A Bit More Detail

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talked about her social networks, and about the need to have faith in one's abilities and to be strong.
  
• C.J. Cherryh describes her visit to Grand Coulee Dam.


• Crooked Timber notes the ways in which Ian Macleod is actually a romantic writer.


• The Crux looks at the controversy over the siting of a new telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea.


• Cody Delistraty wonders if social rejection is needed for creative people.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how difficult it is for Americans with criminal records to get jobs.


• Mathew Ingram notes how young Saudis can find freedom on their phones for apps.


• Language Hat suggests that a computer's word analysis has identified a lost Shakespeare play.


• Personal Reflection's Jim Belshaw linked to his local history columns.


• Otto Pohl notes the culinary links between Ghana and Brazil.


• Peter Rukavina remembers the fallen elms of Charlottetown and reports on innovative uses of Raspberry Pi computers.


• The Search reports on format migration at Harvard's libraries.


• Mark Simpson notes homoeroticism on British television.


• Speed River Journal's Van Waffle describes his discovery of wild leeks.


• Towleroad notes an Austrian magazine's printing of a limited edition with ink including HIV-infected blood, notes a gay Mormon's defense of his life to his church, and observes an Argentine judge who thought it acceptable to give a man who raped a possibly gay child a lighter sentence because of the child's presumed orientation.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the repeal of blasphemy laws in Norway and examines the questionable concept of Straight Pride.

Developing the technology to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere is an expensive but promising approach that may be necessary to help prevent the worst effects of climate change, according to the first of two reports released this morning by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

But according to the second report, proposals to cool the planet on the cheap by reflecting sunlight are so risky that even serious study of them should be undertaken only in preparation for an emergency.

Together the two reports from the National Research Council (NRC) offer the most comprehensive U.S. examination yet of "geoengineering"—the intentional intervening in the climate system in an attempt to forestall some of the impact of global warming.

"The world is in a very tough situation, and there's no magic bullet here, unfortunately," said Paul Falkowski, a biochemistry professor at Rutgers University, who worked on the reports.

An NRC committee of experts from across disciplines was asked by several U.S. government science and intelligence agencies to evaluate geoengineering proposals. The ideas range from anodyne (planting trees to capture CO₂) to potentially alarming (injecting sulfate particles or other aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet).

We had some useful data at our disposal. That same year, Google had completed a study on the impact of clean energy innovation, using the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.’s low-carbon economics tool. Our study’s best-case scenario modeled our most optimistic assumptions about cost reductions in solar power, wind power, energy storage, and electric vehicles. In this scenario, the United States would cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically: Emissions could be 55 percent below the business-as-usual projection for 2050.

While a large emissions cut sure sounded good, this scenario still showed substantial use of natural gas in the electricity sector. That’s because today’s renewable energy sources are limited by suitable geography and their own intermittent power production. Wind farms, for example, make economic sense only in parts of the country with strong and steady winds. The study also showed continued fossil fuel use in transportation, agriculture, and construction. Even if our best-case scenario were achievable, we wondered: Would it really be a climate victory?

A 2008 paper by James Hansen [PDF], former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change, showed the true gravity of the situation. In it, Hansen set out to determine what level of atmospheric CO2 society should aim for “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” His climate models showed that exceeding 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already blown past that limit. Right now, environmental monitoring shows concentrations around 400 ppm. That’s particularly problematic because CO2 remains in the atmosphere for more than a century; even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant today, existing CO2 will continue to warm the planet.

We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use. So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.

Those calculations cast our work at Google’s REC program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only had REC failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but that goal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change.

A final route for the canal has not yet been announced, but the proposed routes pass through Lake Nicaragua, which covers about six times the area of Los Angeles and is Central America’s largest lake.

The lake is a major source of drinking water and irrigation, and home to rare freshwater sharks and other fish of commercial and scientific value, Huete-Pérez and Meyer say. The forest around it is home to howler monkeys, tapirs, jaguars, and countless tropical birds–not to mention several groups of indigenous people (some of whom have challenged the project in court, so far to no avail).

Meyer, who’s done field work in Nicaragua for 30 years, says the area is a natural laboratory for evolutionary biology. Just as Darwin’s finches evolved into different species as they adapted to the unique environment of individual islands, so it goes with fish as they’ve colonized the region’s network of crater lakes. “These crater lakes are like islands in a sea of land from a fish’s perspective,” said Meyer, who has been characterizing genetic changes in the region’s cichlid fish populations.

[. . .]

Huete-Pérez and Meyer worry primarily about the dredging necessary to accommodate massive container ships: The proposed canal is 90 feet deep; the lake averages just 50 feet. “The initial digging would create a huge sediment issue that would be bad for water quality in the lake and the wetlands around it,” Meyer said.

Pedro Alvarez, a civil and environmental engineer at Rice University raises another water-related concern. It may be necessary to dam the San Juan River, the main route for water flowing out of the lake, to keep the water levels high enough for the canal’s locks to work properly, Alvarez says. “If you do that you’re going to change the hydrology of many lakes and rivers,” he said. “Some may dry up.”

Lovejoy sees other potential problems. He’s especially worried about creating a conduit between the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. “It’s creating the potential for an enormous invasive species problem,” he said. That problem could include venomous Pacific sea snakes invading the Caribbean and a disruption of Caribbean fisheries from an influx of competing species, predators and disease.

[. . .]

The seismic risks may have been overblown for political purposes. But they’re not negligible, and they probably represent the worst-case scenario, says Alvarez, the engineer from Rice University. “Releasing a dam could be a catastrophic event that I don’t even want to think about,” he said.

• Centauri Dreams notes a new project to look for planets around near stars, starting with relatively massive worlds in torch orbits.


• Daniel Drezner argues that the limited support likely to be given to the Syrian rebels by the United States reflects a certain realpolitik on the part of the Obama administration. Neither Assad nor the rebels will be able to win.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the discovery of two planetary candidates orbiting the star GJ 221, a star with fewer heavy elements in its composition than the Sun. This seems to confirm a trend: a star doesn't need to have many heavy elements to form relatively massive planets.


• Eastern Approaches reports on the Czech political scandal that has just claimed the prime minister.


• At A Fistful of Euros and his own blog, Alex Harrowell talks about how the Turkey protests were triggered in part by the decline in Istanbul's public space, like parks. A common urbanity works to make everyone happy.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley notes that the Sino-American summit hasn't gotten much coverage compared to (say) the Soviet-American summits a couple of decades ago.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer has a few posts regarding the unlikelihood of a Nicaragua Canal (1, 2, 3).


• Normblog's Norman Geras links to a few different people with their own views on what should be done with Syria.


• At the Planetary Society blog, Emily Lakdawalla notes that Lego will be putting out a model of the Curiosity Mars rover.


• Supernova Condensate discusses the prospects of an ammonia-dominated world. What would its seas, or its biochemistry, look like? (There's a picture.)


• Window on Eurasia reports the speculations of a Russian analyst who thinks--absurdly, IMHO--that Central Asia's most likely fates include state failure and conquest by China.

• A Budding Sociologist or not, Dan Hirschman has a fascinating Q&A up with Canada-based economist Morten Jerven talking about the extent to which economic--and other--statistics in Africa are flawed.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes the landmark discovery of a distant supernova, a Type 1A supernova 10.5 billion light years away (and 10.5 billion years in the past).


• Bag News Notes comments on the "Jew in a Box" display of a Berlin museum. Providing contemporary German museum-goers with a volunteer Jew to talk about their Jewish experiences may be well-intentioned, but it also has obvious negative echoes.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling links to an interesting essay on the ethics of geoengineering.


• Eastern Approaches visits a desolate, impoverished town in Bulgaria.


• New APPS Blog takes on the ridiculous philosophizing of libertarian economist Steven Landsberg, who suggested that no harm is done to a person--a woman, naturally-who was raped while she was unconscious.


• Progressive Download's John Farrell is quite unimpressed with the Vatican's latest statement about the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. Something peer-reviewed and new, not just a remining of old data, would be nice.


• Steve Munro talks about various developments in Toronto transit.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little takes a look at Jonathan Haidt's theory about the natural origins of moral intuitions.

• Over at the Burgh Diaspora, Jim Russell takes a look at Japan's system of higher education, with a proliferating number of institutions and faculties but collapsing numbers of students, and argues that financially viable higher education systems will need students beyond their immediate catchment area.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell starts a discussion about post-democratic governments such as Italy's recent Monti government and elsewhere, and wonders what response there can be apart from an inchoate populism.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird links to a paper suggesting that the greenhouse effect has been mitigated in the past decade by the sulfur dioxide from volcanic eruptions.


• At False Steps, Paul Drye contemplates the abortive joint ESA-Russia effort at an Ariane-launched spaceplane, the Kliper.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis notes, with some local distinctions, the contrast between a broadly secular and liberal minded core Egypt (Cairo and the upper delta) contrasted with a more conservative rest of the country.


• At The Power and the Money, Douglas Muir expects the Syrian civil war to continue for a good while yet.


• Towleroad reports on Lech Walesa's homophobic statements, denounced even by his own son.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little sees reason for concern about the long-term effectiveness and academic credibility of the French university system.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes, via others, the alienation of western Kazakhstan--rich in natural resources, more conservative, but subordinates--from the remainder of the country.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell reminds his readers--proponents of the Iraq war, too--of the broad consensus in the United Kingdom against the 2003 invasion and its sequelae.

[O]ver the summer, 100 tonnes of iron sulphate and 20 tonnes of iron oxide were scattered 370 kilometres off the coast of Haida Gwaii, right in the path of the Haida eddies, during the first and only project undertaken by the Haida Salmon Restoration Corp. The $2.5-million exercise was a purported attempt to measure how the iron — which is water-soluble — added to the ocean could enhance declining salmon stocks.

The Haida eddies, clockwise-rotating areas of water up to 300 kilometres in diameter, are known to carry iron-rich coastal water out to sea, where there is less iron and therefore less ocean life. The eddies form off the southern tip of the island and become highly concentrated with phytoplankton and chlorophyll, which is readily visible as a “bloom” from satellites as they travel through the northeast Pacific.

The iron fertilization project garnered worldwide attention and criticism from the scientific community. Scientists from around the world have studied the ocean currents near the archipelago, and many expressed concern over the environmental effects on what is considered pristine water.

But experts also say adding iron to this particular ocean region would obscure any data collected by the salmon restoration company because it would be impossible to tell if any growth in fish food — plankton — was a result of added iron or the eddies.

“If you were going to plan to do an experiment to demonstrate the impact of iron fertilization, you wouldn’t dump it into a Haida eddy, I don’t think,” said Jay Cullen, an ocean scientist who runs a lab at the University of Victoria that studies chemicals and trace metals in marine environments.

“If a group were to fertilize such a feature with iron, it would be next to impossible to determine how productivity and phytoplankton biomass was influenced by the treatment,” he said, calling it “bad scientific design.”

A well-designed experiment would include a way to distinguish between water with iron added and water without, to isolate the impact of adding the iron by using a control water sample. Outside the eddies, iron concentration offshore is low because its source is land and the northeast Pacific is anemic compared to coastal water.

• 3 Quarks Daily's Azra Raza wonders how, in the face of the difficulty of creating life in the lab, life evolved on Earth as quickly as possible and survived massive asteroidal and cometary bombardments roughly four billion years ago.


• Andrew at Acts of Minor Treason imagines what the night sky might look like from a habitable world in the planetary system of 55 Cancri.


• This Centauri Dreams post has a lot of interesting stuff, everything from ideas for space elevators to bacteria discovered kilometres below the Greenland ice sheet.


• In what now seems to be a fine Republican tradition, Republican Senator John Ensign--he who voted against same-sex marriage bills--has been caught having an affair with the wife of one of his supporters. It's getting to be like the John Major Conservatives, really, when backbenchers kept being found dead, tied to a bed and dressed in women's underwear, every fortnight or so.


• While tumult in Iran continues--and I wish them the best--Daniel Drezner points out interesting information suggesting that the conservatives are getting help from Russia.


• Far Outliers has a wealth of material, everything from the nasty civil wars in Nazi-occupied countries to Germany's development of the originally British blitzkrieg theory to the Iranian society to outside observers.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros argues that the best model for Iranian events can be found in Yerevan, when after an obviously faked election the government clamped down and ended up surviving quite nicely, thank you very much.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money tackles the idea of geoengineering, fearing that it might be used as an excuse to do nothing else on global warming.


• On yet another blog, Douglas Muir examines why what should be a major Senegalese port, the community of Kaolack, isn't.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio links to some informative videos on geoengineering.


• pauldrye blogs about the many, many, destructive uses of Egyptian mummies in the foolish 19th century.


• Towleroad reports that same-sex couples can use the spouses' name on passports and that the White House wants to include same-sex couples on the census.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Dave Kopel blogs about a woman in China who was let off after killing a Communist Party official in self-defense following popular uproar, suggesting that this reflects not the rule of law so much as it does the need to satiate public opinion.


• Finally, Window on Eurasia reports that at least one Russian newspaper argues that Russian policies are alienating the other post-Soviet states, potentially leaving it alone in the region.