NNadir
NNadir's JournalNature: "Current models of climate economics assume that lives in the future are less important...
than lives today, a value judgement that is rarely scrutinized and difficult to defend..."
This language comes from a news feature "focus" article from Nature featured on this issues cover: Nature, Vol. 539 Iss. 7591 pg 397 (2016)
The issue, at least in its news and viewpoint sections, is devoted to reflections on scientists' need to reflect on how their work will impact future generations.
One "news" article asks the question, "Should parents edit their children's genes." Nature 530, 402405 (25 February 2016) It now seems perfectly technologically feasible to do so, owing to the invention of CRISPR-Cas, a technique using complementary genetic material to carry a protein which is a nuclease, designed to clip sections of DNA enabling the insertion of other genes.
This has very high potential to edit the genome in a very facile and efficient way, not only humans, but practically every other high species on the planet. Ultimately it is a technology by which humanity could, were it so inclined, design its own ecosystem and all of the creatures in it?
Were this technology fully developed when the embryo that ultimately became me, my parents might have considered snipping and replacing the gene for type II diabetes, which I apparently carry. Would I be me? Would I know that I wasn't me? Would I care?
My son, who just was admitted to a fairly prestigious art school, is dyslexic, generally associated with chromosome 18. Would I have been wide or foolish to edit it?
Of course, the implications go way beyond any particular individual, myself included. These are not easy questions to answer.
(One of two independent discoverers of CRISPR-Cas, Jennifer Doudna, wrote a wonderful rumination a few issues back, also in Nature on how ill equipped she was to deal with the ethical implications of her work, the emergence of which surprised her and got her to thinking in new ways: Genome-editing revolution: My whirlwind year with CRISPR (Nature 528, 469471 (24 December 2015))
One of the articles in the current issue also features a rumination on the Environmental issue before us, climate change. An economist, Nicolas Stern, authored an article titled Current climate models are grossly misleading. The point here is that climate models talking about a 2oC increase is a global average, but the economic effects locally can hardly be expected to the same everywhere. The author writes:
Dark impacts
...The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2013 and 2014, provided a comprehensive overview of the literature on the costs of action and inaction. But the assessment understated the limitations of the research done so far. Essentially, it reported on a body of literature that had systematically and grossly underestimated the risks of unmanaged climate change. Furthermore, that literature had failed to capture the learning processes and economies of scale involved in radical structural and technical change, and the benefits of reducing fossil-fuel pollution, protecting biodiversity and forests, and so on...
An article with a larger physical science focus was published a few weeks ago:
Allowable CO2 emissions based on regional and impact-related climate targets (Nature 529, 477483 (28 January 2016))
The authors show that a 2oC "average" temperature increase in the climate is dominated by the relatively mild changes over the oceans; elsewhere the impacts will most extreme.
The following graphic demonstrates this:
Here's another plot from their paper:
The authors write:
"Every tonne contributes the same amount of global warming no matter when its emitted."
This includes tons emitted when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. We may think we're doing something by mouthing mindless platitudes about how great wind and solar and other forms of so called "renewable energy" are, but we are lying to ourselves.
What we are doing isn't working; it isn't working at all.
2016 has been an unprecedented year, with the weekly data as compared to the same week the year before routinely being over 3 ppm higher. February 21, 2016, 3.33 ppm higher than the weekly average of 2015
I don't think we'll find the wherewithal to stop at 2C. It's going to be much worse.
Have a nice week.
I'm so embarrassed. My governor endorsed a raging racist to be President of the United States.
The State of New Jersey is, I think, one of the best places in the world to live, but somehow we have a problem electing decent Governors.
Now we have the height of obscenity. Our useless Governor, Chris Christie, a blubbering incompetent buffoon, announced that he supports a freak racist.
I'm so embarrassed.
It's looking very bad these last few weeks at the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide observatory.
At the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide observatory website, they have a data page which compares the averages for each week of the year with the same week of the previous year.
The data goes back to 1974, and comprises 2,090 data points.
I import this data into a spreadsheet I maintain each week, and calculate the weekly increases over the previous year. I rank the data for the increases from worst to best, the worst data point being 4.67 ppm over the previous year, which was recorded during the week ending September 6, 1998, when much of the rain forest of Southeast Asia was burning when fires set to clear the forests for palm oil plantations got out of control during unusually dry weather. Six of the worst data points ever recorded occurred in 1998 during this event, another was recorded in the January following that event.
Of the twenty worst data points ever recorded out of 2090 two of them have occurred in the last four weeks. The week ending January 31, 2016 produced a result of a 4.35 ppm of increase. The week just passed, that ending, 2/14/2016, produced a result of 3.79 ppm increase, tying it for the aforementioned week in January 1999, that ending on January 24, 1999, and that of January 2, 2011.
Of the twenty highest points recorded, 9 have occurred in the last 5 years, 10 in the last 10 years.
The week ending February 7, 2016 was until today's data was published, the 20th of the top 20, it was pushed out and is now the 21st worst.
I also keep a record of the monthly data that is similar to that for the weekly data. This data, unlike the weekly data, goes back to 1958.
November of 2015 was the second worst November ever recorded, 3.08 ppm over the previous November, December of 2015, the worst ever recorded, 3.07 ppm over the previous December, and January of 2016 the 4th worst ever observed, 2.56 ppm over the previous January.
The observatory is still evaluating the final results for 2015; it involves a running average from November through February compared with the data of the previous year. A few weeks ago the preliminary data suggest that 2015 was the worst year ever observed, the data today declares that it is actually a few hundredths of a ppm (a few hundred millionths of a part) behind 1998.
There is no event of which I'm aware comparable to the 1998 fires, and that makes this doubly disturbing to me at least, since it suggests what may be an out of control event such as temperature driven out gassing of sequestered carbon dioxide from permafrost or from oceanic hydrates.
But there's no reason that you should be disturbed as I am. Don't worry, be happy: They're building a solar roadway in France, and even if it ends up covered with grease, skid marks, tire wear marks, sand and salt, it's the thought that counts.
My worry that we are kidding ourselves to the point of suicide by thinking we're actually doing something is pure "Chicken Little," I'm sure.
I now return you to the Hillary vs. Bernie cartoon show.
Enjoy what's left of the weekend.
Nature: Historical Nectar Resources of the British Isles Reflects Their Rise and Fall.
This paper really caught my eye when I was leafing through the current issue of Nature:
Historical nectar assessment reveals the fall and rise of floral resources in Britain (Nature 530, 8588 (04 February 2016))
An excerpt of the opening lines from from the text:
A graphic included therein:
Another graphic showing the mass of sugars available to pollinators throughout the British Isles:
The closing text:
This was quite an interesting perspective about which we don't think, at least about which I haven't thought. It demonstrates the importance of diversity in both species and habitats, and the important inter-dependency of the our commercial agricultural land on what surrounds it.
In New Jersey we often see bumper stickers (issued by our State agricultural department) that read "No farms, no food."
One may extend this to: "No pollinators, no food."
This speaks to efforts in some midwestern states in the US to make grassland parks, and points, one thinks to the economic as well as the aesthetic value of doing so.
Enjoy the weekend.
December 2015 is recorded as the worst ever for carbon dioxide increases over the previous...
...December at the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide observatory.
A text file for monthly mean data, recorded since 1958 at the Mauna Loa, is found here: Mauna Loa Data Page (Monthly Data).
As each month is posted, I load it into an Excel file I've built for calculation and ranking of the data. The increase of 3.07 ppm as recorded for December 2015 over December 2014, is the largest in 55 years of such observations.
November of 2015 was the second worst ever observed, 3.03 ppm increased CO2 as compared to November of 2014.
We did better in January. January of 2016 was "only" the fourth worst January ever observed.
Whatever we think we are doing to address this situation is clearly not working, and inasmuch as the majority of such feeble attempts we make: Trillions of dollars "invested" in so called "renewable energy" over the last ten years - so called "renewable energy" by the way is not sustainable in any way because of its extremely low energy to mass density (there aren't enough materials on the planet to dig up to manufacture meaningful amounts of that rickety stuff) - switching from coal to gas, and imagining that we are "conserving" energy and "becoming more efficient".
Experiment trumps theory, 100% of the time.
One may wish to kill the messenger, but the messenger is not really me, nor the scientists at Mauna Loa and elsewhere, it's the clear chemical signature registered in the composition of the atmosphere. And let's be clear that messenger is being killed.
Enjoy the weekend.
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: New Jersey
Member since: 2002
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