Category: Environment

Environmental topics, climate change, global warming, geography

Muddled Environmental Meddling

limestone-lifesaverThe idea of using carbon sequestration to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels has been bandied about for years, I vaguely recall writing about it when I first freelanced for New Scientist in 1990. It struck me then as a ludicrous approach to tackling climate change akin to sweeping the problem under the carpet. Now, a press release from another journal for which I once wrote on a regular basis, Chemistry & Industry (published for the UK’s Society of Chemical Industry) is suggesting yet another madcap approach to climate.

The “open source” concept being put forward by cquestrate.com and reported in C&I suggests that we could reduce atmospheric CO2 levels and so ameliorate anthropogenic global warming by heating millions of tonnes of limestone in the world’s deserts to release its locked in CO2, ship the resulting lime to the seaside and dump the rock into the oceans where it will apparently absorb twice as much dissolved CO2. It’s backed by multinational petrochemical giant Shell.

Now forgive me for being uber skeptical but isn’t there something just a little hypocritical about an oil company looking to macro scale chemical engineering to manipulate the environment. The C&I article quotes Tim Kruger, formerly of Shell, and now consulting on the project for Corven as mentioning Australia’s Nullarbor Plain as being a prime location for the process. Lots of energy from sunlight to heat the abundant limestone to calcify it. And, presumably excess energy to sequester the huge volumes of CO2 released at source.

The mention of Australia reminds me of another particularly crass attempt by humanity to control the environment that went badly wrong – the cane toad. The cane toad was introduced into Queensland, Australia, en masse, in the 1930s in an effort to control the cane beetle that was ravaging the sugar cane industry. Of course, cane toads are now one of the most widespread and biggest pests in the region, with no obvious way of controlling their numbers, other than introducing an exogenous, but unidentified predator species.

I suspect that, overall, dumping lime into the oceans will be as successful as dumping cane toads into sugar cane plantations. There will be unknown after shocks that will cause more harm to the environment and global ecosystems overall than anyone could predict.

First, off, there’s the problem of what to do with the CO2 released from the limestone mined in the deserts that serves as the raw material for the process. Secondly, the huge tonnages involved are going to be so big that this project really will never work, especially as shipping all that lime from the desert to the oceans will require energy and release its own huge quantities of CO2 before dumping even begins. But, more than that there will be enormous, unforeseen environmental effects of dumping this material into the oceans on such a scale.

The idea of using even “stranded” energy to release CO2 from limestone, ship the limestone to the oceans, where it will apparently absorb dissolved CO2, has to be fundamentally flawed. There are issues of pH, absorbancy, equilibria, and marine ecosystems to consider. Surely, it would be simpler and more efficient to find a way to tap the stranded energy and supply it to population centres directly, thus cutting our dependency on fossil fuels without attempting to tamper with the oceans. Several macroscale engineering ideas have been bandied about and some, such as iron seeding and nitrogen control, have even been trialled, with little success and evidence of detrimental environmental impact. Let’s not add lime to the list.

I interviewed Kruger for the August issue of Intute Spotlight in which I will cover this topic in more detail. You might also be interested in checking out the Sciencebase endsjobs.co.uk/environmental page.

Atmospheric, Spectroscopic, Arsenic

Arsenic poisoningRemote arsenic assessment – A topic I’ve come back to again and again since I first covered for The Guardian the breaking news of arsenic contaminated tubewells on the Indian sub-continent in 1995. Now, an informatics approach to surface data could allow geologists and environmental scientists to identify regions of the world where people are at risk of exposure to arsenic in their drinking water without the need for widespread sampling to be undertaken. More…

Listening to tomographic tales – Researchers in the USA and The Netherlands have pieced together a picture of the most exquisite of molecular machines using electron-microscopic tomography. The team has for the first time obtained a three-dimensional structure of the gossamer-like filament of proteins found within the inner ear that gives us our sense of hearing and balance. More…

Atmospheric NMR – Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy has been used to study the kinetics of atmospheric pollutants in the gas phase for the first time. The method provides an empirical correlation between the atmospheric lifetimes of atmospheric pollutants and their relative reaction rates with chloro radicals at ambient temperatures. Read on…

Ebola spiked – An X-ray structure of the surface spike of the Ebola virus could explain how this lethal pathogen infects human cells and may help researchers devise preventative measures to stop the virus spreading during an outbreak. Full story…

Dirty Dozen Chemicals

Dirty dozen chemicalsWe live in an age of chemophobia, an insidious disease that threatens our way of life, precludes R & D that might solve many of the environmental issues we face and prevents disease-stopping compounds being deployed where they are most needed in the developing world. Chemophobia is an irrational fear of all things chemical and is usually contracted by those already with naturophilia, the irrational love of all things natural.

It usually starts with a dose of nostalgia, pangs for a time when the world was simpler, and an aching for a natural world that we have long since lost. Unfortunately for sufferers, there never was a time of simplicity and natural living. In those halcyon days of yore, infectious disease was rife, infant mortality rates were high, and life expectancy was very low.

Natural, at that time meant, inept remedies for lethal diseases such as polio, tuberculosis, bacterial infections, and plague. It meant poor harvests and widespread famine, and if disease didn’t catch you young, only those who kept their heads very low were safe from interminable wars, rock-breaking on distant sun-bleached shores, or the hangman’s noose, guilty or otherwise. Today, we may have more obesity and diabetes and certainly fare more incidences of the diseases of old age, but that’s because we have more food to eat (in the developed world, at least) and live longer.

Certainly, natural does not equate to good for you – think snake venom, belladonna, and deadly toadstools, whereas most synthetic chemicals have a strong pedigree and have tested safety and toxicity. But throw in the fact that most chemophobics also have risk assessment blindness as well as dystatistica and we see pronouncements on all things chemical and synthetic as being bad.

It is from this, that the UNEP Dirty Dozen Chemicals list emerges. Not only has it a far too conveniently tabloid name to be believed, but several of the entries are not single chemicals but whole families.

Needless to say, several of these, while appearing to be the harbinger’s of doom media hyperbole would have us believe, are not necessarily as dangerous to us or the environment as you might think, and others, such as DDT could be used to help eradicate one of the biggest global killers. Indeed, the WHO now allows for the use of DDT to fight malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

  • Aldrin (pesticide)

  • Chlordane (pesticide)

  • DDT (pesticide, highly effective against malaria-carrying mosquitoes)

  • Dieldrin

  • Heptachlor

  • Mirex

  • Toxaphene

  • Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs, a whole group of diverse compounds, each with
    its own properties)

  • Hexachlorobenzene

  • Dioxins (a whole diverse group of compounds)

  • Furans (a whole diverse group of compounds, each with its own properties)

These compounds are now banned under UNEP, but were not used in manufacturing before this list was created.

There are other lists, such as the List of RoHO prohibited substances, which includes lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants, which is fair enough. And, industry-specific lists, such as the Volvo manufacturing black list, which lists all the compounds that may not be used in its production lines, including CFC cooling agents, the paint hardener methylenedianiline, and the previously discussed carbon tetrachloride

In a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing (2008, 1, 41-57), Jack Jeswiet, of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada and Michael Hauschild of the Danish Technical University, Denmark, argue the case that market forces need to inform environmental design. One can only assume that this should be one of the drivers rather than media scare stories, chemophobia and the simplistic blanket precautions of lists.

Greenhouse gas emissions, environmental impact, and toxic substances to be avoided must all be addressed by the EcoDesigner in any design situation, they say. The ecodesigner cannot control market forces, but must aware of them and rules should be followed to reduce the eco footprint.

At the time of writing, a news release from the UK’s Royal Society’s summer science exhibition presented findings from consumers tests being carried out during the event which is open to the public. The researchers involved, from the National Physical Laboratory, are working towards producing the world’s first model that will predict how we perceive “naturalness”. They claim that the results could help manufacturers produce synthetic products that are so good they seem “natural” to our senses and are fully equivalent to the “real thing”, but with the benefits of reduced environmental impact and increased durability.

Meanwhile, a new study shows that companies are significantly hijacking the language of environmentalists to their own marketing ends, presumably hoping to leverage the best out of the movement in selling their products.

Save Gas

Old cars are bestApologies if, like me, you’re a Brit and prefer to refer to petrol and diesel, then apologies for today’s post title. But, I’ve noticed a flurry of complaints from Americans about the price of vehicle fuel, recently, and just had to comment. Complaints about the price of gas? I hear the good folks of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland exclaim! Yes, indeed, apparently, filling your tank Stateside now costs a staggering $4 per gallon (about 8 pounds sterling!) Pah! You say, us Brits are paying the equivalent of over $10 per gallon these days.

So what’s a driver to do? Save fuel that’s what! But, how? Money-saving expert and pragmatic tide-wad Martin Lewis has a few pointers on his MoneySavingExpert site. In fact, he reckons following his advice could cut your fuel spend by a third and it doesn’t involve overthrowing a government with a penchant for heavy stealth taxes.

There are four key steps to saving money on fuel, Lewis explains:

  • Boost vehicle efficiency
  • Drive more efficiently
  • Find cheaper fuel
  • Get cashback on your fuel

The first of these involves removing any dead weight from your vehicle, detachable seats that never see a derriere could be stored offline, as it were. Roofracks and cycle racks should be taken down unless in use, and any trash, garbage, waste, rubbish lying in footwells, in the boot and trunk and elsewhere should be disposed of or recycled. Lewis reckons decluttering can save a couple of a percent, while ditching the roofrack and do the same.

Other fuel savers include keeping tires at the correct pressure for your vehicle (up to 3% saving), keeping air-con use to a minimum (A/C uses between 4 and 8% of your fuel in hot weather). Lewis’ final efficiency tip is slightly less obvious and possibly doubtful – don’t fill your tank, he says. A car will run just as well on a half-full (half-empty) tank as a full one, apparently. He claims that the weight saving of not filling up every time you drive on to a garage forecourt (filling station), will boost efficiency by about 1%.

I’m not so sure that this stacks up overall, however, because you will end up making twice as many journeys to the filling station, which itself will use fuel not only with the drive, but the stops and starts, and if you get stuck in traffic it could soon counteract that 1% saving. Especially given that being parked with the engine idling for 5 minutes is the equivalent of driving 5 miles, or thereabouts.

Anyway, back to his list. Lewis next suggests that being a gentler driver, rather than a kid-racer can save you up to 60% fuel without cutting your top speed. It’s not about the theoretically optimal approach of accelerating gently up to 56 mph and then releasing the accelerator pedal and cruising back down to close to zero and then slowly accelerating up to 56 again. Rather, Lewis explains, you should ensure you’re driving in the appropriate gear (for stick shift drivers only) and that you should speed up smoothly.

“When you press harder on the pedal more fuel flows, but you could get to the same speed using much less power,” he says, “a good rule is to stay under 3,000 revs [revolutions per minute, rpm].” Conversely, when you want to slow down, use the engine and ease down through the gears, reduce the need to stamp on the breaks. All that hard stopping and starting many drivers do simply wastes fuel. As my driving instructor told me at the start of my first lesson in decades past, “We’re all trying to get from A to B, but there’s no need to rush, be polite to other road users, and enjoy the ride.” (A good life philosophy in general, I thought).

Lewis’ Point 3 means either doing some legwork and hunting down the best buys for fuel or using one of the many price comparison tools on the web. In the UK, we have the aptly and simply named petrolprices.com. Lifehacker recently highlighted GasBuddy and Gaspricewatch in the US. However, if you find a filling station 30 miles off your regular route that offers a fractional per gallon saving, then give it a miss, the extra 60 miles will most likely counteract the saving. In tip #4, Lewis suggests cashing in on loyalty cards, cashback credit cards, and company savings schemes, which could save a few quid (bucks) too.

There are several other tips we might add to Lewis’ list. If you’re in the UK, agricultural vehicles avoid a certain amount of tax on their fuel, so becoming a farmer could save you money (and, of course, lose you it in other ways). You might be tempted to throw some magic potion, magnets or shiny beads into your tank in the hope of saving a few pennies. Don’t be. From a chemist’s perspective, I’d like to emphasise that drivers should avoid all such scams including so-called catalysts, magnetic gizmos, and shiny beads. Crystals, Reiki, and homeopathic remedies don’t work to fix human bodies, equally they are not going to let you squeeze extra juice from your car.

Some observers suggest switching to compressed gas vehicles, hybrids, electric, and fuel cells etc. These are all well and good, although on the whole simply displace pollution elsewhere in terms of the fuels they use. However, the enormous overall energy and financial cost of replacing even an old car is far, far greater even than maintaining an old banger (lemon).

Finally, here is the killer tip on how to save money on gas – walk or use a bicycle. Aside from the costs of extra carbs you’ll need to sustain you for the journey and the marginal increase in laundry costs for your Lycra cycling shorts, the broader outlook is for an almost 100% fuel saving. Of course, if you commute fifty miles a day, you’re going to have to set the early morning alarm just a little bit earlier to arrive at work on time, but just think of all those poor suckers paying $10 a gallon and listen to the dawn chorus and you’ll feel a whole lot better.

Water, Water, Everywhere

Water turbineFresh, clean water is going to be increasingly in short supply. Despite the recent heavy rains across Southern Europe, the building of desalination plants in such regions, and the shipping in of water supplies from elsewhere is likely to increase in coming years, while desertification will maintain its dehydrating crawl and some regions of the developing world will continue to die of thirst in hotter dry season, while squandering the precious harvest of the rainy season.

So, what’s the answer? Solar-powered desalination certainly, or perhaps the extraction of the hydrate component of abundant desert minerals such as gypsum (calcium sulfate dihydrate, 20% water by weight)?

In a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Global Environmental Issues (2008, 8, 224-232), M. Whisson of Subiaco, in Western Australia, discusses two serious alternatives for providing even the most parched lands with unlimited fresh water. Both approaches are reminiscent of ancient, old world technologies, but could provide a modern solution. Whisson explains the problem:

The world water crisis may be more serious than generally appreciated. One reason for this is that the main response has been to increase storage of rain rather than to increase the amount of fresh water. Another is that fossil groundwater has been widely seen as inexhaustible.

Storage and redistribution of rain water, of course requires processing plants while those suffering debilitating and ultimately fatal arsenic poisoning on the Indian sub-continent are all too familiar with the effects of the desiccation of aquifers.

“There are two, and only two, unlimited sources of water: the sea and the air,” says Whisson. The Earth has 1.26 x 1021 litres of water, of which 98% is seawater. The surface is acted on by solar radiation, turbulence and wind, which liberates water into the atmosphere ensuring that the lower 1 kilometre of the atmosphere (volume of 5 x 107 cubic kilometres contains 1 x 1015 kg of water, which turns over with a half life of a few days.

Harvesting of water from the air on a very small but socially important scale has a long history, as does desalination of seawater but, says Whisson, in the context of current and growing world needs, these approaches will provide nothing but a short delay in the onset of global life-threatening water scarcity. This is especially so, given their small, centralised scaling as industrial units.

Instead, Whisson suggests two fresh water collecting systems and argues that they have no ultimate limitations, either because of the availability of water or because of environmental constraints. The first system is the Water Road, a macro-engineering concept, which produces fresh water from seawater without the energy and processing demands of conventional desalination. It also offers a distributed network system that precludes many of the issues facing an industrial-style desalination plant. This system uses a large surface area to allow a non-fresh water supply to be distilled by solar and wind energy and trapped as fresh clean water.

The distillation would occur during the transfer of seawater inland (essentially given a kickstart by tidal surges) to the area of need, explains Whisson. This seems counter-intuitive, but immediately provides a high surface area, while the slow flow rate through a wide pipeline under a transparent heat-insulating cover means a large surface area of water is exposed to the sun over several days, with wind turbulence on the seawater surface acting like the natural process of transfer of surface water to the air over the open sea. This system of evaporation also avoids the inhibitory effect of water vapour saturation of the evaporating air. The concentrated seawater formed as a byproduct could be used to produce common sea salt at much lower cost and efficiencies than traditional drying pools.

The second system is a Water from Air system that uses a wind turbine to extract moisture from the wind. Whisson points out that at a relative humidity of 60%, a temperature fall from 20 to 5 Celsius would only require 10 grams of water per cubic metre of air. However, once it is recognised that a wind-driven turbine with an aperture of 10 square metres facing into a moderate breeze of 10 kilometres per hour would acquire 100000 cubic metres of air containing 1000 kg water every hour. Even with an efficiency of just 20% that would be a useful system, especially given that thousands of turbines could be installed in dry regions.

The two systems are seen as complementary,” explains Whisson, the Water Road providing water to large arid geographic areas, such as Western Australia, and the Water From Air units providing dispersed multiple water collection from the air wherever it is needed, whether on high industrial buildings, farm buildings, coastal cliff-tops, remote sand hills or small isolated communities.

Whisson, M. (2008). Two proposals for unlimited fresh water. International Journal of Global Environmental Issues, 8(3), 224. DOI: 10.1504/IJGENVI.2008.018637

Biomonitors

Autumnal grasses

Keeping a weather eye on atmospheric pollution is a large-scale, costly and time-consuming activity. However, there just happens to be a vast network of self-contained, self-powered units around the globe that can respond to the presence of toxins, radioactive species, atmospheric particulates and other materials in the environment and could be used to build up a local, national or international picture of environmental conditions – the world’s plants, mosses, and lichens.

In a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Environment and Pollution (2008, Volume 32, Issue 4), researchers from various fields explain how living organisms can be used to track the dispersal of atmospheric pollutants, particulates, and trace elements. They also explain how plants and other so-called biomonitors have been validated across the globe.

Writing in an editorial for the IJEP special issue chemist Borut SmodiÅ¡, a senior research associate at the Jožef Stefan Institute, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, explains how biomonitoring can be used in environments where a technological approach to monitoring is not only difficult and costly but may be impossible. “Biomonitoring allows continuous observation of an area with the help of bioindicators, an organism (or part of it) that reveals the presence of a substance in its surroundings with observable and measurable changes (e.g. accumulation of pollutants), which can be distinguished from the effects of natural stress.”

SmodiÅ¡ points to numerous other advantages of biomonitoring: “Simple and inexpensive sampling procedures allow a very large number of sites to be included in the same survey, permitting detailed geographical patterns to be drawn. Biomonitoring can be an effective tool for pollutant mapping and trend monitoring in real time and retrospective analysis,” he says.

While any organism might be used as a biomonitoring agent, Smodiš points out that mosses and lichens, which lack root systems, are dependent on surface absorption of nutrients. This means that they accumulate particulates and dissolved chemical species from their surroundings rather than from the soil and so could be more appropriate biomonitors for atmospheric pollutants.

In 1998, the International Atomic Energy Agency part of the United Nations, started a Coordinated Research Project on biomonitoring. Several papers in the special issue of IJEP detail methodologies, case studies and other aspects of various projects within this initiative and point to future avenues that might be explored.

Bristling beech leaves

In the paper “Atmospheric dispersion of pollutants in Sado estuary (Portugal) using biomonitors”, Maria do Carmo Freitas of the Instituto Tecnológico e Nuclear Reactor, in Sacavém, Portugal, and colleagues used instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and proton-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) to investigate pollutant levels in epiphytic lichens. They found that temperature and humidity had a more prominent effect on pollutant accumulation than wind direction or rainfall levels, which could affect the interpretation of other biomonitoring results.

Ni Bangfa of the China Institute of Atomic Energy, Beijing, and colleagues in their paper “Study on air pollution in Beijing’s major industrial areas using multielements in biomonitors and NAA techniques” used NAA to analyze three types of plant leaves from Chinese white poplar, arborvitae, and pine needles. They found that northeast Beijing is a clean area while southwest is relatively polluted.

In “Biomonitoring in the forest zone of Ghana” B.J.B. Nyarko of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission and colleagues studied the distribution of heavy metals in agricultural, industrial and mining areas in the first survey of its kind in Ghana using lichens as biomonitors. They found that the area around gold mining regions were most heavily polluted, with arsenic, antimony, and chromium while industrial sites had raised levels of aluminum, iron, and titanium. Farming regions were much less affected by heavy metal pollutants, as one might expect.

H.Th. Wolterbeek of the Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands in ” Large-scale biomonitoring of trace element air pollution: local variance, data comparability and its relationships to human health” used biomonitoring data to determine air concentrations and metal deposition and discussed how such studies might be used in the future to correlate pollution with human health issues. Other researchers including Bernd Markert of International Graduate School Zittau, Zittau, Germany, Eiliv Steinnes of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in Trondheim, and their respective teams also further validated the potential of biomonitoring approaches to pollution.

Mosses lichens

While biomonitoring techniques are improving rapidly and researchers are quickly validating results at the local level, Smodiš points out that there is no single species that could be used on the global scale. Moreover, different weather conditions around the globe mean that techniques are not necessarily comparable. With that in mind, environmental sensor manufacturers may rest assured that there is still a market for their instrumentation despite the best efforts of the mosses and lichens.

Biodiesel and Political Crop

Biodiesel car

Biofuels seem to be reaching the headlines on an almost daily basis, with some activist groups touting their benefits as part of a planet-saving strategy for fossil fuel alternatives. Other groups, of course, point out that you don’t get something for nothing and that ravaging ecosystems in order to plant crops for conversion does not provide as straightforward an answer as some people would have you believe. This is perhaps especially so for newer untested biofuel crops that may actually require more energy to produce and process into fuel than they save in unused fossil fuels.

Anyway, putting aside the politics aside and the balancing of energy equations, one question that car owners hoping to go green will want to know is – will biodiesel damage my engine? Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Global Energy Issues (2008, 29, 303-313, in press), researchers in Turkey have begun a research program to try and answer that question. Their initial findings suggest that the answer is no.

Cem Sensogut, of Dumlupinar University, Kutahya, Turkey, and colleagues point out that biodiesel is not a twenty-first century invention. Diesel fuel derived from biomass as opposed to oil has been used as an alternative fuel since the early 1900s. The original diesel engine from 1895 was actually designed to be run on a variety of fuels rather than just petroleum-derived products. Moreover, Brazil pioneered the use of biofuels even before World War II with sugar-derived ethanol from sugar cane being trans-esterified to fuel in a major program that escalated during the 1970s oil crisis. Other countries have adopted biofuels quietly ever since for public transport and other initiatives.

Today, with the rising price of oil and an apparently urgent need to find other fuel sources there is renewed interest in making vehicle fuel from crops:

Biodiesel, in its purest form, consists of short chain alkyl esters derived from the transesterification of vegetable oils, animal fats, and algae. They can be used alone or blended with conventional diesel in unmodified diesel engines.

Sensogut and colleagues have analysed engine and vehicle components to discover that biodiesel does not cause long-term engine health problems. Of course, the manufacture of engines and vehicles is energy intensive and so if the environmental benefits of biofuels are offset by a shorter half-life for the global fleet of vehicles, then their use would be unviable in ameliorating pollution and climate change.

The researchers came to the following key conclusions for biodiesel made to ISO 14214:

  • Pistons, intake valves, and engine exhaust are undamaged
  • Engine power is unaffected by using winter biodiesel made from canola or soybean oils
  • Engine power decreases by about 5% with summer biodiesel made from palm or sunflower oils
  • Summer biodiesel leads to starting difficulties at temperatures below 15 Celsius
  • Winter biodiesel, as the name suggests is best for autumn and winter use, but there starting difficulties at below 0 Celsius.
  • No modifications are needed to a diesel engine except that fuel tank, fuel tank particle strainer and fuel filters have to be changed and cleaned regularly

Having obtained such positive results so far, the researchers are now investigating the effects of biodiesel on fuel-system components, injectors, pressure pumps. Should this ongoing work demonstrate conclusively that diesel engines are entirely safe with biodiesel fuels, then it will then only be a matter of resolving the political and environmental quandaries…simple…

Technological To-Do List

Technological To-Do ListA panel of eighteen apparently maverick thinkers was charged with coming up with a to-do list for the twenty-first century by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The maverick panel includes such notables as former director of the National Institutes of Health Bernadine Healy, Google co-founder Larry Page, geneticist and businessman Craig Venter, Nobel Chemistry Laureate Mario Molina, climate change expert Rob Socolow, and ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil.

I am sure some of these sci-celebs are mavericks in their own way, but if that’s the case why do some entries on their list of 14 technological challenges for our age read like the section headings from a college student essay or worse still a beauty pageant winner’s wishlist?

  • Engineering better medicines
  • Advancing health informatics
  • Providing access to clean water
  • Providing energy from fusion
  • Making solar energy economical
  • Restoring and improving urban infrastructure
  • Enhancing virtual reality
  • Reverse engineering the brain
  • Exploring natural frontiers
  • Advancing personalized learning
  • Developing carbon sequestration methods
  • Managing the nitrogen cycle
  • Securing cyberspace
  • Preventing nuclear terror

Okay, don’t get me wrong, world peace and universal wellness are noble aims and avoiding nuclear terror should be a priority. Moreover, even beginning to approach some of these problems will take a maverick or two, and many will probably remain intractable well beyond the twenty-first century. Despite advances in functional MRI, I don’t think we’re that close to reverse engineering the brain, for instance. We are really not going to come close to “managing” the nitrogen cycle any time soon either; we cannot yet make perfectly accurate weather or climate forecasts let alone find ways to control the global flux of atmospheric gases.

Another worrying property of the list is that in some sense a few of the entries are redundant. If we have access to solar power, why would we need fusion power? Even if we get to grips with fusion, building fusion reactor power stations is going to be incredibly expensive and difficult to do at least compared to the solar option. Some people would argue that CO2 is not an issue and others would suggest that the threat of nuclear terrorism is not what the scaremongers would have us believe, so maybe those list entries are also redundant.

Socolow admits in an interview that the challenge of coming up with 14 must-do technological developments was “crazy”. “We came up with broad categories of the challenges that lie ahead and within those categories identified specific initiatives,” he says.

The panel didn’t actually rank the 14 challenges in any particular order. It was obviously a tough call to decide whether advancing health informatics is any more or less important than advancing personalized learning. However, preventing nuclear terror should come well above reverse engineering the brain and perhaps even above engineering better medicines, surely?

Likewise, enhancing virtual reality and exploring natural frontiers will allow humanity to advance way beyond the claustrophobic confines of our current mindset, but if millions of people are without clean water, then we might as well be in the dark ages.

Apparently, the panel released its report in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), so I suspect it was more than a little tongue in cheek in some respects, especially given some of the personal reports I’ve heard from fellow science journalists about the quality (or lack thereof) of this year’s meeting.

CO2 Refusenik to Win Pulitzer

Polar bear

Polar bears are not quite the enormous white climate canary of frozen climes that we have been led to believe. In fact, they’re more likely to turn out to be the elephant in the room, when in fifty years time their numbers have grown despite Gory warnings.

Anyway, in the spirit of being contrary almost for the sake of it, but more seriously for the sake of science, I’d like your thoughts on the following article. It was published on ScienceandPublicPolicy.org, which is controversial enough, with the organisation’s Chief Science Advisor being Willie Soon, who along with Sally Baliunus, suggests that climate change is down to non-anthropogenic phenomena.

Anyway, the SPPI article highlights how some scientists have apparently now broken ranks to proclaim that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is not quite the forceful climate change driver those who advocate a global carbon tax would have us believe. After all, if George W Bush is suddenly on-message when it comes to the environment, then something is surely wrong with the world. Of course, I’d want the full insider details and to know if there are any conflicts of interest before taking any refusenik too seriously.

The post’s author Jerry Carlson suggests that a brave journalist who stands up against the carbon conspiracy might be in line for a Pulitzer by 2010. There are a few out there who are making waves including at least one NYT writer, he tells us. Carlson suggests that in order to take the Prize, that enterprising investigative journo will have to find answers to an intriguing pair of questions. I’m sure the folks at RealClimate.org will be readying their riposte right now, if they haven’t already, but here are Carlson’s queries for the record:

First, he asks, why don’t those who suggest we reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions and sequester carbon ever mention the enormous opportunities for feeding the world that might come from longer growing seasons and higher carbon availability for crops? Historically, civilisation has seemingly thrived when the climate has been warmer and wetter and agriculture more prolific. One might also tack on to the CO2 question the issue of water vapour being a much broader and potent greenhouse gas than CO2 as well as a dozen other apparently unaddressed issues within the climate change models.

The second Pulitzer-winning question Carlson offers is: Why is the IPCC’s projected future global warming almost linear or accelerating, when it is well-known that the greenhouse-gas impact of CO2 fades sharply with each incremental increase of CO2 in the atmosphere?

My own additional question to IPCC would ask about that 10% uncertainty in their initial report that suggested we are 90% certain that humans are responsible for rising temperature trends. 9 to 1 against is long odds, but not lottery impossible and mean that there is a chance (albeit just one in ten) that our carbon emissions are not to blame. If they’re not to blame, then rather than asking what is perhaps it’s time we checked the climate change data and took a more rigorous look at the historical and prehistorical trends, before it’s too late.

We live in an ice age, by definition; there is ice at the poles and that defines it as such. But, despite measurable volume changes in the Arctic ice sheet, NASA satellite images show without doubt that the ice cap is growing. Couldn’t that cause cooling because of increased reflectance? It has been said before, but what if we actually manage to reduce CO2 levels only to discover that the earth’s natural cycle is about to take us into a deeper ice age? We’ll regret meddling with atmospherics if it does. But, at least the growing polar bear population will be happy.

Giving the Ghetto Blaster Retro Chic

iPod Ghetto Blaster

The ongoing quest for bigger, better, smaller, faster gadgets and other consumer products is not environmentally sustainable and must be replaced by an approach to design that builds on the products of contemporary mass-produced culture by re-working them for current desires. That is the simple message offered by Stuart Walker of the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada, currently Co-Director of Imagination@Lancaster at Lancaster University, UK, writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Design.

Walker points out that it is critical that we address issues of sustainability more substantially than has been done to date. The throwaway culture of the mp3 generation is not only filling landfills with mass-produced and almost disposable products, but wasting vast quantities of potentially recoverable materials, including precious metals. Moreover, the continued greed for novelty means that countless perfectly useful gadgets and other products are being discarded in favour of the next version much sooner than they need be given the robustness of many well-designed products today.

He adds that if design is to contribute to human culture in a more meaningful way then it has to move beyond the often shallow, style-based notions of product design that have become so prevalent over the last 50 years.

If the creation of new products is part of the problem rather than the solution to sustainability in a world of climate change, overburdened landfills and dwindling supplies of inexpensive mineral resources, then does the designer have a role if consumerist society were to desist from its quest for novelty?

“On the face of it, and within the conventional parameters of product design, it would seem that the answer would be no,” says Walker, “or at most, relatively little.” However, he suggests that a broadening of definitions of what design involves could lead to a new generation in design that exists not simply to create novel products but to use the creative skills of individuals to re-work old products.

Walker takes as a case in point the “old-fashioned” stereo radio-cassette player, which had its heyday in the ghetto blasters of the 1980s. Countless ghetto blasters will have hit landfills in the decades since and yet, with a little imagination, a once prized possession could become a new outlet for a portable mp3 player with a simple rewiring of the input circuitry.

Such re-purposing may not be fashionable, there is not at present any cachet nor retro-chic associated with the ghetto blaster as generation after generation of sleek touch-sensitive portable media gadgets hit the market month in, month out. And yet it would take only a few cultural innovators seeing the potential of this and other examples for rebuilding and repurposing to lead to a consumer tipping point in which such a primal approach to recycling became the height of fashion. Being an early adopter need not mean buying the latest gadget, it could simply mean repurposing an old one.

More information on Walker’s potentially revolutionary proposals can be found in “Extant objects: designing things as they are” Int. J. Sustainable Design, 2008, 1, pp 4-12

You can leave ideas for other potentially retro chic repurposed gadgets and products in the comment form below.