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
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