household smells and stinking streets. Stories that the glovers of Grasse, who used lavender oil to scent their fashionable leather, were remarkably free from plague, encouraged other people to carry lavender. Ladies of refinement carried lavender sprigs tucked into their tussy mussy. A beautiful addition to any bouquet, it was also a very good way to daintily avoid unpleasant odors. Lavender has long been used medicinally. The oil of the flower being the most popular. The flower is also infused as a tea to soothe headaches, calm nerves, ease flatuance, fainting, dizziness and halitosis. It is said that if you add 6 drops to an irritable child's bathwater it will help calm them. Now that's a bonus! Lavender was...
December 29, 2006
Deforestation Myth
This is another crumb on the forest path begun a few days ago. [via A&L Daily] I was lucky to be at Rackham’s debut, at a conference 30 years ago. He was a shy young Cambridge botanist then, and was addressing the seemingly uncontroversial subject of The Oak Tree in Historic Times. But his paper turned out to be a bombshell, a clinical demolition of foresters’ paternalism and an awesomely evidenced account of the fact that, for most of human history, trees had been regarded and used as a self- renewing resource. He described how he had measured all the main timbers in the original part of his college, Corpus Christi (there were 1,249, mostly small squared trees about 7ins in diameter), and calculated how frequently such a building could have been created from the renewable oaks of an ordinary Cambridgeshire wood. He blew away the notion that felling trees destroyed woodland. In the half-dozen books he has written...
December 29, 2006
Bio-Beginners
The steady trickle of paradigm changing biological discoveries in recent years is growing into a torrent. One tributary of this torrent is the repeated discovery of microscopic life forms making a living in places we thought barren, using methods we hadn't known about. Roger Pielke Jr. noticed this syndicated NYT article about the discovery of archaea living in toxic wastes and wondered: We'd welcome an explanation of the possible (or non) significance of this new paper in Science for understandings of the global carbon cycle. A news story contained the following interesting paragraph (italics added): Scientists say the discovery could bear on estimates of the pervasiveness of exotic microbial life, which some experts suspect forms a hidden biosphere extending miles underground whose total mass may exceed that of all surface life. I've been loosely following Craig Venter's exploits on the Sorcerer II as he and a team sail around the world sampling oceanic microbes and sending them back to...
December 16, 2006
Polycultures
One of the nicest things about blogging is that sometimes you get unexpected contacts with knowledgeable readers. In June of 2004 I found an interesting blurb about a paper, but didn't have access to the paper itself. Still, I posted about it and lamented lack of access. One of the authors read the post and sent me a copy for personal use. That old post, Biotope Space, discussed one of the important reasons why polycultures are so productive. Using diverse plant mixtures instead of monocultures can increase yield and other ecosystem goods and services on which humans depend. Recent studies showed that such beneficial effects of biodiversity depend on complementarity between species in resource use, as is the case if species root in different soil depths. This knowledge led to the further hypothesis that the biotope space, for example the soil volume in which species can root, should also matter. With increasing biotope space more species occupying different niches...
December 07, 2006
That's Better
Biofuels, for the most part, are a nonsense hustle. There are a few proposals that make some sense in that they produce more than they cost when all factors, including system degradation, are considered. Here's another one. A new study led by David Tilman, Regents Professor of Ecology in the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences, shows that mixtures of native perennial grasses and other flowering plants provide more usable energy per acre than corn grain ethanol or soybean biodiesel and are far better for the environment. "Biofuels made from high-diversity mixtures of prairie plants can reduce global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even when grown on infertile soils, they can provide a substantial portion of global energy needs, and leave fertile land for food production," Tilman said. . . Based on 10 years of research at Cedar Creek Natural History Area, the study shows that degraded agricultural land planted with highly diverse mixtures of...
November 17, 2006
Disturbance
The old post Habitat Management collected pointers to a number of crumbs that marked a thought trail about the seemingly disparate elements of functioning ecologies, and how experts with highly specialized knowledge in one or another domain tragically failed to grasp the relevant attributes of the whole system, and so supported destructive policies. See the post and its references for detail but this graf is a fair summary: The large ruminants make habitat for rabbits. The rabbits make habitat for herbs. The nutrient poor subsoil that they pile on the surface when digging their borrows is perfect habitat for "poverty plants". That's their ecosystem role, the niche they exploit, pioneering bare soil resulting from soil disturbance. In time, as they die and decompose, they enrich that soil making it once again suitable for grasses. And so the cycle proceeds. Not stated is that the herbs make habitat for butterflies etc. In a circuitous way cows make rabbits (and gophers...
November 14, 2006
Social Illusions
Alex points to an interesting paper, Exploiting moral wiggle room: Experiments demonstrating an illusory preference for fairness : Subjects in economic experiments are often generous. This behavior is often interpreted as reflecting a preference for equitable, efficient, or otherwise desirable social outcomes. We show that a considerable proportion of such fair behavior may be driven by a desire to appear fair without actually wanting a fair outcome. To do so, we first demonstrate a high frequency of fair behavior in a modification of the standard dictator game, but then show that fairness decreases substantially when the connection between choices and outcomes is obfuscated. Specifically, we show that in a binary version of the dictator game, a majority of subjects choose the fair and efficient outcome. We then show that subjects playing the same game instead choose to maximize their own payoffs, at the expense of fairness and efficiency, when the recipients’ payoffs are uncertain, even if this uncertainty can...
November 11, 2006
It's Not Noise
I've been taking care of Nanette's ranchette for her while she and Chuck travel the world. They're doing a sort of post-retirement grand tour, having already done the retire to the ranch thing. I get the benefit of using her pastures for my stock, and she gets some peace of mind knowing that an uptight everything-must-fit manager is overseeing her dominion. She and Chuck stop by once or twice a year and I see that when they arrive all is in order. It's almost as if their own ranch is a B&B that they visit now and again. This is an emerging profession of sorts - ranch butler, a.k.a. mouse catcher - as more urban refugees buy up ranch land but have no interest or expertise in the grungy details. In general, I don't do television, but Nanette has a big screen and satellite programming. The last time she visited it was on the blink, a failure on my...
October 24, 2006
Different Strokes
Is it true that what is good for the goose is good for the gander? Not in all ways. Intralocus sexual conflict reduces the benefits of sexual selection by diminishing the fitness of offspring produced by the most attractive mates, researchers report in PLoS Biology this week. The study is the first to measure the inheritance of genetic quality from both parents across generations. When individuals of the same species carry sexually antagonistic genes -- genes that have opposite effects on fitness when expressed in the two sexes -- sexual conflict ensues. "In promiscuous mating systems, many genes that make a good male don't make a good female, . . The results showed that any potential genetic benefits of sexual selection were reversed in the next generation: high-fitness males produced low-fitness daughters, and high-fitness females produced low-fitness sons. "A male may be high-quality because he has a lot of masculinizing male-benefit genes," explained Pischedda, the first author of the...
October 24, 2006
Glomalin Critics
This is another post about strings used to get here. I repeated the search to see what would result but didn't find any actual "glomalin critics". I did find this older overview that had some information that was new to me. In 1996, Dr. Sarah Wright and colleagues at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service isolated a glycoprotein called glomalin that literally "gums up" the soil rhizosphere (the interface between soil and plant roots) with carbon fixed from the atmosphere. The compound is produced by common soil fungi called mycorrhizae that frequent the roots of many crops. When Wright removed glomalin from soil samples, the result was a lifeless mineral powder. The soil had lost its tilth - the substance that conveys texture and health. She had inadvertently discovered the fundamental factor of soil welfare, elusive for over 10,000 years. Humic acid, previously thought to be the main contributor to soil carbon, could muster only a tiny percentage of glomalin's...
October 22, 2006
Mysterious Meanders
I'm continually amazed at the number of every day things we have no clues about. Gradually my faith that my betters know how things work, and that I could in principle know too, is being beaten out of me. I first encountered the mysteries of meanders in an article by Luna B. Leopold and Walter Langbein, published 40 years ago in Scientific American. They gave a lucid account of how meanders form and why they assume their characteristic sinuous shapes. I was a student at the time, and the article made a lasting impression. Not that I was inspired to go off and pursue a career in potamology, but the Leopold-Langbein theory of meanders was an eye-opener all the same. It brought home to me the curious fact that the world is a comprehensible place: You can look at a landform, say, and expect to understand what you see. The patterns of nature make sense, if you know how...
October 13, 2006
Pluvial Events
I've discovered an interesting blog, Down to Earth, self decribed as the science and engineering of ecosystems, landforms, land-use, natural hazards, and water resources. It's authored by Daniel Collins, an environmental engineer and geoscientist, currently a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison. It has an initial feel, to my mind, similar to Transect Points, Philip Small's soil science blog, but seems to be updated more often. Philip is in the field or something, and may perhaps blog more this winter. Just a guess. But, Down to Earth is a little bit cozy with the dark side, the confederacy of dunces. That's pretty common. I'm the odd ball on that. As an example of what I mean consider this post, Courting Procrastination, that links to WorldWhingeing and Andrew Dressler with approval. An example of the problem (for me) comes from Dressler. Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? ... The bottom line is that we are virtually 100% certain that humans...
October 13, 2006
Bio-Climate
A stirring account of the role of the marine biosphere in planet management. Physical and biological oceanographers led by FSU Professor William Dewar put the yearly amount of chemical power stored by phytoplankton in the form of new organic matter at roughly 63 terawatts, and that's a lot of juice: Just one terawatt equals a trillion watts. In 2001, humans collectively consumed a comparatively measly 13.5 terawatts. What's more, their study found that the marine biosphere –– the chain of sea life anchored by phytoplankton –– invests around one percent (1 terawatt) of its chemical power fortune in mechanical energy, which is manifested in the swimming motions of hungry ocean swimmers ranging from whales and fish to shrimp and krill. Those swimming motions mix the water much as cream is stirred into coffee by swiping a spoon through it. And the sum of all that phytoplankton-fueled stirring may equal climate control. "By interpreting existing data in a different way,...
October 12, 2006
Chemical Warfare
It's a jungle out there. In the past decade, scientists conducting routine analyses of animal and food samples began to discover unknown HOCs [halogenated organic compounds] in their samples. Detective work led to their identities, but where these compounds were coming from has been a mystery. While some of these "unknown" compounds can be loosely traced to a possible industrial or natural source, the majority of these compounds have no known industrial or natural sources. Study authors Emma Teuten and Christopher Reddy found their pre-industrial HOC samples in a most unlikely place: whale oil from the Charles W. Morgan, one of the last whaling ships operating during the 19th and early 20th century. Built in 1841 in New Bedford, Mass., the ship traveled the world looking for whales, often on voyages of three years or more. The ship is now preserved and on public display at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Conn. The researchers received the whale oil sample from...
October 09, 2006
More Moties
If you are a bit incredulous about cosmic rays affecting climate then try Sahara dust storms affecting Atlantic hurricanes. Writing today (Oct. 10, 2006) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists discuss a surprising link between hurricane frequency in the Atlantic and thick clouds of dust that periodically rise from the Sahara Desert and blow off Africa's western coast. Lead author Amato Evan, a researcher at UW-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS), pored over 25 years of satellite data - dating from 1981 to 2006 - and noticed the correlation. During periods of intense hurricane activity, he found, dust was relatively scarce in the atmosphere. In years when stronger dust storms rose up, on the other hand, fewer hurricanes swept through the Atlantic. . . Evan decided to explore the correlations between dust and hurricane activity after CIMSS research scientist Christopher Velden and others suggested that dust storms moving over the tropical North Atlantic might be...
September 21, 2006
Wasteful Utility
I've liked that term and linked its source before. The metahistory that I think I see lurking in the foundations here is a tricky one, and a lot of effort will be required to bring it to light. We will have to unlearn assumptions about scarcity. At the scale of living things, making more copies of living things may be thermodynamically incredibly cheap. At the scale of post-Fordist mass production, making more material wealth may be much cheaper than we tend to assume. We will have to root out our presumptions about efficiency and optimality and recognize that many real-world systems whose results we depend upon, from the immune system to the brain to capitalist economics, depend upon inefficient effectiveness (productive non-optimality, wasteful utility). As noted in earlier posts it may not be only a matter of unlearning assumptions since humans do not have an intuitive grasp of some important physical systems, such as stocks and flows. That's one...
September 14, 2006
We're Unworthy
I've mentioned Lovelock here and there, noting his support for nuclear power and disdain for burning fossil fuels, and his contempt for agriculture, but haven't given him major attention. Brian Hayes reviews The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity and strikes just the note I would have sounded if I had his talent. The Revenge of Gaia: The title of James Lovelock's new book calls to mind the fourth or fifth sequel of some horror movie, one with a monster that rises from the sea to maul Tokyo or New York. This mental image is not altogether inappropriate. The book is in fact a sequel, following several earlier titles by the same author: Gaia, The Ages of Gaia, Healing Gaia, Homage to Gaia. Furthermore, it is a horror story, meant to frighten us. Tokyo and New York and hundreds of other cities are in grave danger, Lovelock warns. And, as in most horror flicks,...
September 07, 2006
Search Strings
Search Strings I like to Google search strings that were used to access this site to see what else is available on the subject. Today I Googled the string "mycorrhizal fungi for carbon circulation", which was used to access this old post here: Nitrogen Transport. It's a good post that featured this MSU news release: Digging in the dirt for life’s biochemical foundations. The referenced study is worth a second look, especially if you missed it a year ago or had forgotten about it. It seems a mighty feat for a microscopic fungus built from threadlike filaments. But collectively, these spindly mushroom relatives help move several billion tons of nutrients out of the soil and into plants each year. . . The fungus-plant partnership is one of the planet’s oldest and dates back more than 400 million years, when plants began to move out of the oceans and onto land. Plants trade a bit of their sunlight-made sugars for building...
September 03, 2006
Size Matters
I'm too busy to think and write but still read. There's been a cross media discussion about envy, spite and redistribution for a couple of days that was mildly interesting. Today Don Boudreaux gets to the meat of the nut. Status Won't Go Away. Alex, Arnold, Greg, and Megan each mention solid reasons for questioning the wisdom of reducing envy by taxing the rich and giving the proceeds to the poor. (Brad DeLong recently offered such a proposal.) . . Back in April the New Yorker magazine ran this interesting article by John Cassidy in which Cassidy used evidence of social hierarchies in some animal species to suggest that we humans should "redistribute" income. The specific evidence was that animals low on the totem pole were more likely to get sick and die than were animals in the same group but higher up the social pecking order. A few weeks later the New Yorker published this letter of mine...
August 16, 2006
Virtually Natural
A recent paper discusses how the number of per capita visits (NPV) to US national parks has trended lower for the past 16 years, and speculates that it has something to do with electronic reality supplanting experience au naturel. Go on home baby, watch it on TV. After 50 years of steady increase, per capita visits to US national parks have declined since 1988. This decline, coincident with the rise in electronic entertainment media, may represent a shift in recreation choices with broader implications for the value placed on biodiversity conservation and environmentally responsible behavior. We compared the decline in per capita visits with a set of indicators representing alternate recreation choices and constraints. The Spearman correlation analyses found this decline in NPV to be significantly negatively correlated with several electronic entertainment indicators: hours of television, video games, home movies, theatre attendance and internet use. There were also significant negative correlations with oil prices, foreign travel, and Appalachian Trail...
August 06, 2006
All Wet
Politicized activists never have a clue what they are talking about. They read some stuff written by bureaucrats and other activists - or by researchers who apparently gain their knowledge from the moon's rays while sitting atop their towers - and engage in an essentially content free discourse. . . . inefficient irrigation wastes more water than all the people of the world use (efficiently or inefficiently) for all their drinking, bathing, manufacturing, and industry. By a long shot. Worldwide, 70% of all water use is agricultural irrigation, according to the UN World Water Development Report. (22-23% is used for industry, and the remaining 7-8% is domestic use.) In the US, irrigation uses 80%, and in the dry western states 90%, according to the USDA. What's more, the UN's World Water Assessment Program says that almost 60% of irrigation water is wasted. (These and many other impressive statistics at International Water Management Institute and Earth Policy Institute.) Usage and...
July 07, 2006
Ups and Downs
This earth work in the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah was built in 1970 by Robert Smithson near the end of a cyclical drought period. The drought ended soon after and the earthwork spent the next 3 decades submerged. It became visible again in 1999 but has since partially submerged again due to heavy winter snows in the mountains that feed the lake. The decades long wet/dry cycles of the area have been going on for eons. Much of the western US is affected since a main driver of the cycle is similarly long period sea surface temperature cycles in the Pacific ocean. There are other cyclical variations such as the track of upper atmosphere winds. The cycle of sea surface temperatures and wind tracks interact to either amplify or counteract one another, providing great variability to resulting conditions. It can be very wet, very dry, or anywhere in between though the dominant pattern is decades...
June 14, 2006
Proceed As If
One of the hardest ideas to get across to my pasture management clients, those who hire me to teach them how to make their pastures as nice as mine, is that you must manage them as if they were good pastures even when they aren't yet good. You set up the system and stick to it even if you have nothing but bare dirt and weeds. They all want to do something grand, some massive change to create good pasture, and then begin good management. Their way can work but it's expensive and most often temporary. Usually they fail to do the necessary management, not really believing that it is important, and soon have nasty pastures again. Since they didn't create good pastures with good management they don't appreciate the power of the practice. I understand the problem, the desire to make massive change in one swell foop and begin a new life. Playing "small ball", sticking to the...
June 04, 2006
TOE
Secrets of the Aether In February 2002, Thomson was observing a peculiar setup of a Tesla coil and noticed what appeared to be two distinctly different manifestations of charges. Not finding an adequate explanation for why charge should take on two different forms, Thomson decided to re-examine the foundations of quantum physics. Within three weeks, he discovered the simple, empirically based equations, which produce the Unified Force Theory. "This new model of quantum existence does not change the laws of Quantum Mechanics, it merely changes our view of quantum structure," Thomson said. "I placed an ad on my website for someone to develop the mathematics for a Unified Field Theory based upon the Aether," said Bourassa. "David said he not only could do it, but already had." Since then, they joined together to form QADI, a registered 501(c)3 non-profit research organization devoted to the development and dissemination of the Aether Physics Model, published Secrets of the Aether, a book...
May 09, 2006
Heavy Nitrogen
Last summer a paper was published that examined mechanisms for nitrogen transport to plants by Mycorrhizal fungi. Many had assumed that the fungus would play a modest role. The team found, however, that the fungus acts more like a four-lane highway than a two-track country road in shuttling the nitrogen into plant roots. More than a third of the total nitrogen taken up by the plants came by way of the fungus. A new paper ups the amount, at least in some environments. It has long been known when soil nitrogen is in short supply, mycorrhizal fungi (those living symbiotically on the roots of plants) transfer nutrients to their host plants in exchange for plant sugars derived from photosynthesis, but the rates of transfer have never been quantified in the field. John and Erik Hobbie's study, published in the April 2006 issue of the journal Ecology, quantifies the role of mycorrhizal fungi in nitrogen cycling for the first time...
April 11, 2006
Distributed Cognition
If you rely primarily on RSS feeds, as I do, you can miss some interesting things at some sites. One site that requires actual visits is Arts & Letters Daily because the Nota Bene section isn't in the feed. The link for today points to Shakespeare Meets The Selfish Gene, an interview with Literary Darwinist Jonathan Gottschall, co-editor of The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, which argues that "an understanding of the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, psychology and culture can produce powerful new perspectives on storytelling". OK, not novel, and not highly regarded it seems, since it challenges so many beliefs about humans. All literary theory — Marxism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism — is ultimately based on a theory of human nature. A Darwinian literary approach takes its guidance from theories of human behavior and psychology that are now emerging in the evolutionary sciences. . . You know, Einstein once said that theory defines what we can...
March 10, 2006
Social Dunces
Assume that GHG emissions, land use changes that have affected albedo, solar output changes, celestial cycles and things we don't yet grok have been increasingly warming the earth and may in future warm it to an extent we would rather not endure for any number of reasons. What are the sensible responses people can make? A variety of hacks have been studied: "To really stop climate change in its tracks, you have to go to virtually zero emissions in the next two decades. "So the question is, is there a silver bullet that can help us to limit the amount of climate change?" Some such "silver bullets" aim to scrub carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, some to cool Earth directly by veiling it; others are yet more radical. While most are confined to computer models or scribbling on the backs of envelopes, a few have been tried cautiously. . . Consider the notion of shading the planet...
February 11, 2006
Wild Mind
From an academic perspective she was raised in a barn by wolves, and so lacks some institutional manners and graces, but some of her insights are treasures. [via Cafe Hayek] However, in the face of so many nasty surprises, arising in so many different circumstances and under so many differing regimes, we must be suspicious that some basic assumption or other is in error, most likely an assumption so much taken for granted that it escapes identification and skepticism. Macro-economic theory does contain such an assumption. It is the idea that national economies are useful and salient entities for understanding how economic life works and what its structure may be: that national economies and not some other entity provide the fundamental data for macro-economic analysis. This assumption is about four centuries old, coming down to us from the early mercantilist economists who happened to be preoccupied with the rivalries of European powers for trade and treasure during the period...
January 10, 2006
Simple Minded
When land is "preserved" by meddlers a common result is accelerated degradation. . . . in 1872 Ulysses Grant set aside Yellowstone as the first formal nature preserve in the world. More than 2 million acres, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. John Muir was pleased when he visited in 1885, noting that under the care of the Department of the Interior, Yellowstone was protected from "the blind, ruthless destruction that is going on in adjoining regions." . . . But Yellowstone was not preserved. On the contrary, it was altered beyond repair in a matter of years. By 1934, the park service acknowledged that "white-tailed deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone." . . . What they didn't say was that the park service was solely responsible for the disappearances. Park rangers had been shooting animals for decades, even though that was illegal under the Lacey Act of 1894. But...
December 23, 2005
Non-Optimality
I seem to do a bit of review at the end of the year, toting up pluses and minuses, noting trends and patterns - soul searching I suppose though it has more to do with mind than soul for me. I'm hardly unique in this, and the pattern that emerges seems to be that it is the urges of others to do this sort of thing that infects me with something analogous. This year's trigger is Chris Anderson's Q and A - The Probabilistic Age. [via Tyler] Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing? A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale. Q: Huh? A: Exactly. Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that...
December 12, 2005
Hide The Pea
All of the convoluted biofuel hustles and many of the bio-sequestration hustles are just shell games that capture some co2 here and release it there. This fools regulators but not mother nature. For example consider this pataphysical device. [via Green Car Congress] Biological carbon sequestration, in particular engineered photosynthesis systems, offers advantages as a viable near-to-intermediate term solution for reduced carbon emissions in the energy sector. Such systems could provide a viable option for “other-than-ocean” sequestration for smaller fossil generation units located in the midwest. Photosynthetic (or “natural” sequestration) systems produce usable byproducts (biomass). . . An engineered photosynthesis system could be placed at the source of the emissions to allow measurement and verification of the system effects, rather than being far removed from the emissions source, as is the case with forest-based and ocean-based natural sinks. The byproducts of an engineered system, biomass, could be used as a fuel, fertilizer, feedstock, or source of hydrogen. And even though...
December 03, 2005
Winter Is Coming
There seems to have been an up tick in metaphysical subjects in the news as winter deepens. As the sun sinks lower in the sky, in some northerly places threatening to disappear entirely, a vague uneasiness spreads across the land. Animals scurry about making preparations for a siege, and people do something not all that different. What do they fear? It seems to be more than just cold weather and diminished sunlight. People know that spring will come again in time, that the sun isn't really disappearing never to return, still there is depression that exceeds causes. Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD it is called by some, an explained in various ways amenable to symptomatic relief with light therapy and such. In God isn't big enough for some people Umberto Eco reaches into the idea bag to fish for older explanations. Father Christmas means one thing to children: presents. He has no connection with the original St Nicholas, who performed...
November 30, 2005
Special Sauce
Eccentrics. One sandwich short of a picnic. A screw loose. History is littered with sometimes charming enthusiasts who go a bit over the top, following a line of reasoning beyond the pale, shocking, outraging or just titillating more sober and cautious types. Sometimes they are vindicated as knowledge increases over time and their musings are shown to have been prescient. Hannes Alfven, 1970 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, is one of my favorite examples of this. for much of his career Alfven's ideas were dismissed or treated with condescension. He was often forced to publish his papers in obscure journals; and his work was continuously disputed for many years by the most renowned senior scientist in space physics, the British-American geophysicist Sydney Chapman. Even among physicists today there is little awareness of Alfven's many contributions to fields of physics where his ideas are used without recognition of who conceived them. This isn't always or even often the outcome. We...
November 19, 2005
Two Minds
Norm, like many others, is hung up about religion. He posts quite often on religious subjects and has a running conflict with religious people. It's a common hobby and we've heard a lot of it lately due to ID, Islam and American evangelicals in the news and in government. You know those lines from Tom Lehrer's 'Folk Song Army'? Though he [Franco] may have won all the battles, We had all the good songs. I think of them more or less whenever I see the religious having a go at those of us who aren't. We seem, at least, to have the better arguments. hmmm, I find both of Norm's assertions questionable. Never could stand folk music since it was so transparently phony - city brats and trustafarians pretending to be jest folks. Besides, it wasn't good music for the most part. It wasn't music at all by some definitions. The exception of sorts is Dylan, but he wasn't...
October 16, 2005
Nonsense Equations
Norm links to this millenarian lament by Bryan Appleyard. Norm is agnostic on the claims, leaning a bit towards the skeptical but open to the general idea. I think that Norm should cheer up a bit since Appleyard is merely confused. He is one of many that have a vision problem, they have their future-scopes wrong way round and so things in the distance aren't magnified and more visible as if they were nearer, they are reduced and less visible as if they were farther away. See dnE ehT ... toN for a discussion of this intellectual defect from a couple of winters ago. The core argument of that old post applies here too and is worth repeating. Crichton blames Frank Drake for fathering this recent line of opportunistic science poseurs because of his Ozma project and the false but exciting signal from space he detected and the subsequent organization of the SETI conference. His original sin was the...
October 12, 2005
Lagomorpha Fear
Jon points to the cover story for the new issue of Conservation In Practice, The Look of Success, which surveys the state of wolf reintroduction projects in the western US. The American West is getting wild again. Half a century after the wolf was dynamited in its den, hunted, trapped, and poisoned out of the West, it has reclaimed the northern Rockies. This is one of the fastest recoveries of an endangered species on record, and few expected so many wolves would come back so quickly. The return of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) has become one of the most controversial wildlife issues in the U.S. While people in Alaska and the northern Midwest have long lived with wolves, the wolves were gone for so long in the West that their return to daily life has been a shock. This is partly because wolves touch something very deep in the reservoir of human emotion—a depth to which few other...
October 11, 2005
Pathfinders
There's another interesting paper in the Ecology & Society Issue In Progress. This one deals with the difficulties faced by transdisciplinary teams seeking to apply complex systems thinking to socio-ecological problems. Understanding the relationship between people and the environment requires that researchers on the ground simultaneously navigate multiple world views (Gadgil et al. 2003) and complex social-ecological systems (Scheffer et al. 2001, Berkes et al. 2003) characterized by cross-scale interactions, nonlinear feedback, and uncertainty (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Transdisciplinarity is often touted as the answer to the difficulties involved in understanding such systems. . . There is, however, a lack of guidance and experience in adopting integrated approaches involving different world views, and few academic curricula address these challenges. In reality, this type of complex systems research allows for different conceptual and practical approaches, which can be confusing and disconcerting to researchers. . . By comparing two case studies from Peru and South Africa, where community-level assessments were conducted...
October 04, 2005
Regular Rent
One of the smarmier arguments used by pseudo-environmentalists to justify their socio-economic predations is that large multi-national corporations want more regulations, whether they make any sense or not, because it improves their competitive position in all markets and yields economies of scale. Why would companies want more regulation? Much of it is a desire for consistency, a "level playing field." Companies doing business in both more-regulated and less-regulated areas often find that meeting multiple rules can be costly. Greater regulation can end up being less of an issue than diverse regulation. This is one of the reasons that even the CEO of Duke Energy called for federal carbon taxes -- so as to avoid 50 different state tax schemes. Collusion between large corporations and governments is nothing new, it's just garden variety rent-seeking - "The pursuit of government policies or programs that transfer income to one person or group at the expense of others." Carbon taxes won't help anyone...
September 26, 2005
Big Muddy
While we have rivers on our minds see this Ecology & Society special feature article Compromised Rivers: Understanding Historical Human Impacts on Rivers in the Context of Restoration. Abstract A river that preserves a simplified and attractive form may nevertheless have lost function. Loss of function in these rivers can occur because hydrologic and geomorphic processes no longer create and maintain the habitat and natural disturbance regimes necessary for ecosystem integrity. Recognition of compromised river function is particularly important in the context of river restoration, in which the public perception of a river’s condition often drives the decision to undertake restoration as well as the decision about what type of restoration should be attempted. Determining the degree to which a river has been altered from its reference condition requires a knowledge of historical land use and the associated effects on rivers. Rivers of the Front Range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains in the United States are used to illustrate...
June 19, 2005
Still Wrong
Todd Zywicki demonstrates just how confused political pundits are about climate issues. Ellen Goodman writes today: The only way to justify doing nothing about global warming now is to deliberately muddle the science. Is it true that the only way to "justify doing nothing about global warming now is to deliberately muddle the science"? I think the answer is quite plainly "no." Even if it is true that global warming is occurring, this is only the first of many questions regarding whether we can justify doing nothing about global warming. Who on earth is doing nothing? This is the intellectually bankrupt accusation of authoritarian anti-market advocates but it is utterly false. But that's not the only defect in Goodman's claims or Zywicki's refutation of them. Doing "something" isn't helpful and may in fact be worse in every way than doing "nothing" because we don't understand the climate system well enough to predict its behavior or alter the behavior in...
June 08, 2005
Nitrogen Transport
One of the themes discussed many times here is that life is a group effort. An often discussed aspect of this is that soil isn't a granular medium suffused with chemicals, it is alive and must be alive to function. Many people have what can be described as a hydroponic metaphor for life. They think of plants dangling naked roots into circulating water doped with mineral salts. All that is needed to grow plants in this metaphor is light. This simple metaphor is then applied to reality in the field, imagining soil as simply being something plant roots can grasp so they don't fall over in the wind, while soil moisture circulates the nutrients. How? There are no pipes and pumps in the soil to do this circulation. Much of the time soil is far too dry to support any such metaphor. Several earlier posts 1,2,3 discussed Vesicular Arbuscular Mycorrhizal fungi (VAM, or just AM) for its role in...
June 04, 2005
Born Again
Jon Christensen has an interesting article in the April-June issue of Conservation in Practice that comments on the Damascene conversion of some ecologists, including perennial Baba Yaga paul Ehrlich, to a more informed and reasoned understanding of natural systems. The key was getting a clue about economics. “If someone had told me in 1970 that I would be close friends with a bunch of economists, I would have thought they were out of their minds,” says Ehrlich. “Economists seemed like the enemies.” . . If you step back for a moment, this isn’t so strange. After all, both disciplines are concerned about the same place. “Eco” comes from the Greek word “oikos,” meaning house. To get our house in order will require better accounting on both sides of the equation: ecology and economics. What’s strange is why it took so long for them to talk to each other. With a more realistic understanding of economics it became possible for...
June 01, 2005
Anthropomorphic Myths
The bad science and worse policy noted in Mystified Obscurity resulting from constructivist insights which ignore reality is pervasive and seemingly growing worse. Looked at another way it isn't getting worse so much as failing to get better though old myths (creationism, etc. etc.) are refuted. Other myths take their places. One of the more worrisome myths is that animals are in some way like humans and so should be treated like humans. This isn't possible in even a trivial sense but that doesn't prevent trivial policies from being pursued in the name of this myth. Where animals were seen as "agricultural products", now they are seen as creatures with feelings. This has been accepted by the European Union, which has put a definition of sentience in its animal welfare legislation: "A sentient animal is one for whom feelings matter." In deciding that they are sentient and have feelings, science has blurred the line between "them" and "us" even...
April 13, 2005
Cargo Cults
In Taking 'Harm' Out of 'Harmony with Nature' Don Boudreaux rebuts criticism of his earlier post Living in Harmony with Nature, citing Ologies and Urgies as one of the critical responses. These objections fall into three overlapping camps: pre-industrial Europeans didn’t live so harmoniously with nature; . . . not all that we moderns do is harmonious with nature. . . modern humans’ footprint on nature is extensive. . . This misses the central criticism stated in Ologies and Urgies; the failure to grasp the advanced science of pre-industrial societies, especially the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas used in his examples. The concluding graf of that post sums up. Boudreaux's concluding point - It is science – rational thought, skepticism, critical inquiry – that furthers greater harmony with nature - is true, but that means recognizing the science of the past and its accomplishments. They were natural philosophers too and have some things to teach us. Their soil science,...
March 30, 2005
Shapeless Futures
An example of the type of error made by those who don't have an accurate and useful understanding of the world, those who don't understand the sources of social wisdom or the disordering effects of design, comes from this essay, Shaping the Future. [via BaySense] In everyday life, responsible people look out for the long term despite the needs of the here and now: we do homework, we save for retirement, we take out insurance. The same principles should surely apply to society as a whole. But how can leaders weigh the present against the future? How can they avoid being paralyzed by scientific uncertainty? This is an example of the mistake noted in Disordered by Design. The very act of framing issues or describing problems as “social” entails thinking of society (usually in the form of a country) as the relevant unit upon which analysis is to be directed – as the relevant unit upon which corrective action...
March 30, 2005
Independent Cacophony
“It is better to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” – Keynes. "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson Keynes was wrong in this as in so much else. Though it may be better for an individual to go along and get along, even if it means failure, the group does poorly. The problems noted in the earlier post Unanimous Fallacies that resulted in social collapse, and the problems noted in Situation Normal that lead to bad governance, result from this very human but very mistaken fallacy. In addition to the mistakes individuals make when they fail to heed Emerson's advice and choose the more cowardly Keynesian approach instead, groups composed of such degraded individuals seek to dominate...
March 28, 2005
Disordered by Design
A previous post, Perpetual Poverty, dismissed the muddled ideas of Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty and cited William Easterly's Wapo article rather than repeat the debunking of Sachs' old fashioned ideas. Sachs has replied to that Easterly article with an ad hominem attack: William Easterly, who reviewed my book The End of Poverty (Book World, March 13), is notorious as the cheerleader for "can't-do" economics... Easterly's simplistic approach fits well with many conservatives in Washington, who would rather blame the poor than help them. Somehow the world's poorest people are made out to be our enemy. To which Easterly responded: It's a shame that Jeffrey Sachs chose ad hominem attacks over intellectual debate. His colorful vitriol didn't leave him room to answer the key questions. Why didn't aid officials implement his easy solutions to world poverty already, after half a century of foreign aid? How will his top-down, many-pronged solutions conceived in New York get feedback from the...
March 19, 2005
Western Squick
True Knowledge Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for their selves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything. All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots...
March 01, 2005
Muddled Nonsense
It hasn't been a focus of this blog, but here and there a comment was dropped, usually tangential or peripheral to another discussion, that I had been an early opponent of war as a sensible response to terrorism. It had two apparent flaws: it wouldn't reduce terrorism and wasn't an appropriate response in any event. So what is an appropriate response? In the broadest possible terms the need is for fewer angry people, but that's not a handy prescription that anyone can run to the pharmacy with and get relief. It a 10,000 foot view of society from a game theoretic perspective that provides a general goal and no help at all with policy. Also, reality rears its ugly head and makes a mess of things. So long as large parts of the world, especially old Europe as well as significant bits of the US, approved of terrorism and would engage in it themselves, at least in theory, there...
February 27, 2005
Opportunity Knocks
One of the least savory parts of the climate change business is that it is a business, and so information is concealed, distorted, metaphored and hustled as opportunists try to cash in. Earlier posts pointed out how this has affected the scientific community, turning scientists into advocates for pet projects rather than honest brokers able to advise society, but the same is obviously true of private sector efforts. This isn't a problem to be solved - it isn't solvable since the dynamics are identical whatever the sources of funding and however status is measured - but it means that boosterism is always suspect and usually unhelpful. Activists, as ever, are part of the problem rather than the solution. For example: Joel Makower is a widely respected writer and consultant on issues of sustainable business, clean technology and green markets. His essays on environmental business and technology are a regular feature of Sustainability Sundays. Take it away, Joel: For the...
February 25, 2005
Agree To Disagree
The efforts to subvert society using ICT noted in the earlier post Extremists, and noted again recently in Mobocracy, use traditional marketing techniques not very different than are used in legacy media. It is a broadcast model which attempts to persuade and frighten mobs to get them to give money, vote and riot at set times and places to gain power. There is another, more insidious, method of subverting society that claims legitimacy because it contrasts with the marketing approach. It uses a distorted version of what Robert Conquest called "the Periclean need for debate", the exchange of views prior to making decisions, the truly valuable part of democracy that results in consensual rule. This second method of subversion variously calls itself deliberative democracy and collective rationality, but it could as easily be called brain washing, as it was in the past. For example: A random, representative sample is first polled on the targeted issues. After this baseline poll,...
February 15, 2005
Far Too Specific
This post at Sphere, discussing an instance of the less than exciting results of the endangered species act (ESA), provides another example of the muddled attitudes we have towards environmental management, discussed at length in Mama's Rules. [via The Uneasy Chair] We’ve learned that when we try to maximize production of a single variable from a complex system, we destabilize the system. Whether the cherished output is codfish, board feet of timber, or animal-unit-months of livestock forage, the result tends to be a system crash. In theory, an obsessive effort to maximize output of an endangered species would be no different. The base idea of the ESA is mistaken, is harmful to the very species it seeks to preserve, because it fails to consider the complexity of natural systems, and focuses on spurious indicators of system health. It isn't that we don't already have a body of research and practice that fully embraces these more modern ideas, it's that...
February 13, 2005
Creating Chaos
One of the subjects that has been getting more attention lately as a consequence of the tsunami is the effectiveness of aid for both victims of natural disaster and chronic socio-economic failure. The idea of massive aid fueled by redistributive policies that played out so badly in the past few decades is toast, burned to a crisp by those failures. We care when people suffer and want to help, so it is worth thinking about why those efforts failed and whether there are more useful responses. This article speaks to the issue: ... the tsunami was a simple act of nature. It bubbled up from the sea, and laid waste to half a dozen countries; it had nothing to do with human greed or cowardice or corruption. And so westerners responded generously, confident that an uncomplicated, unpolitical disaster could be swiftly remedied with charity. This was a return to a simple vision of disasters, one that has been mostly...
February 05, 2005
Mama's Rules
The recent post Science Solipsism had some fun at the expense of William Bond of the University of Cape Town and his colleagues who said: In a fire-free world, forest cover would double at the expense of grasslands and savannas... Fire is more than an unnecessary evil... Perhaps this article from last fall's Conservation In Practice, Burned, by William deBuys can illuminate just how absurd the ideas of Bond et. al. are in truth. Consider for a moment the present condition of the east slope of the Jemez range: the Dome Fire (1996) adjoins the La Mesa Fire (1977), which adjoins the Cerro Grande Fire (2000), which adjoins the Oso Complex Fire (1998). The cumulative effect of these powerful fires, amplified by additional stand-changing burns on the southern slopes of the Jemez in the 1970s, has been to incinerate most of the continuous belt of ponderosa pine that used to wrap around the mountains. Those who feed on irony...
January 02, 2005
Neither/Nor
In this column David Brooks deflates some inflated views. The naturalists hold up nature as the spiritual tonic to our vulgar modern world. They urge us to break down the barriers that alienate us from nature. Live simply and imbibe nature's wisdom. "Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds," Thoreau wrote. Nature doesn't seem much like a nurse or friend this week, and when Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of combat. In short, this week images of something dark and unmerciful were thrust onto a culture that is by temperament upbeat and romantic. In the newspaper essays and television commentaries reflecting upon it all, there would often...
November 16, 2004
More Coopetition
The previous post Natural Coopetition attempted to clarify human behavior a bit and touched on a number of issues that have since been explored in more depth. One that is worth further inquiry is the complementary roles of Competition and Cooperation. Free-market competition is often described as “cutthroat” and “wasteful.” “Dog-eat-dog” rivalries are fueled by “greedy self-interests” operating according to “the law of the jungle” in which “survival of the fittest” is the only rule. In contrast, government regulation is said to have the potential to promote genuine cooperation in which citizens “pull together” to advance the common good. On the rhetorical battlefield, “competition” is too often out-gunned by “cooperation.” But those who deplore free-market competition simply do not understand it. Competitive markets excel at promoting cooperation. Indeed, to succeed in the market requires great cooperative skills... A mistake made by those who condemn competitive capitalism is to assume that competition and cooperation are two alternative means of achieving...
October 10, 2004
Micro Macro
A theme of sorts that can be abstracted from earlier posts is the foolish and destructive behavior of activists animated by fear of the future. Some of the attributes shared by these activists are pessimism and myopia. They approach life and thought with expectations of doom and seek evidence to justify their emotional expectations. They share social mind space with a motley band of brothers oppressed by millenarian type fantasies. Though primarily associated with religious sects millenarian thinking aptly describes the whole brotherhood: [M]illenarian ideas have qualities which makes them tend to form the nuclei of narrative communities. The believers in the millenarian story have a role to play in the story, and so to accept the story is to feel that one is, or should be, part of the community of believers. Non-believers are not part of the community. But, in such situations, there is a natural tendency to think that everyone who is not part of the...
October 01, 2004
Extremists
An earlier post, Situation Normal, pointed out the predatory behavior of activists seeking to dominate society. Most herd effects in society are of small importance. They result in fads that reward products and there is a thriving industry seeking to trigger cascades for commercial gain. Viral marketing, stealth viral marketing, and advertising in general are less concerned with good decision making based on product qualities than they are in achieving the tipping point where their product becomes dominant whether it is good or not. But these are the same tactics and objectives used by activists seeking to dominate governance, and that is of much greater significance to society. Many see increases in the speed and scale of networks due to technological advance as a golden opportunity to trick societies into making bad decisions and are working feverishly to develop mechanisms to do so. A collection of rants by this sort of authoritarian activist has conveniently been assembled, EXtreme Democracy....
August 16, 2004
Prosociality
One of the more dissapointing aspects of social and cultural events in past years has been the mechanical view of human society - the steam age, heavy metal, cybernetic interpretation of the world. With every real world event we see a rash of articles claiming that this event supports their steam age views. Here's one. I'm almost a disruption-fetishist myself (even if I'm at risk) just because of how they shake-up human relations, just because they make visible so many invisible relationships, flows and issues. And I agree with you collective action and commons-sharing is always fascinating to watch, and even more amazing to experience first hand. NYers talk a lot about this post September 11th, i.e. how they met neighbours for the first time; how they still have block-parties as a result of this powerful community-forming event. As you note, it's sad when this is an anomaly versus the norm. American society didn't used to be this way;...
July 24, 2004
So Excited!
This essay, Lessons from the Anthill by Jason Lefkowitz, somewhat like the one in the previous post, attempts to advance paleo-collectivist views citing distorted examples from insect and human behaviors. It's interesting to reflect on the ways that evolution has shaped different species. Consider, if you will, the lowly ant. It is hard to imagine a creature that functions differently from a human being. The story of human progress has been shaped dramatically by the actions of singular individuals, people who drive society in a new direction through force of arms, intellect, or will. By contrast, ants have evolved into a purely collectivist species; instead of free will, which allows individuals to control the destiny of the group, they operate through fixed behavior patterns. On their own, each ant's behavior is relatively useless, but when swarms of ants come together, the patterns optimize naturally and allow them to accomplish tasks that should be far beyond their reach. To the...
July 16, 2004
All The Way
Here's another example of the confusions noted in Extended Senses; Nova Spivack's blog post/essay Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind [via Future Now, again] I believe that the Internet (the hardware) is already evolving into a distributed global brain, and its ongoing activity (the software, humans and data) represents the cognitive process of an increasingly intelligent global mind. This global mind is not centrally organized or controlled, rather it is a bottom-up, emergent, self-organizing phenomenon formed from flows of trillions of information-processing events comprised of billions of independent information processors... Although we created it, the Internet is already far beyond our control or comprehension - it surrounds us and penetrates our world - it is inside our buildings, our tools, our vehicles, and it connects us together and modulates our interactions. As this process continues and the human body and biology begins to be networked into this system we will literally become part of this network...
November 30, 2003
Whitmanesque Multitudes
This opinion piece by pollster Daniel Yankelovich in NAS Issues is remarkable for its complete lack of connection with current realities and trends. His subject is the 'science divide', a large and growing gap between scientists and the public. Science has reached greater heights of sophistication and productivity, while the gap between science and public life has grown ever larger and more dangerous, to an extent that now poses a serious threat to our future. We need to understand the causes of the divide between science and society and to explore ways of narrowing the gap so that the voice of science can exert a more direct and constructive influence on the policy decisions that shape our future. It seems odd to say but Yankelovich doesn't seem to be paying attention to social trends. I suspect this is a classic example of echo chamber group think, that Yankelovich lives in a small world of like-minded people and studiously ignores...
November 01, 2003
Smokey Terror
When you cross from state forest to federal forest the boundary is obvious since you leave healthy forest and enter a realm of sickness and overpopulation devoid of wildlife except for insects.
October 22, 2003
Natural Coopetition
Hipbone recommends The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All by Tom Atlee. In a nutshell, Tom offers us a persuasive account of what we can do, and how, to change our world -- not for the better as we as individuals might define it, but as we might define it if we listened to each other closely enough to arrived at mutual understanding. That seems to be an attractive idea. Surely listening to each other closely is a highly desirable behavior. But there is a serious defect lurking in Hipbone's statement and Atlee's book, the idea that the result of close attention to one another will be mutual understanding that will somehow allow us to "create a world that works for all". All evidence indicates that is the least likely result absent a very powerful authority that can coerce society. When people listen closely to one another they may reach mutual understanding but...
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