Volcanoes Are Proof of Concept That Geoengineering Can Counter Global Warming

(p. C11) ‘Volcanoes get a bad press,” Clive Oppenheimer writes at the beginning of “Mountains of Fire: The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanoes.”

. . .

Most people know that erupting volcanoes can affect the climate. But there are nuances: “You might expect that volcanoes, with burning flames, spewing molten hot lava and searing ash, would heat up the planet, but in fact they do the opposite.” An addendum, also counterintuitive: “Though several factors . . . influence how much an eruption cools the climate, it is the amount of sulphur blasted into the stratosphere that is critical.”

. . .

. . ., Mr. Oppenheimer’s scientific expertise is what’s most important—for his book and for the rest of us.

For the full review, see:

Howard Schneider. “Explorer of the Underworld.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023): C11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 6, 2023, and has the title “‘Mountains of Fire’ Review: The Vital Volcano.”)

The book under review is:

Oppenheimer, Clive. Mountains of Fire: The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanoes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.

In Australia and Japan “Coral Appear to Be Migrating Poleward”

(p. A9) Scientists are still learning about corals’ ability to adapt to climate change. Efforts are underway to breed coral that tolerate higher temperatures. In a few places, including Australia and Japan, coral appear to be migrating poleward, beginning to occupy new places.

For the full story see:

Catrin Einhorn. “Scientists Say Rising Ocean Temperatures Are Damaging Coral Reefs Around the World.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 16, 2024): A9.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 15, 2024, and has the title “The Widest-Ever Global Coral Crisis Will Hit Within Weeks, Scientists Say.”)

Dogs Can Alert Owners to Epileptic or Diabetic Emergencies

(p. B1) Rosebud is a service dog trained at a nonprofit called Canine Partners for Life in Cochraneville, Pa. The dog can detect when Ms. Vible will have a seizure about 15 minutes before it happens. She lets Ms. Vible know with a whine or a bark and then lies down with her owner until the seizure is over.

Seizure-alert dogs are part of a growing class of service animals that can detect warning signs of epileptic seizures and diabetic emergencies and identify other medical conditions. Demand has surged, according to trainers and training centers—some of which now have long wait lists—as recent scientific studies have started to confirm the dogs’ efficacy in helping their owners.

. . .

Their acute sense of smell helps the dogs detect low and high blood-sugar levels and epileptic seizures before they happen. Researchers haven’t yet identified the specific compounds that the dogs are smelling. But once the dogs recognize the smell, they are trained to respond with a specific action such as barking or pawing at their owners. Depending on the owner’s state and the animal’s training, some dogs also might alert another adult, bring a juice box or press a button that sends a phone text to a caregiver.

The University of Bristol in England this year produced a study of dogs’ ability to detect hypoglycemia, which occurs when a diabetic’s blood sugar drops dangerously. If left untreated, this can lead to unconsciousness or death. In assessing the effectiveness of 27 glycemia-alert dogs, the Bristol study found that the dogs alerted their owners to 83% of hypoglycemic episodes in more than 4,000 hypo- and hyperglycemic episodes.

The findings of another study released this year showed promise for people suffering from epilepsy. Researchers from the University of Rennes in Normandy, France, presented dogs with samples of breath and sweat odors obtained from epileptic patients having seizures, not having seizures and exercising (to determine whether the dogs were just detecting sweat). All of the dogs succeeded in identifying the epileptic-seizure-odor sample, and the dogs spent about 23 seconds investigating the seizure smell, compared with about five seconds spent on the other samples.

The lead researcher of the study, Amelie Catala, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rennes, says the research could help in the development of electronic noses, devices that can detect and analyze odors and flavors.

“If there is an organic compound related to these diseases that we can detect and identify, it could help develop electronic noses,” she says.

Medical-alert dogs are being trained by for-profit and nonprofit centers, by individual trainers and at times by individual pet owners themselves. In addition to those skills already mentioned, some have been trained to warn patients about abnormal heart rhythms, and to detect allergens. Dogs also have been trained to help identify certain cancers in laboratory settings.

For the full story, see:

Aili McConnon. “Dogs That Can Read Warning Signs Progress Before Explosion.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Sept. 16, 2019 [sic]): R9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 12, 2019 [sic], and has the title “A Growing Role for Medical-Alert Dogs.” The last four paragraphs quoted above appear in the online, but not in the print, version of the article.)

The University of Bristol academic paper mentioned above is:

Rooney, Nicola J., Claire M. Guest, Lydia C. M. Swanson, and Steve V. Morant. “How Effective Are Trained Dogs at Alerting Their Owners to Changes in Blood Glycaemic Levels?: Variations in Performance of Glycaemia Alert Dogs.” PLOS ONE 14, no. 1 (2019): e0210092.

The University of Rennes academic paper mentioned above is:

Catala, Amélie, Marine Grandgeorge, Jean-Luc Schaff, Hugo Cousillas, Martine Hausberger, and Jennifer Cattet. “Dogs Demonstrate the Existence of an Epileptic Seizure Odour in Humans.” Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (2019): article #4103.

Shark Tank Shows Capitalism as a “Bootstrap Meritocracy”

(p. 24) . . . my favorite TV show is “Shark Tank.”  . . .  The premise of the tank is that small-business owners get an audience with investors — the “sharks,” a crew of millionaires and billionaires that includes Mark Cuban, Daymond John and Lori Greiner, the “queen of QVC” — in the hope of provoking a bidding war for a stake in the company. Sometimes the sharks dismiss the ideas outright, and they often do so cruelly, but in a satisfying, detailed way. You start to feel as if you could write your own business plan after watching a few episodes.

. . .

(p. 25) The show dramatizes a romantic vision of our economy, depicting it as a bootstrap meritocracy.

. . .

Part of the show’s appeal is that it’s an equal-opportunity forum — you don’t have to know a Silicon Valley V.C. or even a banker to get your audience with the sharks.

. . .

I was so politically assertive as a kid because I wanted someone to respect my opinion, to value me. I wanted to be taken seriously. I think most kids feel this way, dismissed outright for being small. In the tank, no one is dismissed — the sharks start every segment with furrowed brows, ready to take notes and hear out pitches, no matter how preposterous. They begin the process with a clean slate every time. Somewhere deep down, I want all these deals to work, I want the enthusiasm that sharks feel to be genuine and I want the contestants to walk away with business plans ready to be set into motion. Even if “Shark Tank” is propaganda — the selling and marketing of the American dream — the fantasy feels real.

For the full commentary, see:

Jaime Lowe. “Letter of Recommendation: ‘Shark Tank’.” The New York Times Magazine (Sunday, October 1, 2017 [sic]): 24-25.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 28, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

Before Europeans Arrived, “Conflict Was Endemic” Among Native American Indians

The left’s narrative of peaceful Native American Indians brutalized by colonizing Europeans, is rhetorically used to undermine the legitimacy of property rights that are a foundation of a system of innovative dynamism. The history is messy, but before and after the arrival of Europeans, Indians were frequent violent aggressors.

(p. C8) . . . Wayne E. Lee’s “The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800,” [is] an ambitious and thoughtful reassessment of Native American war-making before and after permanent European settlement in the early 17th century.

. . .

Rather than simply harassing enemies, Native American fighters sought to isolate and destroy them. It was a technique that could be scaled up as opportunity allowed, ranging from the elimination of an unwary scouting party to the surprise of an unsuspecting town.

. . .

The notorious fate of the Mystic Pequots provides an example of Mr. Lee’s approach. Witnessing the conflagration, the New Englanders’ Narragansett allies were appalled by the indiscriminate slaughter, and reproached them for waging, as they put it, a war that was “too furious.” But as Mr. Lee points out, this reaction was not primarily an expression of “culture shock” at the use of “fire and mass killing.” Rather, the Narragansetts were aggrieved because such ruthlessness denied them their anticipated harvest of prisoners.

“Paradoxically,” Mr. Lee notes, Native American attitudes toward captives demonstrated “both the most and least restraint in the overall violence of their warfare.” Prisoners were living proof of victory. Taking scalps—a pre-Columbian practice encouraged by colonial bounties and often cited by Europeans to epitomize Native American “barbarity”—was a poor substitute. Adult males, especially, became the objects of communal vengeance, tortured to death in prolonged rituals that channeled a community’s frenzied grief. Luckier captives were adopted to replace the casualties. Others, as recent research indicates, were effectively enslaved.

. . .

. . ., precontact conflict was endemic, driven by blood feud in a grim cycle of retribution that was hard to break “in a society ill-suited to top-down coercion,” and further motivated by the pursuit of respect, resources and dominion.

For the full review, see:

Stephen Brumwell. “The Native American Way of War.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023): C8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated October 4, 2023, and has the title “‘The Cutting-Off Way’ Review: Native Americans at War.”)

The book under review is:

Lee, Wayne E. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

Too Little Carbon Dioxide Caused Earth to Be a Frigid Barren “Snowball” for 56 Million Years

(p. D4) Around 717 million years ago, Earth’s humid landscapes and roiling blue waters transformed into a frigid, barren world. Scientists nicknamed this stage of geological history, and others like it, Snowball Earth.

What exactly froze the planet nearly solid has been a mystery, as has how it remained that way for 56 million years. On Wednesday, a team of researchers at the University of Sydney said they have it figured out. Earth’s glaciation, they say, may have come from a global drop in carbon dioxide emissions, a result of fewer volcanoes expelling the gas into the atmosphere.

Less carbon dioxide makes it more difficult for Earth’s atmosphere to trap heat. If the depletion were extreme enough, they argued, it could have thrust the planet into its longest ice age yet.

The theory, published in the journal Geology, adds insight to the way geological processes influenced Earth’s past climate. It may also help scientists better understand trends in our current climate.

. . .

Dr. Dutkiewicz and her colleagues turned their eyes to volcanoes because of a newly available model of Earth’s shifting tectonic plates. As the continents spread apart, they studied the changing length of the mid-ocean ridge — a chain of underwater volcanoes — predicted by the model.

The team then calculated the amount of volcanic gas emissions at the beginning of, and throughout, the ice age. Their results showed a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide sufficient to initiate and sustain a 56-million-year glaciation.

A reduction in volcanic gas emissions has been proposed as an explanation for Snowball Earth before. But according to Dr. Dutkiewicz, this is the first time researchers have proved that the mechanism was viable through modeled computations.

For the full commentary, see:

Katrina Miller. “How Earth Stayed Frozen for So Long.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 13, 2024): D4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated February 12, 2024, and has the title “How Earth Might Have Turned Into a Snowball.”)

The paper in the journal Geology mentioned above is:

Dutkiewicz, Adriana, Andrew S. Merdith, Alan S. Collins, Ben Mather, Lauren Ilano, Sabin Zahirovic, and R. Dietmar Müller. “Duration of Sturtian “Snowball Earth” Glaciation Linked to Exceptionally Low Mid-Ocean Ridge Outgassing.” Geology 52, no. 4 (2024): 292-96.

SpaceX Embraces Fast Failures as the Best Path to Fast Fixes

(p. B1) SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft pulled off an extended flight through space on its third test mission, marking major progress for a vehicle that could one day transport astronauts to the moon and beyond.

Shortly after launching the nearly 400-foot-tall rocket Thursday [March 14, 2024], SpaceX successfully separated the booster from the spacecraft, which proceeded to fly for around an hour before it was lost while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, according to a company livestream.

The mission advanced much farther than the company’s previous two Starship test flights. It was a milestone for a vehicle that is a centerpiece of SpaceX’s commercial ambitions, NASA’s space exploration plans, and company founder Elon Musk’s goal of one day sending humans to Mars.

. . .

(p. B4) Current and former SpaceX leaders have said the company embraces failing fast to try to rapidly identify fixes and improve. The company took 63 corrective actions to address issues that emerged during the initial launch, and an additional 17 following the second, according to the FAA.

For the full story, see:

Micah Maidenberg. “SpaceX Starship’s Third Test Mission Marks Major Progress Before Explosion.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, March 15, 2024): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 14, 2024, and has the title “SpaceX’s Starship Makes Major Progress in Third Flight Test.”)

Carbon Dioxide Greens the Earth as Plants Slow Global Warming

(p. D3) For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out what all the carbon dioxide we have been putting into the atmosphere has been doing to plants. It turns out that the best place to find an answer is where no plants can survive: the icy wastes of Antarctica.

As ice forms in Antarctica, it traps air bubbles. For thousands of years, they have preserved samples of the atmosphere. The levels of one chemical in that mix reveal the global growth of plants at any point in that history.

“It’s the whole Earth — it’s every plant,” said J. Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced.

Analyzing the ice, Dr. Campbell and his colleagues have discovered that in the last century, plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years. Writing in the journal Nature, they report that plants are converting 31 percent more carbon dioxide into organic matter than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

. . .

Since plants depend on carbon dioxide to grow, scientists have long wondered if that extra gas might fertilize them.

. . .

In the mid-2000s, atmospheric scientists discovered a powerful new way to measure plant growth: by studying an unimaginably rare molecule called carbonyl sulfide.

Carbonyl sulfide — a molecule made of a carbon atom, a sulfur atom and an oxygen atom — is present only in a few hundred parts per trillion in the atmosphere. That is about a million times lower than the concentration of carbon dioxide. Decaying organic matter in the ocean produces carbonyl sulfide, a gas that then floats into the atmosphere.

Plants draw in carbonyl sulfide along with carbon dioxide. As soon as it enters their tissues, they destroy it. As a result, the level of carbonyl sulfide in the air drops as plants grow.

. . .

But Dr. Campbell and his colleagues found that it hasn’t increased very much. As we have been adding carbonyl sulfide to the atmosphere, plants have been pulling it out. In fact, the scientists found, they have been pulling it out at a staggering rate.

“The pace of change in photosynthesis is unprecedented in the 54,000-year record,” Dr. Campbell said. While photosynthesis increased at the end of the ice age, he said, the current rate is 136 times as fast.

With all that extra carbon dioxide going into plants, there has been less in the air to contribute to global warming. The planet has warmed nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, but it might be even hotter if not for the greening of the Earth.

For the full commentary, see:

Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; A Global Greening.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 11, 2017 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 5, 2017 [sic], and has the title “MATTER; Antarctic Ice Reveals Earth’s Accelerating Plant Growth.”)

The paper in Nature mentioned above is:

Campbell, J. E., J. A. Berry, U. Seibt, S. J. Smith, S. A. Montzka, T. Launois, S. Belviso, L. Bopp, and M. Laine. “Large Historical Growth in Global Terrestrial Gross Primary Production.” Nature 544, no. 7648 (April 16, 2017 [sic]): 84-87.

Edgar Allen Poe Said Intuitive Leaps Should Be Added to Deduction and Induction as Paths to Knowledge

(p. C7) In an 1848 lecture, Edgar Allan Poe—the “Raven” guy, the progenitor of detective stories and spooky science fiction, who married his 13-year-old cousin, and died after being found insensibly drunk and wearing (somehow the most unsettling detail of all) another man’s clothes—this ink-stained wretch described a startling number of what would turn out to be prominent features of modern cosmology, including the big bang, the big crunch and the unity of space-time.

. . .

Where Poe sent audiences winging around the universe (or multiverse, another concept he seems to have anticipated), Mr. Tresch keeps to a steady course. He approaches Poe’s uncanny lecture—and its published version, the prose poem “Eureka”—not as a crazy fever dream, but as an inspired series of leaps from a firm grounding in fact.

. . .

In his lecture on the universe, Poe turned this method upside down: Here he used fiction in the service of science. He began by citing a letter, purportedly written in 2848, that mocked the primitive methods of 1848, when overconfident scientists believed that deduction and induction were the only paths to knowledge. Intuitive leaps, Poe insisted, could yield insights of their own. One such “soul-reverie” led him to argue that the universe began when “a primordial Particle” erupted outward in every direction. Everything that has happened since then is the result of the interplay of “the two Principles Proper, Attraction and Repulsion.” So far, so reasonable, by the lights of 21st-century cosmology. Still, plenty of what Poe went on to assert is either flatly wrong, ludicrously wrong, or outside the realm of cosmology properly defined, e.g., his suggestion that if there are multiple universes, each might have its own god.

“The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum”: As far as Poe was concerned, these gloomy triumphs of his imagination—all the poems and short stories that have made him immortal—counted for less than his cosmic speculations, which he considered the pinnacle of his career. “I could accomplish nothing more since I have written Eureka,” he told his mother-in-law/aunt. So imagine his dismay when, after requesting a print run of 50,000 copies, his publisher granted him only 500, and even these didn’t sell. A year later, Poe would spend a calamitous day and night in Baltimore, drinking himself to oblivion. He died at 40.

Had he lived, he would have found it ever more difficult to “revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science.” Mr. Tresch, who teaches at the Warburg Institute at the University of London and has previously written about Romanticism and science in 19th-century France, shows that the last years of Poe’s life coincided with increased regimentation in American thought. New organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science began applying rigorous standards to scientific discourse. “Eureka” was “precisely the kind of publicly oriented, freewheeling, generalizing, idiosyncratic, and unlicensed speculation that the AAAS was created to exclude,” he writes.

For the full review, see:

Jeremy McCarter. “Mystery, Science, Theater.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 12, 2021 [sic]): C7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated June 11, 2021 [sic], and has the title “‘The Reason for the Darkness of the Night’ Review: Poe’s Eureka Moment.” In the online and print versions, the words “Attraction,” “Repulsion,” and “Eureka” in Poe quotes appear in italics.)

The book under review is:

Tresch, John. The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Allowing the Sale of Hearing Aids Over-the-Counter (O.T.C.) Results in “Increased Innovation and Lower Prices”

(p. D3) A year ago, the Food and Drug Administration announced new regulations allowing the sale of over-the-counter hearing aids and setting standards for their safety and effectiveness.

. . .

Some background: In 2020, the influential Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention, Intervention and Care identified hearing loss as the greatest potentially modifiable risk factor for dementia.

Previous studies had demonstrated a link between hearing loss and cognitive decline, said Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and lead author of the new research.

“What remained unanswered was, If we treat hearing loss, does it actually reduce cognitive loss?” he said. The ACHIEVE study (for Aging and Cognitive Health Evaluation in Elders) showed that, at least for a particular group of older adults, it could.

. . .

A small study recently published in JAMA Otolaryngology found that patients who were given a commercially available, self-fitting hearing aid in a clinical trial could, after six weeks, hear as well as patients fitted with the same device by audiologists.

. . .

The United States is the first country to develop a regulated O.T.C. hearing aid market, and “the tech companies and the retailers are still experimenting,” Dr. Lin pointed out. He predicts increased innovation and lower prices ahead.

For the full commentary, see:

Paula Span. “THE NEW OLD AGE; A Challenging Over-the-Counter Market for Hearing Aids.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 31, 2023): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 30, 2023, and has the title “THE NEW OLD AGE; Hearing Aids Are More Affordable, and Perhaps More Needed, Than Ever.”)

The “small study” mentioned above is:

De Sousa, Karina C., Vinaya Manchaiah, David R. Moore, Marien A. Graham, and De Wet Swanepoel. “Effectiveness of an over-the-Counter Self-Fitting Hearing Aid Compared with an Audiologist-Fitted Hearing Aid: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery 149, no. 6 (2023): 522-30.

Musk Calls German Anti-Electric-Vehicle Ecoactivists “Dumber Than a Doorstop”

(p. B1) GRÜNHEIDE, Germany—When Tesla opened its first full-scale European factory in this sleepy community outside of Berlin, Elon Musk was feted as a hero, the chancellor gave a speech and workers cheered the rollout of new Model Ys.

On Wednesday [March 13, 2024], almost two years to the day later, Musk was back, this time to cheer up workers after an act of sabotage by suspected eco-activists shut down the plant for more than a week.

. . .

Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment on the various incidents. In a post on his X social-media platform, Musk has called the eco-activists “dumber than a doorstop” for their criticism of electric vehicles.

As the plant’s managers and workers gathered in a tent on the factory grounds for a “team huddle” on Wednesday, Musk could be seen carrying his son. Hoisting the boy onto his shoulders amid calls of “Elon, Elon,” he shouted back: “They can’t stop us!” and “Ich liebe Dich!”—German for “I love you.”

As he left, reporters asked him whether he was still committed to expanding the plant and producing vehicles in Germany.

“Yes, absolutely,” he said. “Germany rocks!”

For the full story, see:

William Boston. “Tesla Faces Blowback in Germany.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, March 15, 2024): B1-B2.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 14, 2024, and has the title “Elon Musk’s Plans to Conquer Europe Collide With Germany’s Culture Wars.”)