Rhinocrisy

Some of you may already be familiar with Earth Hour, an effort pioneered by the Australians to increase awareness about global warming by symbolically turning off all lights in participating major cities around the world for one hour. It occurs on April 1 (already a great day, now even better) of each year, going since 2007.

When I heard about this my first thought was - “Holy shit! Dark sky!” After all, who gives a toss about stopping catastrophic climate change when there’s the possibility of seeing a really spectacular starry sky? As I’ve hinted here before, I’m more or less committed to sidereal worship, and it’s long been a fantasy of mine to become Lord Commander of Earth so that I can impose just such a venture (viz., forced blackouts) on major cities. I mean, check out the pathetic Bortle Scale map of North America. A guy like me hasn’t a chance in this country.

Or so I thought! But, cloaked in the guise of “environmentalism”, I can advance my umbratory agenda. It seems that Chicago is already on board, and certain other cities seem like ripe targets to follow. If things continue in this vein, I may even abandon my plans to sabotage certain transformers on Walpurgis Night.

This story documents some interesting research — turns out that rather than dedicate vast tracts of land to fueling cars, it would make more sense from a carbon point of view to let the farms revert to forest and continue using fossil fuels for cars.

Strange. I was reading about the Venezuelan terrorist just freed on bail when I saw this Google Ad at the bottom of the screen that said something like “Coffins for everyone!” I had to click. It was for these mass-casualty coffins, easily folded and stacked and then assembled and stacked again. Clever! Too bad they are 100% tropical hardwood. Boo hiss. What’s wrong with a pine box?

But on the topic of the terrorist, it’s sad to see liberals agitating against Posada’s bail. I agree he should face murder and terror charges at least, if not extradition to Cuba or Venezuela. But bail is ok. I don’t support the hypocrisy of letting a CIA asset right-wing nutjob off the hook for terrorism. But I do support bail for all, even those facing terror charges. Prisons suck.

I know how low my expectations of U.S. government have fallen when, upon reading this report, I am not only furious but also relieved, like the time I hurled up a burger that had been out too long.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board decided to slam oil company BP for screwing the pooch on safety at its Texas City, Texas refinery and contributing to an explosion that killed 15 people and injured 180 in 2005. Their press release is terrifying. It says a tanker-truck worth of flammable hydrocarbons spewed out of a vat in less than two minutes. It vaporized and spread over the property before being ignited and bang. “High overpressures from the resulting vapor cloud explosion totally destroyed 13 trailers and damaged 27 others. People inside trailers were injured as far as 479 feet away from the blowdown drum, and trailers nearly 1000 feet away sustained damage.”

It wasn’t surprising that fuels can burn and even explode. Or that refineries might suffer from design flaws. The two surprises were how open the investigators were about negligence by the oil company and in recommending federal regulation as a cure.

For BP’s part, here was a particularly damning section:

the refinery only investigated three of the eight known previous ISOM blowdown release incidents, where flammable and potentially explosive vapor was released from the same blowdown drum involved in the March 23 accident. In 2004, an internal BP audit graded the refinery’s analysis of incident information as “poor.”

And there was that subhead, “Dysfunctional Safety Culture Existed at All Levels of BP,” followed by lines like “BP executives made spending cuts without assessing the safety impact of those decisions.”

I know I’m not including BP’s side of the story here, because my point isn’t to provide a news story. I’m just pleased that any U.S. federal agency would speak such clear truth to power. And even more surprised that they would call on the government, rather than voluntary industry action, as the remedy. They did so in a section called “OSHA Should Increase Petrochemical Inspections, Enforcement.”

Proposed OSHA fines during the twenty years preceding the March 2005 disaster - a period when ten fatalities occurred at the refinery - totaled $270,255; net fines collected after negotiations totaled $77,860….

Federal OSHA conducted only nine [in depth, multi-week] inspections [between 1995 and 2005], and none in the refining sector. State agencies in the 26 states that operate their own workplace safety programs conducted a total of 48 [such] inspections, including six at refineries. However, a number of states - including Texas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, where much of the U.S. oil and chemical industry is concentrated - rely upon federal OSHA to enforce workplace safety rules….

California’s Contra Costa County, which has its own industrial safety ordinance, inspects each covered facility every three years. A county staff of five engineers performs an average of 16 inspections per year.

I can think of a few other places where the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s straightforward analysis could come in handy.

Previously we lamented the ease with which scientific theories on the subject of evolution can be smudged in the public eye, and how simple it is for a disingenuous party to skew the proportions of a “debate”, especially given an ideologically-predisposed audience. Fortunately, other domains of science are vulnerable to the same tactics, so we biologists are not alone.

A case in point: the recently-released documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, aired on the UK’s Channel 4, is earning wild praise all over the [expletive deleted] for finally debunking that pesky global warming myth once and for all. Thanks to the miracle of science, you can actually view this documentary in full. Which I did!^*

The piece is full of errors (and also full of infuriatingly snide and self-satisfied men). I was forced to flip my LCD monitor the bird a couple of times. The most egregious, in my estimation, was a little segment talking about how carbon dioxide makes up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere (including the good old bit about how water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas, so why should we pay CO₂ so much attention?), and anyway anthropogenic carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of the total CO₂ released into the atmosphere every year, swamped by the amount released by volcanoes and decaying plant matter. This is hopelessly insulting if you even know how to spell “science”. Real Climate has a decent thrashing, plus more in comments.

Then it gets weird: the documentary concludes by positing that this is all an effort on the part of the first world to keep the Third World down. Say what? The environmental movement is fighting against big business and First World governments to keep the Third World down?

The producer of the piece is a guy named Martin Durkin, whose inglorious production history is apparently firmly wedded to controversy. Curiously enough, it turns out that he’s closely associated with a band currently called “Spiked” (their hagiographic piece on the documentary is here), previously known as “LM”. A.k.a. “Living Marxism”. George Monbiot reveals that this is apparently the product of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist unit you might be familiar with. Apparently the RCP feels that the environmental movement is the spearhead of the Western effort to crush Third World development, and is doing what it can to stymie this evil green tide (though evidently the news has not reached all quarters).

Loopy Maoists aside, it’s astonishing how easy it is to make and distribute a documentary like this these days. (You may have noted the similarly-styled documentary “Loose Change“.) The Internet is much better at transmitting than at producing novel ideas (cf. this post), meaning that the veneer of intelligence is often enough to allow something to go skating for miles and miles further than it otherwise might have. Note that the obverse is not necessarily better; the majority of global warming believers likely take it on faith, having received the gospel from Al Gore or some other cherished apostle.

This doesn’t speak well for contemporary discourse. But we shouldn’t be surprised by this state of affairs. Modern questions are often highly technical, and it’s really unremarkable that most people are unequipped with the means to parse them correctly. All of us defer to others in their areas of expertise, and in areas of contention it’s appealing to attend to the words of those experts that scratch our confirmation bias. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect people to be able to reach the right conclusions under those circumstances.

Daylight savings time starts tonight in the United States, 5 weeks earlier than it has in prior years. The theory behind the change was that it would save energy. The theory, from what I can tell, was based on studies that dated to the Nixon Administration. Like so much in the Bush Administration, it was a “no-brainer” fix, a painless step that seemed like a win-win. I bet you $1 that it turns out to be lose-lose.

The win-win idea was that it would cost little to implement the change, consumers would save money, and the U.S. would become more energy-independent. All of these are likely to turn out false.
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Or rather, food for cars.

I found it strange a few days ago, in this transcript of a conversation between Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, that the two of them agreed that ethanol was a horrible waste. Their reasoning was one I haven’t heard articulated outside of the disgruntled mumblings of luddites:

Hugo Chávez.- Do you know how many hectares of corn it takes to produce one million barrels of ethanol?Fidel Castro.- Of ethanol, I think you talked about 20 million hectares the other day, something like that (Laughter), but remind me.

Hugo Chávez.- Twenty million. No, you are the one with the exceptional mind.

Fidel Castro.- Ah, 20 million. Well, of course, the idea of using food for producing fuel is tragic, it is dramatic. Nobody is certain about what is going to happen with food prices, when soy is becoming a fuel, with the need there is in the world to produce eggs, to produce milk, to produce meat, and it is one more tragedy of the many that exist at this time.

But then there’s this:

An increase in the cost of tortillas, a staple of the Mexican diet since the Maya ruled 1,000 years ago, has triggered a slump in the peso.

Tortilla prices jumped 5.9 percent in January, the most in eight years, after costs climbed for corn, the main ingredient. That increase fanned inflation and a bond market rout that curbed demand for the currency. The peso has fallen 2.3 percent in the past month, making it the world’s second-worst performer against the dollar among the 70 currencies tracked by Bloomberg…

The peso may fall further in the next several months as corn prices continue to rise. Corn has soared 16 percent in the past eight weeks and 121 percent since late 2005 as demand for the grain grows from ethanol producers.

That’s not to say there’s no debate on the subject. But it’s pretty remarkable. Of all the reasons for corn prices in Mexico to finally rebound from their Nafta-depressed state, this is the most depressing. A need to feed cars.

Note: this blog beat me to the discussion.

Update: Saurabh, in comments, spots the impresarios’ math error. What’s two orders of magnitude when you’re in charge of a whole damn country? The basic point remains — consumption of corn for fuel, or speculation on corn because it’s now trendy to see it as an energy commodity rather than a boring old grocery store item, is screwing up Mexico.

It may seem as if we’ve resigned ourselves to being “All global warming, all the time!” here at Rhinocrisy. However, this is only illusory. Any random process, like the workings of a human or a hedge-hog brain, will naturally produce confluences which have the appearance of the miraculous, but are in fact the product of mere coincidence.^* We will shortly return to talking about jello sculptures and cow flatulence.^† Meanwhile, here’s a few bits on just how screwed we really are.

If you believe the science, this couldn’t matter more. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is coming out this year, and I’m sure most of you noted the release of the Summary for Policymakers on February 7th, which, with much fanfare, announced that it was the opinion of the scientific community, with 90% certainty, that humans are responsible for the current warming trend.

The projections are quite dire; by 2090, even the low estimate puts the temperature rise at 1.8^oC; mid-range estimates yield a mean shift of 2.4-3.4^oC. But note that this is average warming - the warming on land will be much sharper than warming over the oceans, ~4-5 ^oC, and in the Arctic it will be an astonishing 6-8 ^oC. To put this in persepective, the last Ice Age was about 5 to 7 ^o C from the modern temperature. And as Hedgy points out below, carbon cycle feedback will continue to contribute to warming despite our best efforts on quite long timescales (for us).

Meanwhile, the Policymakers themselves are not speaking in terms of halting or reversing our emissions, but rather in merely slowing their rate of growth.^‡ Just to be clear, this means we will emit more than we did last year or the year before, and next year we’ll emit even more - but the amount of our increase will be smaller. This is presumably a sensible way to look at things if you’re used to thinking in terms of continuous rates of growth and the creep of inflation. In this case, perhaps not so much.

The most concrete steps the Administration likes to crow about is “clean coal”. I wrote about this previously. Surprisingly, the amount they’ve spent on it is rather sparse; only $2.2 billion to date. The favored child of the DOE’s efforts in this regard is something called “FutureGen”, initially touted as a zero-emissions coal-based plant supposed to come online in 2012. Sounds dreamy. What does FutureGen say about this?

During normal operations, emissions will be as low as, if not lower than virtually any other coal plant in the world. However it should be noted that there may be criteria emissions, such as NOx, SO2, and particulates, when the plant is starting up and shutting down.

Here’s some icing on that cake: FutureGen is working hard to find sites for carbon dioxide injection, as part of the much-touted carbon sequestration program. Their minimum target is 1 million tons, but they hope to get as high as 50 million tons. How much CO₂ does the U.S. produce in a year? 5.8 billion tons. Yeah.

At this point you should do your best impression of Curly. Slap your face a few times. Go “woop woop woop woop!” Run around the room, possibly up and down a few walls.

Now that you’ve relaxed a bit, let’s review: coal is the major source of electricity generation in the United States. 50% of our power comes from coal. This number is only going to go up; demand is probably going up thanks to our continuing profligacy. And coal is attractive, despite its considerable environmental failings. It is abundant and cheap. It seems likely that the dozens of new plants that are going to be built in the upcoming years will be coal-based plants. So it’s somewhat distressing that the best result we can hope for out of this is that in ten years’ time, we’ll have almost no improvement whatsoever.

^* For example, if you are watching some re-runs of the X-Files with some friends, and then later that same day you are beamed up by space aliens.

^‡ E.g., see this White House open letter on climate change.

There is no shortage of clever ideas for solving climate change once and for all. I’m not talking about amateur-hour stuff like electric cars or planting lots of eucalyptus trees. I mean serious proposals with at least a little scientific backing that might screw everything up for everyone but would solve some aspect of climate change. They might prevent some of the tipping scary feedback loops from accelerating out of control. And the good news is they are guaranteed against any unforeseen effects. After all, everyone knows that reengineering the world’s climate is a simple, linear process that has no possibility of failure.

Here’s one that was presented at a scientific conference in December with the I-wish-I-were-joking title, “Are Salps A Silver Bullet Against Global Warming And Ocean Acidification?” No, the term “silver bullet” isn’t being used sarcastically. It’s a concept by this fellow to pump nutrients out of the deep ocean to increase the population of salps, strange jelly-like creatures, which then shit out lots of carbon-rich excreta which drop to the bottom of the sea, sea-questering it for “ever.” The nice inventors appear to be positioning themselves to make money with this kind of scheme when carbon credits go above $26 a ton, as companies will pay them big bucks to sequester carbon so they can keep pumping out more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Another idea is to spray sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere to reflect light and “counterbalance most of the warming associated with the greenhouse gas forcing. Surface temperatures return to within a few tenths of a degree(K) of present day levels. Sea ice and precipitation distributions are also much closer to their present day values. The polar region surface temperatures remain 1-3 degrees warm in the winter hemisphere than present day values.” They note that they didn’t study “the important ethical, legal, and moral issues that are associated with deliberate geo-engineering efforts.”

Thanks to Saurabh, master of all things bloggy, I am writing my first post in months. First a little update: I am semi-retired as I am going through a job transfer that is likely to leave me on a different continent. I have spent recent weeks rummaging through my burrow, realizing how closely related hedgehogs are to packrats. Meanwhile I have outsourced all of my blog needs to Jonathan at Tiny Revolution, who has been doing a yeoman’s job of smiling into the apocalypse.

Speaking of the apocalypse, here is the best news I’ve heard in ages:

The relative lifetimes of CO2 and aerosol in the atmosphere result in the expectation that reducing fossil fuel use will accelerate warming. A CO2 molecule has a lifetime of about 100 years in the atmosphere, while an aerosol particle has an average life expectancy of only about 10 days. Therefore, if we instantaneously ceased using combustion engines, the (cooling) fossil fuel-related aerosols would be cleaned out of the atmosphere within weeks, while the (warming) CO2 would remain much longer, leaving a net positive forcing from the reduction in emissions for a century or more.

Meanwhile, this quote from Colorado:

“I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

Colorado? Yes, the source of such gigglers as this:

The Greeley Tribune has agreed to end a years-old practice of copying stories from competing newspapers and falsely labeling them as Associated Press stories, the newspaper’s publisher said today….the practice began several years ago when Chris Cobler was the newspaper’s editor. Cobler is currently overseeing the paper’s online operations and announced this week that he was leaving to take a job with the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Fla., organization that provides training programs for professional journalists….Cobler agreed the practice was unethical and said it was his fault if it happened on his watch, but added repeatedly that he had not been the editor for 18 months.