As the Excitement of the national party conventions fades and we move into the debate phase, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain has submitted his responses to the 14 questions posed by the crew at Science Debate 2008. Democrat Barack Obama submitted his responses previously, and the SD08 website now has the two candidate’s responses listed side by side for easy comparison.
It would be great to see some of these questions come up in the debates, so that follow-ups to the positions could be explored.
Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has submitted his Answers to the Top 14 Science Questions facing America. Drawing on the expertise of a squadron of science, economic, foreign policy and educational advisors that includes several committed Nobel Laureates, many will be happy to get the religious and political ideology out of the way and really start addressing these issues.
Please go to the ScienceDebate 2008 website, take a hard look at Obama’s answers for our future, and don’t forget to drop the crew a dime (or ten) on your way out. These folks have been hard at it since November of last year, and have gathered some very impressive institutional support. The future is important to all of us – and our children – and the future needs the very best science we can possibly field to meet it head-on.
A declaration of commercial fishery failure by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has paved the way for Congress to allot funds for alleviating financial hardship among the West Coast’s commercial Chinook salmon fishing industry off California and Oregon. The crisis has been building steadily every year since 2000, culminating in this latest action – the commercial salmon fishing industry has essentially been shut down.
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] researchers suggest that changes in ocean conditions – possibly due to global warming – are to blame, along with loss of freshwater habitat for salmon spawning, a chronic problem.
There will be some coho salmon fishing allowed off the coast of Washington and northern Oregon, but there will be financial hardship in that industry as well due to strict limits. This crisis has been building for years, attempts along the way to mitigate it have proven to exacerbate the situation, such as the introduction of farmed salmon. Fish stock collapses in traditionally abundant fisheries off both coasts and elsewhere in the world bode ill for the seafood component of the human food supply, just as the worldwide food crisis heats up around the world for staple crops like corn and wheat and rice.
We could be beyond a tipping point right now, and things could get a bit more than just ‘interesting’ over the next months. Will science be able to come to the rescue, or will it remain helpless to mitigate the collapse of world food supplies? Stay tuned…
Links:
“Fishery Failure” Declared for West Coast Salmon Fishery
Hatchery Controversy Takes on New Significance as Wild Chinook Populations Crash
Escaped Farmed Salmon Infiltrate Fitter Wild Populations
Dramatic Declines in Wild Salmon Populations Linked to Farmed Salmon
Over the last ten days scientists at Oregon State University [Hatfield Marine Science Center] have recorded more than 600 earthquakes emanating from offshore, several of which registered 5.0 or higher. The puzzling aspect of this quake swarm is that they’re not located at the edge of the region’s tectonic plate boundaries, but in the middle of the Juan de Fuca plate itself.
Using hydrophones left over from submarine surveillance during the Cold War, the researchers admit they do not understand what’s happening to cause this seismic activity. The quakes originate about 150 nautical miles southwest of Newport, Oregon in a basin between two subsurface faults where previous earthquake clusters have been recorded.
As magma gets injected into the crust to push the plates apart, quake swarms are fairly common and sometimes lava breaks through onto the sea floor. What sort of tectonic process is causing this swarm in the middle of the plate is unknown, but researchers will be keeping a close eye on it in hopes of finding out.
Links:
Unusual Earthquake Swarm off Oregon
2006 Mexican Tectonic Plate Motion Reversal
The National Research Council has identified and reported on Ten Questions that will shape 21st century earth science. Some may be a little surprised that these questions are still unanswered, having been told in no uncertain terms in science classes in the last century that science already had definitive answers to questions like how the earth and other planets in our solar system formed. Live and learn. Here’s a bare list of the identified questions…
1. How did earth and other planets form?
Scientists still do not know enough about how our planet got its elements to understand its evolution, or why other planets in our system are very different.
2. What happened during the first 500 million years?
Current scientific belief is that another planet collided with ours during the late formation stage, creating the moon and melting this planet all the way to its core. Yet unknown is how (and when) the Earth developed its atmosphere and oceans.
3. How did life begin?
Scientists hope to obtain evidence from rocks and minerals, as well as investigations of Mars and other members of our system.
4. How does earth’s interior work, and how does it effect the surface?
Science still cannot precisely describe the magnetic field-producing convection currents in the mantle and core, which means they have not yet modeled past evolution and cannot predict future evolution of the surface environment.
5. Why does earth have plate tectonics and continents?
Scientists still do not know when continents first formed, how they were preserved for billions of years, or how they will evolve in the future.
6. How are earth processes controlled by material properties?
Scientists hope to gain more understanding of plate tectonics and mantle convection by reducing the macroprocesses down to the atomic microscale. It is hoped this will allow prediction.
7. What causes climate to change – and how much can it change?
Study of our planet’s past climate extremes may lead to improved models that can predict the magnitude and consequences of climate change.
8. How has life shaped earth – and how has earth shaped life>
The ways that geology and biology influence each other are still unknown, though scientists do suspect life had a role in oxygenating the atmosphere, and know of geological events that caused mass extinctions.
9. Can earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and their consequences be predicted?
Scientists admit they may never be able to accurately predict earthquakes, but are getting better at predicting volcanic eruptions. Knowledge of the mantle movements could help.
10. How do fluid flow and transport affect the human environment?
Scientists hope to produce mathematical models that can predict the performance of natural fluid systems (surface and underground water, primarily), to contribute to better human management of natural resources and the environment.
Link:
Ten Questions
Where ecological footprints fall. The environmental impacts of high- (red), middle- (blue) and low- (yellow) income nations fall on other income tiers, as indicated by the footprints. The numbers are in trillions of 2005 international dollars. (Credit: Thara Srinivasan/UC Berkeley)
Rich Nations’ Environmental Footprints Tread Heavily on Poor Countries offers a study led by former UC-Berkeley Thara Srinivasan that examined the impacts of intensive agricultural expansion, deforestation, overfishing. loss of mangrove swamps and forests, ozone depletion and climate change between 1961 and 2000.
For the 3-year project Srinivasan teamed up with Richard B. Norgaard, an ecological economist and professor of energy and resources at UC-Berkeley. This allowed the team to evaluate economic impacts as well as ecological footprints.
Not surprisingly, the team noticed that poor nations are much more adversely impacted than rich nations. The calculation of “ecological footprints” of low, middle and high income nations demonstrated graphically that the large ecological footprints of rich nations unfairly impact poor nations whose footprints are small.
Economically speaking, the impact on poor nations is greater than the entire debt of those nations, about which Srinivasan said, “The ecological debt could more than offset the financial debt of low-income nations.” And middle-income nations had impacts on poor nations equivalent to the rich nations.
The dramatic breakup of the northern ice sheet has tended to confirm global warming, and there are other indications that things are worse than we thought. Turns out that North America’s Northernmost Lake is showing signs of climate change too.
An international research team reports that a core sample of lake bed sediment indicates a drastic change in algae and diatom concentrations in the lake over the last 200 years, but not in the 8,000 years prior – when the lake was permanently frozen. This tends to support the hypothesis that human industrialization has contributed to the warming.
Even if we stopped releasing greenhouse gases today we’d still have to deal with the effects of climate change, and this has been a concern for important ecosystems’ stability. Good news is that researchers have discovered Forests of Endangered Tropical Kelp surviving just fine in the deep waters off the Galapagos Islands.
According to the researchers, the discovery demonstrates a surprising resilience for tropical marine systems in response to climate change. Using a computer model designed to predict where kelp forests might survive despite warming waters, student divers explored the tropical reefs where the computer had predicted likely kelp habitat. They found the forests growing at depths from 40 to 200 feet below the surface, in the cool water layer. Their find may get this species of kelp removed from the World Conservation Union’s database of threatened species.
Meanwhile, in our struggle to develop alternatives to fossil fuels that contribute to greenhouse gases, the National Research Council has reported a serious effect of increased ethanol production from corn that may lead to changing policies on what biofuels we as a nation decide to develop.
Increase in Ethanol Production from Corn Could Harm Water Quality outlines how, if projected increases in corn production for conversion to ethanol occur, water quality could be significantly harmed. This has to do with agricultural practices and expansion of farmland for growing fuel crops, particularly into arid and semi-arid regions of the country.
Irrigation could divert water resources for drinking, industry and hydropower, fish habitat and recreation. In dry regions corn typically requires more water than soybeans or cotton. Native grasses and switchgrass are possible alternative choices for ethanol production that do not require massive irrigation or intense chemical additives, or new crops could be bioengineered that are more water efficient.
It’s good to see the NRC evaluating the relative wisdom of any dramatic change in agriculture to accommodate biofuels production, as factory farming practices already pose a significant threat to public health by pollution of land and water, and agriculture accounts for a hefty chunk of our fossil fuels use all by itself. But ethanol may not be the best choice anyway, if future cars used a different kind of engine. It turns out that just such engines are under development.
Focusing on biodiesel instead of ethanol may be a better policy. Trucks, trains, agricultural machinery and ships already run on petro-diesel, and could switch to 20-80 biodiesel blends immediately without altering the existing engines. New engines can be run on 80-20 biodiesel mixtures, thereby cutting the petroleum content by an additional 60%. GM could deploy its new passenger diesel engine for at least half its new cars and light trucks as soon as nationwide biodiesel distribution allows and the factories can be re-tooled. People would surely buy them, if the popularity of hybrids is any indication.
Production of biodiesel is more energy efficient and less polluting all the way down the line than production of ethanol, though new technologies are being developed to make ethanol production more efficient (and from more easily grown crops). Bioengineered oil crops that will grow in semi-arid climates could be deployed on land not suitable for growing food crops without intensive additions and irrigation, and the machinery that plants and harvests them can run on biodiesel. Researchers are also looking at algae as a source of oil for biodiesel.
As we plan for the future and attempt to wean ourselves from our addiction to fossil fuels, it helps to remember that Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine, designed it to run on vegetable oil in the first place, though petroleum magnates in the early years of the 20th century ensured that only petroleum-based fuel would be used. 100 years later there is hope that his dream may finally come to fruition.
In this era of “peak oil” and ever more environmentally damaging methods of extracting (and using) coal, innovative R&D on alternatives and renewables have been moving forward with vigor even without massive subsidies or continued contributions to global warming.
We already know that our planet receives more energy from the sun every day than all the life forms (and human industries) could ever use, but humans haven’t yet figured out how to harvest those electrons efficiently enough to even begin to compete with green plants and their direct conversion via photosynthesis. We also know that the sun powers our atmospheric wind patterns, and have developed means of extracting electricity from that source as well. Though again, not enough.
There’s another source of power that nature provides to our planet, and which entrepreneurs and engineers have developed and are still developing. This is the immense power of gravity, and it manifests itself in regular cycles in all the oceans and seas that cover the majority of our planet. These are the tides. Tidal generators are located beneath the surface of the water, and have to deal with both the corrosive effects of salt and other minerals in the water as well as various other contaminates, including forms of sea life. Still, the French have been generating about 600 million kilowatt hours of tidal power annually at Rance for more than 30 years. So far the moon hasn’t stopped exerting its gravitational energy on the earth!
Even as those issues are being addressed with ever more clever designs, there’s yet another ocean-born form of energy to be tapped for generating electricity – waves. Energy COOL: Swell Electricity from the Sea talks about how inventors are harnessing the waves in ways that could represent world-changing applications.
These wave-power inventions – some are generating electricity as we speak – are starting to get mainstream press attention. The Washington Post reported on a technology called AquaBuOY from Finavera Renewables in September, quoting its CEO as saying:
Finavera’s chief executive, Jason Bak, believes he knows how. The equipment his company designed, called AquaBuOY, aims to generate electricity from the vertical motion of waves. The buoy, anchored in an array two to three miles offshore, will convert the waves’ motion into pressurized water using large, reinforced-rubber hose pumps. As the buoy goes up the peak of a wave and down into its trough, it forces a piston in the bottom of the buoy to stretch and contract the hose pumps, pushing water through. This drives a turbine that powers a generator producing electricity, which would be shipped to shore through an undersea transmission line.
“This is the new source of power,” Bak said. “It’s the highest-energy-density renewable out there. Wind is like light crude oil, and water is like gasoline.”
Perhaps that’s a little overboard, but Finavera’s not the only development company out there…
• Pelamis Wave Power has a snake-like device moving from test-level to commercial production of the Iberian Peninsula and in the UK.
• Verdant Power is testing its systems off coast of Manhattan. There are some new-technology problems, but they’re being addressed.
• Ocean Power Technologies has another buoy power system design. They are testing projects in Hawaii, Spain and New Jersey.
• Swell Fuel has the ‘Ocean Energy Converter’ float device that generates electricity from the swell flow in any direction, and is setting up test projects off El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Belize.
Check out some of the links below to get the latest on what’s what with various forms of renewable power sources and developing technologies to tap them.
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