Environment

The ecological cost of subsidies

The declining condition of our fisheries is in large part due to the floating factories that pass for fishing boats now.  Using unsustainable methods, they “sweep the sea clean”, as The Simpson’s Montgomery Burns likes to say.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Turns out those monster fishing boats depend on subsidies granted for political, rather than economic or ecological reasons.  Shifting Baselines has the story: Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-scale Fisheries...

Small-scale fisheries use much less fuel than industrial fisheries. They also discard fewer fish, convert almost none of their catch into fishmeal (to feed farmed fish, pigs, and chicken), and favor the use of labor over capital. Despite these more ‘sustainable’ traits, small-scale fisheries are disadvantaged by subsidies that go to industrial fishing fleets and keep big boats out on the water. This bias occurs because, as Daniel Pauly says, “small-scale fishers don’t golf.”

The differential in resource efficiency between large and small fisheries is really quite striking - go check it out.

If we stopped all long-term production subsidies tomorrow, corn would still be grown, cars would still be built, oil would still be pumped out of the ground, minerals would still be mined, and fish would still be caught.  If any specific commodity cost more, at least consumers would pay for it directly instead of through taxes.

This would leave short-term subsidies, intended to weather a crisis or jump-start an industry deemed important for whatever reason.  And those subsidies, like a gallon of (subsidized) milk, should have expiration dates on them.

Posted by George on 09/13/08 at 04:42 PM
Science & Technology • Environment • (5) Comments • Link

Charcoal and topsoil loss

When I read stories like “Where Food Begins” I want to add National Geographic to the president’s reading list. Because, his one-page “intelligence briefings” just aren’t doing the job.  Here’s a real, tangible threat to national and global security - one we can do something about for very little money (but which the free market won’t fix) - so you’d think that “conservatives” would want to do something about it.

Turns out, the ancient Amazonians knew how to do something about it.  They systematically buried pottery and charcoal in their fields over a two thousand year period.  Weird, but get this - the result was rich soil six feet deep instead of 8 inches like the rest of the Amazon basin.  And if we did something similar in our mechanized fields, we could lock up enough carbon in the soil to offset a huge chunk of our carbon dioxide output in the bargain. 

See also:

Posted by George on 08/24/08 at 09:15 AM
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“500-year flood”

I often see news stories that say, “Scientists estimate that last week’s deluge was a 500-year flood”.  But that doesn’t make much sense; there was a 500-year flood in 1993 and we’re having another one now.  What gives?

Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous says big surprise, the scientists never said “500-year flood’, or at least they’re learning not to after the media grabs their conclusions and twists them into sensationalistic headlines.

Here’s the short version: events that are both extreme and semi-random are impossible to predict in a given year, so we express them as a probability.  As in, “the probability of a river flow matching this rate is .002 in any given year.”  News creatures hear that statement, think back to junior high math and think; “That’s one in 500!  That means a flood like this one occurs every 500 years!” 

No it doesn’t, any more than it means that every other flip of a coin will be ‘heads’.  And - as data becomes available, extrapolations give way to observations and the probability estimates are revised.  The long version, and the comments following, are well worth reading as an antidote to the chattering journalistic class.

Posted by George on 06/19/08 at 09:29 PM
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Go for a walk today

image

I always appreciate seeing people move under their own power, however they do it.  One student at the College Of Business even carries a skateboard around.  Wouldn’t it be fun to see corporate executives riding to work on skateboards, rollerblades, bicycles?  We have muscles, folks; let’s use ‘em!

Posted by George on 04/22/08 at 06:45 AM
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We’re OK… really! (Earthquake)

A friend emailed MrsDoF from Florida (land of mammoth hurricanes) to see if we were OK.  Central Illinois had an Earthquake a few hours ago - a 5.4.  That’s enough to rattle windows, wake a few people up but most buildings are up to the challenge.  The quake was felt as far away as Wisconsin and Ohio.  But I must have been snoozing because I didn’t know about it.  Lucas is down in Urbana, a little closer to the epicenter; maybe he’ll give us a report.

Our region has had one real smack-down of a quake, though, in 1812.  (Actually two big quakes followed by one staggeringly enormous one) Estimated at an 8.0 on the Richter scale, it cracked sidewalks in Washington, DC and rang church bells in Boston.  Around here it changed the course of the Mississippi and even toppled resilient buildings like log cabins.

I can’t remember exactly how the Richter scale works and right now instead of geeking out over it I have to rush off to work.  But the New Madrid quake of 1812 was several thousand times as powerful as today’s quake. If the same quake happened today…

Anyone notice the quake?  Or been through another quake?  Tell us about it!

Notes & Updates:

Posted by George on 04/18/08 at 06:45 AM
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Of no small importance to New Orleans, I would think

We have been getting some serious tonnage of water in our county.  Luckily, McLean county drains well, but that’s not so lucky for our neighbors downstream.  The ground is saturated, lakes are full (and I wish we could send that water to Alabama!  They really need it.)

Robert E. Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, says MidWesterners have not learned “the lesson of geologic reality”.  He says levees that support an unrealistic expectation of security when building on flood plains.  I bet he doesn’t get invited to many urban developer Christmas parties but someday people will ask; “Why didn’t we listen to him?!”

Posted by George on 04/13/08 at 04:40 AM
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The concept of shifting baselines

We humans are not good at observing gradual change.  Things tend to sneak up on us: it’s how a lean, healthy 20-year-old becomes an obese, arthritic 50-year-old.  The same is true in our perception of the natural environment.  We look out across the bay and it looks pretty, so we assume everything is OK.  But what if there are less than ten percent of the fish remaining from 50 years ago?  We can’t see the fish, and we didn’t know there were so many there in the first place…

(Hat tip to: Shifting Baselines)

Posted by George on 04/12/08 at 11:11 AM
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And I thought driving across Kansas was an accomplishment…

Scientists studying the movement of glaciers in Antarctica;

Julian Scott has just returned from there. He told the BBC: “This is a very important glacier; it’s putting more ice into the sea than any other glacier in Antarctica. “It’s a couple of kilometres thick, its 30km wide and it’s moving at 3.5km per year, so it’s putting a lot of ice into the ocean.”

It is a very remote and inhospitable region. It was visited briefly in 1961 by American scientists but no one had returned until this season when Julian Scott and Rob Bingham and colleagues from the British Antarctic survey spent 97 days camping on the flat, white ice. At times, the temperature got down to minus 30C and strong winds made work impossible. At one point, the scientists were confined to their tent continuously for eight days.

“The wind really makes the way you feel incredibly colder, so just motivating yourself to go out in the wind is a really big deal,” Rob Bingham told BBC News.

When the weather improved, the researchers spent most of their time driving skidoos across the flat, featureless ice. “We drove skidoos over it for something like 2,500km each and we didn’t see a single piece of topography.”  (emphasis mine)

Holy frozen mackerel…  imagine making a fifteen-hundred mile trip on a frakkin’ snowmobile across a featureless sub-zero wasteland to gather data on ice movement.  The next time somebody tells me that scientists go into climate and geophysical studies because they get rich from academic grants, I’m gonna choke from laughing.

 

 

Posted by George on 02/23/08 at 09:41 PM
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History of global warming denialism

The denialist campaign has experience, I’ll give them that.

“Polls show that between one-third and one-half of Americans still believe that there is “no solid” evidence of global warming, or that if warming is happening it can be attributed to natural variability. Others believe that scientists are still debating the point. Join scientist and renowned historian Naomi Oreskes as she describes her investigation into the reasons for such widespread mistrust and misunderstanding of scientific consensus and probes the history of organized campaigns designed to create public doubt and confusion about science. Series: Perspectives on Ocean Science”

Whichever “side” of the global warming issue you find yourself, this video is really worth the hour that it runs.  The first half is the history of global warming research and of the IPCC, and the second half is about the organized campaign to discredit climate science.  (Tip of the hat to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit)

Posted by George on 02/15/08 at 09:15 PM
Science & Technology • Environment • (12) Comments • Link

Asimov on climate change

Most people know Isaac Asimov as a science fiction writer, but his more than 500 works are listed in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey decimal system.  In particular he wrote a number of nonfiction science books, some more technical than others and of which I have twenty or so.  His writing style is a model of crystal clarity that I wish more authors would attempt to emulate.

In 1973 Dell Publishing printed a collection of Isaac Asimov’s essays from Science Digest magazine, called Please Explain.  My copy is dog-eared and falling apart, but the other day I was looking for some bedtime reading and began flipping through it.  A couple of the essays caught my eye - one on the consequences of Earth’s ice caps melting, and another describing the greenhouse effect. 

If the essays are listed in the order that Science Digest printed them, both these essays would both be from 1967.  They are entitled “What would happen if the ice caps melted?” and “What is the greenhouse effect?”  Of course a great deal of new information has been learned and computer modelling has much improved since Asimov typed these essays on his beloved IBM Selectric typewriter, but it is interesting and fun to see how the ‘great explainer’ addressed the questions:

33: What would happen if the ice caps melted?
The earth’s land areas carry a load of nearly 9 million cubic miles of ice (about 85 percent of it on the continent of Antarctica).  Since water is somewhat denser than ice, this load of ice would melt down to about 8 million cubic miles of water…

Continued...

Posted by George on 02/02/08 at 11:46 AM
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Monday Morning Music - “time has come ~ to say fair’s fair…”

Meet Australia’s new Minister Of Environment, Heritage, and Arts

Yep, Peter Garrett, the Aussie Labor Party representative best known as the lead singer from Midnight Oil is now the Environment Minister Down Under.  No lightweight celebrity, he actually is qualified to lay down the law and make it stick, a politician who is also a musician.

How did this happen?  Australia is in deep trouble, and climate-change denial has gotten a bloody nose from reality.  They’re only a mile or so ahead of us on the same road we’re traveling.

Posted by George on 12/31/07 at 10:42 AM
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The view from way up high

I admit to being a gawker at times, though I am careful to stay the hell out of emergency personnel’s way.  But if you want a clear view of what’s going on, or at least a broader perspective, it’s hard to beat the view from up high somewhere.

Like NASA’s view from orbit, for instance. Be sure to click on the “full view” if you have broadband.
(From Discovering Biology in a digital world)

Posted by George on 10/24/07 at 07:05 AM
Science & Technology • Environment • (2) Comments • Link

Blog Action Day

At first sight, “Blog Action Day” sounds like “Jumbo Shrimp” or “Compassionate Conservative”, but hey, dudes, think about it!!!!!!!!!!!!

I mean, like, if we could, like get all the bloggers at once to blog on ONE topic, all at once, it’d like, totally freak out the man, dude!!!!!

Today’s Blog Action Day is for the environment.  We’re all supposed to ‘blog about the environment’ today.  Well OK, though it makes a hell of an assumption about what “bloggers” think about “the environment”.  So here goes.  I’ll just post a quote:

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
- Herbert George Wells

There.  I blogged about the environment. 

(OK, I guess it is important to talk about stuff.  As long as we also do stuff.  Recycle an aluminum can today, OK?  And air up the tires on your bicycle.  Try using it for actual transportation once in a while.)

Posted by George on 10/15/07 at 06:57 AM
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What your parents obviously neglected


When I was a kid, one of the attitudes I absorbed from my dad was that dropping litter was a sign of slovenly and disreputable character.  Anyone who would just leave their trash lying around was acting like the world belonged to them when plainly, it doesn’t.

So, cigarette-butt tossing person, McDonald’s bag tossing person, Starbucks’ Frappuccino-cup tossing person, KNOCK IT OFF ALREADY!!!  There’s a trash can right over there!!!

Posted by George on 10/05/07 at 02:04 PM
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The illusion of stability

The world is full of “spiritual” writers with their deep insights about our connection to this and that, or overworked and misused terminology they’ve stolen, not borrowed, from quantum mechanics.  Reading Deepak Chopra or Gary Zukav waving their incense and auras is like eating cheese puffs - artificial coloring, hydrogenated fats, and not a nutrient in sight.

At the other extreme, some of the most profound and moving written works I have ever read were from real scientists and science writers.  There is a discipline in reality that gives strength to awe.  Chris Clarke of Creek Running North is one of that guild.  He has the discipline to get his facts straight.  He also spends an awful lot of time out in the desert, watching.  Here is an excerpt from his latest session:

“...The desert has been working on me the whole time. It is a matter of thresholds. At some point the pressure becomes too great. Running this morning, the fence lizards that lined my path saw me coming from some yards away, and yet they did not retreat stealthily, methodically. Instead they froze in place until the terror I instilled in them became too great. A trigger reached when the clomping of my clumsy feet became too much to bear, they exploded one by one into noisy flight.

This is the geometry of change in the natural world. Continuous change is uncommon, and where found it is usually part of a cycle, the increase by small increments…”
Excerpted from Chris Clarke’s essay; There is no balance of Nature

The full essay is a scientific meditation on instability and change in the biological world.  It is an antidote to oversimplification.  It is beautiful.

Posted by George on 09/05/07 at 09:39 PM
Science & Technology • Environment • (2) Comments • Link
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