ScienceBlogs Channel : Environment

We may need this in Minneapolis (a.k.a. Bikeyapolis) [Greg Laden's Blog]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:58:53 -0500

Minneapolis is the City of Bikes. There are more bikes here per capita than any other US city, I'm told. Many Japanese cities have more bikes per capita and even less room, so the whole bike parking issue in Japan is pretty severe. And, as usual, Japanese culture allows for more flexibility in technological solutions than American culture does (a limitation that I don't think Americans realize they are living with).

Anyway, here's how to deal with bikes in an urban setting with less and less available bike parking space and more and more people on the bikes:

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And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores [Tomorrow's Table]

Pamela Ronald none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:33:57 -0500

I am traveling now far away from home towards a large lake in Zurich. What a perfect time to receive this poem from Jan Visser.

Le Lac (written in 1820 by Alphonse de Lamartine)

Ainsi, toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages,
dans la nuit éternelle emportés sans retour,
ne pourrons-nous jamais sur l'océan des âges
jeter l'ancre un seul jour?

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First Look at Carbon Capture and Storage in a West Virginia Coal-Fired Power Plant? [Stoat]

William M. Connolley none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:51:32 -0500

So says Sci-Am. The article is high on pic and low on facts. Only a small percentage of the CO2 is captured - 1.5% - but that is OK, it is only a demo plant. The key question, of course, is how much extra coal is burnt to achieve this? This vital fact is not clearly provided. The 1.5% is clear And now roughly 1.5 percent of the CO2 billowing from its stack is being captured... but the other half is vague: But the primary benefits of the chilled-ammonia process for capturing CO2 are lower electricity and steam consumption, compared with other potential technologies for carbon capture, such as using amines, another ammonia compound, which can consume as much as 30 percent of the plant's power just to run, says Shawn Black, product manager for Alstom. The goal here is to get that number down to under 15 percent. So is that 15% of 1.5%, which seems to good to be true, or 15% of the total, which seems too bad to be true?

Wiki says Capturing and compressing CO2 requires much energy and would increase the fuel needs of a coal-fired plant with CCS by 25%-40%.[2] These and other system costs are estimated to increase the cost of energy from a new power plant with CCS by 21-91%.[2] That is more in line with what I was expecting. [2] turns out to be a 2005 IPCC report. Their table SPM 3 (yes, its true, I didn't get very far through) says that coal, sans CCS, is 0.04-0.05 $/kWh, and 0.06-0.10 with CCS and geological storage. The Sci Am article is consistent with that, saying Cleaner coal will be more expensive, too, adding at least 4 cents per kilowatt-hour to the power Mountaineer produces at roughly 5 cents per kWh. So I think they do mean 15% or 1.5%, but are probably being optimistic.

Clearly, until carbon acquires a sensible price (hopefully via a carbon tax) these plants will not be commercially viable.

In other news, Mars looks good.

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Wadhams on sea ice [Stoat]

William M. Connolley none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:54:27 -0500

Nothing new, but M pointed me at Greenman on sea ice which has a quote from Wadhams (starts around 5:00, quote around 5:20 I think) that is the "the arctic will be ice free in summer in 20 years" or words to that effect (which got noted in my Arctic to be 'ice-free in summer'?.

I still don't believe it, not that that matters. Watch the video anyway for a glimpse of Wadham's / SPRI's rather haphazrd filing system.

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The Challenge of Eating Sustainably: College Edition [The World's Fair]

Benjamin Cohen none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:15:00 -0500

Is It Possible to Eat Sustainably at the University of Virginia?

Eating sustainably requires (a) that you come to some resolution about what "sustainable" means, (b) that you have the opportunity to choose so-defined sustainable foods, and (c) that the constraints of your lifestyle, geography, and socioeconomic context make it possible for you to pursue such an endeavor. Threading the needle between all of that is tricky business. Thus many have chosen to run experiments about it, or related to the larger theme, defined in various ways: the "week without" processed food; the "week without" plastic; the "year" living on a local diet; the adventures of "No Impact Man." Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed books on that theme in a New Yorker essay at the end of the summer. Some students in a class I teach called "Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Agriculture" (here is the website the class made last semester) are trying it right now.

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New eruption overnight at Piton de la Fournaise [Eruptions]

Erik Klemetti none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:43:09 -0500

Piton de la Fournaise erupting on November 5, 2009. Image by Julian Balboni in Clicanoo.

Eruptions reader Richard Oliver pointed out to me that Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island erupted (in french) on Thursday night. The volcano produced at least two lava flows that ~~reached the ocean~~ flowed downslope to ~1970 m above sea level, but by Friday morning, the seismicity and eruptive activity had waned considerably. Local residents of the island went out at night to see (in french) the lava flows, with the typical words of warning from local officials. The timeline for the eruption (in french) looks like this (all local time):

20:50 - An eruption begins in the south cliff inside the Dolomieu crater
21:05 - The crack extends and opens on the southern flank near the edge of the Dolomieu crater
21:20 - A second crack opened on the eastern slope of the cone summit of the Piton de la Fournaise (Marco crater).

By the middle of the night, two lava flows were visible on the flanks of the volcano. However, new reports say that by 9:00 on Friday morning, the harmonic tremors at Piton had returned to normal. Yesterday (Thursday) morning, the volcano did experience a M3 earthquake (in french), ~12 hours before it started to erupt, suggesting that this seismicity might have triggered the eruption (or the earthquake was a result of the eruption process - a bit of chicken and egg). However, the volcano had been inflating over the past few weeks, so it seems that an eruption was becoming more likely. This is the first eruption at Piton de la Fournaise since January of this year.

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Earthquakes within plates: we don't know when, and we may not know where [Highly Allochthonous]

Chris Rowan none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:11:06 -0500

Ed has already given the lowdown on a new study in Nature which might lead to a rethink on earthquake hazards in the continental interior. Plate tectonics treats plates as entirely rigid entities, but continental crust is too weak, and too riddled with faults left over from when it was close to a plate boundary, for it to entirely hold up when subjected to the stresses of plate motion. So although a very large proportion of the Earth's earthquakes occur at plate boundaries, there is also some seismicity - including some very large shocks - within plate interiors. The problem is working out where this intraplate deformation is going to occur, and to do so seismologists rely on data which serve them well at plate boundaries - the historical record of large earthquakes, and the location of low-level seismic activity which indicates the build up of tectonic strain.

What Stein and Liu argue in their paper is that away from the plate boundaries, these tools provide a very misleading picture. In apparently active parts of the continental interior like the New Madrid area, all the abnormal seismicity can be regarded as a long-lived aftershock sequence; rather than indicating any new elastic strain being built up by external forces, which could eventually produce another large earthquake in the future, the seismicity is just a local tectonic response to a historically recent large earthquake (in New Madrid's case, it was a series of magnitude 7-8 earthquakes in late 1811 and early 1812), and will eventually die off with time.

This conclusion is a little worrying, since it implies that the next big intra-continental quake might well occur in what presently seems to be a seismically inactive region, which, given the density of old faults cutting through your typical chunk of continental crust, could be almost anywhere. We already know the difficulties of predicting when big earthquakes are going to occur, but it seems that in the middle of plates, predicting where they are going to happen might also be a bit more tricky than we thought. However, a caveat remains: the proposed length of a typical intra-continental aftershock sequence is hundreds of years, which is much longer than our instrumental records, and even historical records in many places. The authors do point out that earthquake patterns in China, which has the best historical record, is of single large quakes in different areas (with last year's Sichuan quake being the most recent) rather than a series of large earthquakes associated with a particular fault; perhaps palaeoseimology can show whether a similar pattern holds further back in time and on other continents.

Stein, S., & Liu, M. (2009). Long aftershock sequences within continents and implications for earthquake hazard assessment Nature, 462 (7269), 87-89 DOI: 10.1038/nature08502

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Josh Jones Studied Whales and Dolphins in The Garbage Patch (video) [A Blog Around The Clock]

Coturnix none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:47:10 -0500

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Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands [Neuron Culture]

David Dobbs none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:57:45 -0500

Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

The Maldives, featured in a Wired gallery of islands shot from space. A place crucial to the story I told in Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong. It's also a singularly beautiful place, and particularly threatened by global warming.
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"On vacation" open thread, play nice! [A Few Things Ill Considered]

coby none@example.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:33:47 -0800

So I will be in Fiji for a one week stop over on my way home from Tasmania to Vancouver and I do not expect to have much internet access and/or time. I think I will schedule a few "Climate Crock" posts for edumusement but otherwise no one will be minding the store here. (that unfortunately includes this Monday's "Another week of GW news" which will have to go up asap the week after next.)

So feel free to raise any topics for discussion here but try to play fair (that goes double for all you Turkish spampots out there!).

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Plants and Bacteria 'Talk' to Thwart Disease [Tomorrow's Table]

Pamela Ronald none@example.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:05:56 -0500

In plant and animal innate immunity, like many of the dances of life, it takes two to tango. A receptor molecule in the plant pairs up with a specific molecule on the invading bacteria and, presto, the immune system swings into action to defend against the invasion of the disease-causing microbe.

Unwrapping some of the mystery from how plants and bacteria communicate in this dance of immunity, hardworking scientists in my laboratory here at the University of California, Davis, have identified the bacterial molecule that matches up with a specific receptor in rice plants to ward off a devastating disease known as bacterial blight of rice.

The publication describing these results will appear tomorrow in the journal Science.

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SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 10/28-11/3/2009 [Eruptions]

Erik Klemetti none@example.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:33:04 -0500

The latest of volcano news from around the world, brought to you by the USGS and Smithsonian Institute Global Volcanism Program (and especially Sally Kuhn Sennert!)

Highlights this week include:

Karangetang in Indonesia produced a couple 3 km/10,000 foot steam-and-ash plumes according to reports from pilots.
Soufriere Hills on the island on Montserrat has had quite a few pyroclastic flows over the last few weeks since the volcano started erupting again. Mix that with some heavy rainfall and lahars were produced as well.
The alert level is still at Orange at Karymsky in Kamchatka, which produced a number of ~3.7 km/12,100 foot ash plumes.
Lava flows from the Thanksgiving Eve Breakout at Kilauea continued to flow towards the ocean, while the Halema'uma'u vent continued to steam from the lava pond near the surface at the vent. The NASA Earth Observatory posted an image today of the current Kilauea lava flows.
The alert level at Anak Krakatau in Indonesia were lowered this week, back to 2 (out of 4) after both seismicity and plumes have tailed off since August.

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The rifting of Africa [Eruptions]

Erik Klemetti none@example.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:16:55 -0500

Lava flows from the 2005 Mando Hararo eruption in Ethiopia.

Alright, I had been attempting to ignore this story because it was, well, a little uninteresting at first, but it apparently has legs so I will tackle it.

Slashdot has a post proclaiming:
'Volcanic activity may split the African continent in two, creating a new ocean, say experts. This is due to a recent geological crack which has appeared in northeastern Ethiopia.'

OK. Where do I start?

This is based on a recent study published in Geophysical Research Lettersthat found that the recent volcanism in Ethiopia is related to the active rifting up and down the east side of the continental - an area already known as the Ethiopian/East African Rift. The continent is known to be pulling apart, forming the valleys and deep lakes (like Lake Malawi and Victoria) that have active volcanoes like Oldoinyo Lengai in them. This is nothing new, we've known that Africa is splitting apart for decades - and the rifting has been going on for millions of years.

From what I can gather from the study, the real find is that the fissures formed during the 2005 eruptions at Mando Hararo in Ethiopia are actually part of that rifting - i.e., the crack is part of the "crack" that is splitting the continent. This is not to say that the rifting is starting NOW due to the crack - rather that the fissure is a new manifestation of the active rifting between Africa and the Arabian subcontinent. As with most fissures in actively rifting area, magma came up the cracks - always nice to have ready-made conduits - so this process of cracking and erupting is akin to what we might expect at a mid-ocean ridge (except, at this point, on a continent).

So yes, at some point in the future, water from likely the Red Sea (also an actively rifting and growing ocean) will spill into the East African Rift system and create a new "ocean." However, this process has been going on for millions of years and to come out and misconstrue the study by Ayele and others in GRL as saying that the activity in 2005 started the rifting or that the crack is the "start" of a new ocean just shows that the mainstream media (a) doesn't know how to read science beyond what other media are saying about it and (b) how quickly the real findings of a study can be lost in the murk of speculation.

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Earthquake hazard mitigation the Iranian way [Highly Allochthonous]

Chris Rowan none@example.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0500

The Guardian reports that the Iranian government has approved plans for a new capital city. It seems this decision was at least partially driven by fears that the present capital, Tehran, is facing some serious earthquake hazard in the future:

Plans for a new capital were first drawn up 20 years ago, but officials only gave them serious consideration after the 2003 earthquake that devastated the south-eastern city of Bam and killed an estimated 40,000 people. Experts warn that Tehran sits on at least 100 faultlines - including one nearly 60 miles long - and that many of its buildings would not survive a major quake.

Iran is part of the Alpine-Himalyan Belt, formed as the African, Arabian and Indo-Australian plates all push northwards into Eurasia. In Iran, seismicity is concentrated in the Zagros mountains in the south and the Alborz mountains in the North, with both of these mountain belts apparently being actively uplifted as they accommodate plate convergence.

Tehran, with a population of about 12 million people, is located just on the southern edge of the Alborz mountains, and a map of the major faults in the area shows that it is surrounded on all sides by sizeable thrust faults.

So, at first glance a relocation seems like a fairly foresighted strategy, even if a cynic (who, me?) might wonder if the move encompasses more than the political elite and their associated minions. But population centres do not generally spring up at random; there are usually strategic and/or economic reasons that people have settled in a particular location, and once established they tend to suck in ever more people and investment as time goes on. Add to that our general inertia in the face of abstract future risk (just look at the response to climate change) and you have to wonder if people will be all that willing to move. There's also the question of how the cost of abandoning all the infrastructure incorporated into a large city like Tehran, and building a whole new infrastructure in your new city, compares to the cost of increasing peoples' safety by enforcing robust building codes: after all, earthquakes don't kill people, collapsing buildings do*.

In the long term, of course, it makes sense to move as much of your population as possible from areas of high seismic risk to low risk areas, by encouraging investment in geologically safer areas and letting economic migration rebalance the population over a generation or three. Sadly, I suspect urban planning is generally driven by somewhat narrower, short-term factors; if building houses on flood plains is waved through without blinking, I can't see nearby faults giving people much pause.

*and tsunamis. But not in Tehran.

Geotagging (View all geotagged posts)

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Tiljander, again [Stoat]

William M. Connolley none@example.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:49:52 -0500

Tiljander and od^4 refer.

Over the past few days, it has become clear to me that the entire issue of "flipping" or "upside-down-ness" of the Tiljander proxy is a red-herring.

Here's why:

Imagine a climate proxy, accurate over the last 2kyr, that shows (for example, let us suppose) a warm period around 1000 AD and which, undisturbed, would show the recent warming. Further suppose for definiteness that this proxy is of such a nature that increases in the proxy value represent increases in temperature. Imagine this proxy is contaminated with non-climatic signal over the last 200 years, enough that the climatic signal is overwhelmed. Suppose that this contamination is of such a nature that it leads to a strong decrease in the values of the proxy over the last 200 years. Such a proxy (call it A), fed into the Mea algorithm, will be flipped over (due to its negative correlation with recent instrumental temperature) and will contribute a net cold influence around 1000 AD. How much it contributes will depend on how well it correlates to recent times.

Now imagine a similar proxy, except the nature of the non-climatic contamination is such as to add a strong increase over the last 200 years. We'll call it B. This time, the proxy won't be flipped over, because its correlation to recent times will be positive. But the variance into the past will be strongly de-weighted (because we've just added an artificially large postiive trend). So it will imply not much change around AD 1000. But now we see this, we can see that the same problem applies to series A: unless, by bizarre co-incidence, the negative non-climate signal just happens to match the true positive instrumental signal, the variance in the past will be wrong. And since we've had to assume that the non-climate signal overwhelms the climate one, its likely that the recent variance will be too large, so the past will be de-weighted.

So in either case we can see that the real problem is the addition of the non-climate signal. The flipping is of little relevance.

Note to the Fanboyz: the comment policy will be vigourously applied. If you don't like it, DenialDepot is your friend. Note to everyone else: don't bother reply to comments you know I'm going to delete ;-)]

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Bjorn Lomborg launches campaign against logic [The Island of Doubt]

James Hrynyshyn none@example.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:54:33 -0500

(Pseudo)-Skeptical Environmental Bjorn Lomborg advises in the Wall Street Journal that spending money on anti-malarial campaigns makes more sense than, and by implication is morally superior to, spending money on cutting carbon emissions. But to make his case, he has to abandon all hope of ever being invited to join the Vulcan Science Academy.

It may be true that every dollar we spend combating the vectors of malaria and the treatments for it will save more lives than those who would be spared the disease if we spend it instead on avoiding catastrophic global warming. But Lomborg is abandons all logic when he writes:

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AGU Workshop on Communicating Climate Change: Media, Dialogue, and Public Engagement [Framing Science]

Matthew C. Nisbet none@example.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:28:04 -0500

For their upcoming annual meetings in San Francisco, the American Geophysical Union is sponsoring a pre-conference workshop introducing scientists, public information officers, journalists, and other attendees to several areas of social science research that examine dimensions of climate change communication and public engagement.

Below the fold are the details and the conference page is here. You can sign up for the workshop by visiting this page. It promises to be a great event and I am looking forward to the ideas, connections, and discussion that it generates.

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Tweetlinks, 11-03-09 [A Blog Around The Clock]

Coturnix none@example.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:01:04 -0500

Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time (all my tweets are also imported into FriendFeed where they are much more easy to search and comment on, as well as into my Facebook wall where they are seen by quite a different set of people):

The future of news is entrepreneurial

Tribune Co. papers rewiring for experimental week without AP

Politicians Use Social Media to Bypass the Press Corps

The first great mammoth

Welcome to ScienceOnline2010

Worth Watching - three great eco movies for the weekend.

The End of Impact Factors as a Measure of Research Quality

Genes as weather vanes for disease

Good news - Dan Delong will be back in the classroom today

GOP Rep.: Health Reform Scarier Than Terrorists

And the Healthcare Reform Disaster Continues...

NIH seeds scientific networking projects with $27M

DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: How we did

Research subjects should have access to their own data

The Obamas' Marriage and Questioning the mom in chief

Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King (for a Time)

Retrospective News: An Example - The Garbage Patch Story

Pay walls never may come at some papers

One in five mammal species on extinction 'red list'

This is sick: Doctor: I built myself a wife

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Mystery Volcano Photo #11 [Eruptions]

Erik Klemetti none@example.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:00:10 -0500

You know, we haven't had an MVP in a couple weeks. Let's remedy that!

Current standings:
volcanista - 1
Elizabeth - 1
Ralph - 1
gijs - 1
Anne - 1
Cam - 1
gg - 1
The Bobs - 1
Boris Behncke - 1
Don Crain - 1

Here's MVP #11 ... good luck!

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Andrew Revkin and Katie Couric on Gore's Choice [Framing Science]

Matthew C. Nisbet none@example.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:45:52 -0500

Over at Dot Earth, the NY Times Andrew Revkin has a good round up and preview on Gore's new book Our Choice. His post also includes an embedded 30 minute interview between Katie Couric and Gore on his new book. Of interest, Couric asks Gore if he thinks the climate debate has been too technical and if there is a need to simplify and appeal to emotions. She also asks Gore about the recent Pew climate survey, which Gore describes as an outlier, asserting that public will and support for action are actually on the rise rather than in decline, as the Pew poll indicates.

I will be picking up my copy of Gore's book tomorrow night at his talk at Lisner Auditorium on the George Washington University campus.

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