Category: Energy/Environment

Geoengineering for the Timid

(p. A15) In 2012, a man named Russ George, working with the Haida people of British Columbia, tried an experiment. From the back of a rusty fishing vessel he spread 120 tons of iron-rich dust on the surface of the North Pacific Ocean. The result was a bloom of plankton, visible by satellite–and a quadrupling of the salmon catch along the coast of the Northeast Pacific. This may or may not have been a coincidence, but it was the intended result.
. . .
Far from being thanked, Mr. George was pilloried for failing to get permission for this rogue “geoengineering” gesture. A second experiment by German scientists in the Antarctic Ocean was stopped by the German government under pressure from environmentalists. A United Nations treaty–the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution–was changed to forbid “any activity undertaken by humans with the principal intention of stimulating primary productivity in the oceans.” This seems a strangely defeatist prohibition, given that a more productive ocean would not only feed more people (and whales) but also sequester more carbon dioxide from the air, through photosynthesis by plankton, potentially providing a self-financing way to prevent possible future climate change.
. . .
. . . Mr. Biello is a writer from Scientific American and is impeccably sympathetic to the environmental movement. The result is a book that explores an intriguing topic but lacks a hard edge or even a clear message.
. . .
Just in the choice of stories to tell, though, the book leans toward the notion that the solution to our environmental challenges will come from technology, and in that sense it is most welcome. Technical fixes are anathema to many environmentalists, but it has been obvious for some time now that innovation and adaptation are the way we will reverse or cope with pollution, habitat loss and climate change. By contrast, a retreat to some golden age of simpler lives more dependent on organic and natural resources is neither possible nor likely to be good for nature: Seven billion people going back to nature would leave nature in a parlous state. The way we will save the planet is by high-tech invention and prosperity, not low-tech simplification and asceticism.

For the full review, see:
Matt Ridley. “BOOKSHELF; Ruling Over Our Dominion; We are living in the Anthropocene: an era when human beings have changed the planet in ways that will be obvious in the geological record.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Nov. 17, 2016): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 16, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Biello, David. The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age. New York: Scribner, 2016.

Large Indian Tribes Hurt by Obama Regulations on Coal

(p. 1) . . . some of the largest tribes in the United States derive their budgets from the very fossil fuels that Mr. Trump has pledged to promote, including the Navajo in the Southwest and the Osage in Oklahoma, as well as smaller tribes like the Southern Ute in Colorado. And the Crow are among several Indian nations looking to the president’s promises to nix Obama-era coal rules, pull back on regulations, or approve new oil and gas wells to help them lift their economies and wrest control (p. 14) from a federal bureaucracy they have often seen as burdensome.
The president’s executive order on Tuesday [March 28, 2017], which called for a rollback of President Barack Obama’s climate change rules, is a step toward some of these goals.
At the tribes’ side is Ryan Zinke, who as the new interior secretary is charged with protecting and managing Indian lands, which hold an estimated 30 percent of the nation’s coal reserves west of the Mississippi and 20 percent of known oil and gas reserves in the United States.
In a recent interview, Mr. Zinke noted that he was once adopted into the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes and said he would help native nations get fossil fuels to market.
“We have not been a good partner in this,” he said. “The amount of bureaucracy and paperwork and stalling in many ways has created great hardship on some of the poorest tribes.
“A war on coal is a war on the Crow people,” he continued. “President Trump has promised to end the war.”

For the full story, see:
JULIE TURKEWITZ. “Tribes That Live Off Coal Hold Tight to Trump’s Promises.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., APRIL 2, 2017): 1 & 14.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 1, 2017, and has the title “Tribes That Live Off Coal Hold Tight to Trump’s Promises.”)

Rain and Snow End California Drought

(p. A18) After six years of a prolonged drought in California, it is all but over. On Friday [April 7, 2017], Gov. Jerry Brown ended the drought emergency for the vast majority of the state. The drought had reduced Folsom Lake, a major reservoir in Northern California, to less than a third of its capacity in 2015, and all but wiped out the Sierra Nevada snowpack.
. . .
But the state’s hydrologic picture brightened significantly beginning in October 2016, when a series of massive storms drenched Northern California. The rain and snow continued through the winter, swelling major reservoirs to the point that officials were forced to make releases.
Meanwhile, the state’s snowpack made an impressive recovery. As of Friday, the water content in the state’s snowpack was about 160 percent of what is considered normal for this time of year. By comparison, the snowpack was reported as about 5 percent of average the day Mr. Brown stood on the barren field and ordered mandatory water conservation.

For the full story, see:
MATT STEVENS. “Drenched by Winter Rain, California Is Told ‘Drought’s Over’.” The New York Times (Sat., APRIL 8, 2017): A18.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 7, 2017, and has the title “California, Drenched by Winter Rain, Is Told ‘Drought’s Over’.”)

Geoengineering Could Cheaply and Quickly Counter Global Warming

(p. B1) Last month, scholars from the physical and social sciences who are interested in climate change gathered in Washington to discuss approaches like cooling the planet by shooting aerosols into the stratosphere or whitening clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, which may prove indispensable to prevent the disastrous consequences of warming.
Aerosols could be loaded into military jets, to be sprayed into the atmosphere at (p. B4) high altitude. Clouds at sea could be made more reflective by spraying them with a fine saline mist, drawn from the ocean.
. . .
. . . , geoengineering needs to be addressed not as science fiction, but as a potential part of the future just a few decades down the road.
“Today it is still a taboo, but it is a taboo that is crumbling,” said David Keith, a noted Harvard physicist who was an organizer of the conclave.
. . .
Geoengineering would be cheap enough that even a middle-income country could deploy it unilaterally. Some scientists have estimated that solar radiation management could cool the earth quickly for as little as $5 billion per year or so.

For the full commentary, see:
Porter, Eduardo. “ECONOMIC SCENE; To Curb Global Warming, Science Fiction May Become Fact.” The New York Times (Weds., APRIL 5, 2017): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 4, 2017, and has the title “ECONOMIC SCENE; To Curb Global Warming, Science Fiction May Become Fact.”)

Lower Ivory Prices Reduce Incentives to Poach Elephants

(p. A9) NAIROBI, Kenya — Finally, there’s some good news for elephants.
The price of ivory in China, the world’s biggest market for elephant tusks, has fallen sharply, which may spell a reprieve from the intense poaching of the past decade.
According to a report released on Wednesday [March 29, 2017] by Save the Elephants, a respected wildlife group in Kenya, the price of ivory is less than half of what it was just three years ago, showing that demand is plummeting.

For the full commentary, see:
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. “Ivory Prices May Mean a Reprieve for Elephants.” The New York Times (Thurs., March 30, 2017): A9.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 29, 2017, and has the title “Elephants Get a Reprieve as Price of Ivory Falls.”)

Since 1880 North America Is Warmer by One and a Half Degrees Fahrenheit

(p. A23) Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.

For the full commentary, see:
Stephens, Bret. “Climate of Complete Certainty.” The New York Times (Sat., APRIL 29, 2017): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 28, 2017.)

Justified Species Extinction

(p. A1) The death toll from diseases carried by mosquitoes is so huge that scientists are working on a radical idea. Why not eradicate them?
Mosquitoes kill more humans than any other animal and were linked to roughly 500,000 deaths in 2015, mostly from malaria. For more than a century, humans have used bed nets, screens and insecticides as weapons, but mosquitoes keep coming back. They are now carrying viruses like Zika and dengue to new parts of the world.
Powerful new gene-editing technologies could allow scientists to program mosquito populations to gradually shrink and die off. Some efforts have gained enough momentum that the possibility of mosquito-species eradication seems tantalizingly real.
“I think it is our moral duty to eliminate this mosquito,” entomologist Zach Adelman says about Aedes aegypti, a species carried afar over centuries by ships from sub-Saharan Africa.
. . .
(p. A8) Purposely engineering a species into extinction–or just diminishing it–is fraught with quandaries. Scientists must weigh the potential impact of removing a species on the environment and food chain. It will take years of more research, testing and regulatory scrutiny before most genetically altered mosquitoes can be released into the wild. And the strategy might not work.
Wiping a species off the face of the earth is “an unfortunate thing to have to do,” says Gregory Kaebnick, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y.
He says humans shouldn’t force a species into extinction to meet their own preferences. “We ought to try not to do it,” says Mr. Kaebnick. One justification, he says, would be to avert a serious public-health threat.

For the full story, see:
BETSY MCKAY. “A World with No Mosquitoes.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 3, 2016): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 2, 2016, and has the title “Mosquitoes Are Deadly, So Why Not Kill Them All?”)

Nano-Enhanced Fabrics Can Clean Themselves

(p. D3) Scientists in Australia, one of the sunniest places on the planet, have discovered a way to rid clothes of stubborn stains by exposing them to sunlight, potentially replacing doing the laundry.
Working in a laboratory, the researchers embedded minute flecks of silver and copper–invisible to the naked eye–within cotton fabric. When exposed to light, the tiny metal particles, or nanostructures, released bursts of energy that degraded any organic matter on the fabric in as little as six minutes, said Rajesh Ramanathan, a postdoctoral fellow at RMIT University, in Melbourne.
The development, reported recently in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces, represents an early stage of research into nano-enhanced fabrics that have the ability to clean themselves, Dr. Ramanathan said. The tiny metal particles don’t change the look or feel of the fabric. They also stay on the surface of the garment even when it is rinsed in water, meaning they can be used over and over on new grime, he said.

For the full story, see:
RACHEL PANNETT. “An End to Laundry? The Promise of Self-Cleaning Fabric.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 26, 2016): D3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 25, 2016.)

The academic article describing the self-cleaning fabric, is:
Anderson, Samuel R., Mahsa Mohammadtaheri, Dipesh Kumar, Anthony P. O’Mullane, Matthew R. Field, Rajesh Ramanathan, and Vipul Bansal. “Robust Nanostructured Silver and Copper Fabrics with Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance Property for Effective Visible Light Induced Reductive Catalysis.” Advanced Materials Interfaces 3, no. 6 (2016): 1-8.

U.S. Science Agencies Omit Margin of Error in Warming Stats

(p. A13) The year 2016 was the warmest ever recorded–so claimed two U.S. agencies, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Except it wasn’t, according to the agencies’ own measures of statistical uncertainty.
Such fudge is of fairly recent vintage. Leaving any discussion of the uncertainty interval out of press releases only became the norm in the second year of the Obama administration. Back when he was presenting the 2008 numbers, NASA’s James Hansen, no slouch in raising climate alarms, nevertheless made a point of being quoted saying such annual rankings can be “misleading because the difference in temperature between one year and another is often less than the uncertainty in the global average.”
Statisticians wouldn’t go through the trouble of assigning an uncertainty value unless it meant something. Two measurements separated by less than the margin of error are the same. And yet NASA’s Goddard Institute, now under Mr. Hansen’s successor Gavin Schmidt, put out a release declaring 2014 the “warmest year in the modern record” when it was statistically indistinguishable from 2005 and 2010.
. . .
. . . other countries like the U.K. and Japan also do sophisticated monitoring and end up with findings roughly similar to the findings of U.S. agencies, yet they don’t feel the need to lie about it. For instance, the U.K. Met Office headlined its 2016 report “one of the warmest two years on record.” A reader only had to progress to the third paragraph to discover that the difference over 2015 was one-tenth the margin of error.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “Change Would Be Healthy at U.S. Climate Agencies; In the Obama era, it was routine for press releases to avoid mentioning any margin of error..” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Feb. 4, 2017): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Two Die from Listeria in Artisanal Cheese

(p. A19) Two people have died following an outbreak of listeria linked to a popular artisanal raw milk cheese made in upstate New York, the authorities said this week.
The deaths occurred in Vermont and Connecticut, local officials said. Four other people in New York and Florida reported feeling sick after eating Ouleout, the artisanal cheese, which is produced by Vulto Creamery in Walton, N.Y.
. . .
Ouleout has been celebrated across the United States as much for its unusual back story as for its flavor: It was created by Jos Vulto, a Dutch artist linked to the Museum of Modern Art, who started making cheese in his apartment and aging it under a sidewalk in Brooklyn.
. . .
Mr. Vulto came to the United States from the Netherlands in 1990, according to several media outlets specializing in cheese. He spent two years as an artist-in-residence at P.S. 1 in Queens, a contemporary art institution affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He specialized in crafting abstract installations made of metal.
His specialty involved “wrapping empty buildings in cloth and building contained fires of sawdust and hay inside,” according to Culture Cheese Mag. When the building started to emit smoke, the cloth absorbed an imprint of the building. Mr. Vulto called the technique “rooking,” a play on the Dutch word for smoke.
In 2008, Mr. Vulto switched to cheese making, reportedly inspired by the stink caused by a carton of soured milk in his refrigerator. He began creating rudimentary cheese in his apartment, and gradually mastered the art by making and remaking new batches and studying techniques.

For the full story, see:
KIMIKO de FREYTAS-TAMURA. “Two People Die after Eating Raw Milk Cheese.” The New York Times (Sat., MARCH 11, 2017): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 10, 2017, and has the title “Two People Die after Eating Raw Milk Cheese Made in New York State.” The last sentence in the next-to-last paragraph quoted above, appears in the online, but not in the print, version of the article.)

British Government Environmentalists Increase London Air Pollution

(p. A4) London is choking from record levels of pollution, much of it caused by diesel cars and trucks, as well as wood-burning fires in private homes, a growing trend.
. . .
London’s air pollution today is different from seven decades ago, and more insidious. No longer thick as “pea soup,” as it was traditionally described, the city’s air is now laced with nitrogen dioxide — a toxic gas mostly produced by vehicles with diesel engines.
. . .
The current problem is, in part, an unintended consequence of previous efforts to aid the environment.
The British government provided financial incentives to encourage a shift to diesel engines because laboratory tests suggested that would cut harmful emissions and combat climate change. Yet, it turned out that diesel cars emit on average five times as much emissions in real-world driving conditions as in the tests, according to a British Department for Transport study.
“No one at the time thought of the consequences of increased nitrogen dioxide emissions from diesel, and the policy of incentivizing diesel was so successful that an awful lot of people bought diesel cars,” said Anna Heslop, a lawyer at ClientEarth, an environmental law firm that last year forced the British government to produce a better plan to improve air quality.
. . .
Bob Miller, 69, a cabdriver who has crisscrossed London for 30 years, wasn’t convinced. He has lost faith in recommendations by policy makers and experts, he said.
“We were told how wonderful diesel is, how they were supposed to be cleaner than petrol,” Mr. Miller said, idling his cab in heavy traffic with the window open.
“The experts make the rules, then they’re wrong,” he said, shaking his head. “I give up.”

For the full story, see:
KIMIKO de FREYTAS-TAMURA. “A Push for Diesel Leaves London Gasping Amid Record Pollution.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 18, 2017): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 17, 2017.)