Blackbird image from: Ernie Janes/naturepl.com

A recent study has provided some evidence supporting the hypothesis that light and noise pollution alters the biological clocks of birds living in cities (compared to birds living in rural areas).  

Dr. Dominoni (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Germany) and colleagues used radio-pulse transmitters attached to European blackbirds (Turdus merula) living in Munich, Germany (city) and those living in a forest nearby to track the animal’s activity levels. They found that blackbirds living in the city showed significantly increased activity an average of 29 minutes earlier in the morning than blackbirds living in the forest.

When the birds were housed in a room with constant dim light, effectively eliminating time-of-day cues, the circadian rhythm of the city birds was 50 minutes shorter and the animal’s behavioural pattern became irregular more quickly compared to forest birds. The authors speculate that the irregular pattern may help the city birds adapt to their ever-changing, and often unpredictable, environment.

Sources:

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2013.13137

Dominoni DM, Helm B, Lehmann M, Dowse HB, Partecke J. Clocks for the city: circadian differences between forest and city songbirds. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 280(1763) [Epub ahead of print]

“Dr” Roy Spencer is sad and lonely and wrong refers.

[a timely repost]

If you’ve seen “The Longest Day” or any of the other classic semi-documentary dramatizations of D-Day, you may recognize the name Captain James Stagg. Stagg was the meteorologist on Eisenhower’s staff, and as such he was the conduit and translator for the information that came from the meteorology group. That, in turn, was a combination of American and British scientists with very different methods and backgrounds, but both using data and analyses that involves a large number of individuals making observations and crunching numbers, from teams at Scripts Institute in California who developed the primary predictive models in use to British Coast Guard observers making observations at sea several times a day.

The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, Rogue Waves, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters by Bruce Parker elucidates the science behind this historic moment in great detail in one of several riveting chapters about the ocean, and stuff the ocean does. Parker is a former chief scientist of the National Ocean Service so he knows something about waves, storms, tides, tsunamis, storm surges, and the like. This book is a nice combination of primer on meteorology ala the ocean and weather-related adventure stories. Throughout the book I kept running into things that I had always wanted to know about … like how exactly did that one huge ship I’ve seen so many times off the Cape Peninsula in South Africa sink? (The ocean did it!), what really was the story behind Stagg’s predictions (as discussed) and what is a future with greater storm surges and rising sea going to look like?

I recommend this book for non-experts who need to know all about ocean related science, who need to better understand the effects and dynamics of storms like Sandy, Tsunamis, and similar events. Parker does not hold back on the science and the detail. This is a very enjoyable way to elevate one’s self to the level of armchair oceanic meteorologist in a few evenings of enjoyable reading!

[A timely repost]

The term “D-Day” is military for “The Day” just like “H-Hour” is military for “The Hour” on which something will happen. However, once D-Day happened everyone started to use the term “D-Day” to refer to this event. The idea is you can put the date “D-Day” in your planning documents and refer to it without having the date set, or if you do have the date set, to avoid saying the date out loud.

So, in English, in normal culture, D-Day is this: It is a military operation that happened on June 6th 1944. It involved air and naval strikes against a line of defenses set up by the Germans who had occupied France, along the French Coast in a region called “Normandy.” Following and in coordination with the air and naval strikes, 24,000 British, American, Canadian, and Free French dropped onto Normandy out of airplanes and in gliders. Following this, somewhat over 160,000 troops landed on various sorts of shore-landing craft on the beaches of Normandy and fought their way up the bluffs onto the high ground and overran the German defenses. That’s the simple version.

This could also be called the Invasion of Normandy because it was an invasion. Of Normandy. You could call it the Normandy Landings, which had a code name: Operation Neptune. Operation Neptune, in turn, was part of Operation Overlord, which was the coordinated Allied attack on German Territories in Western Europe with the eventual goal of defeating the Germans there.

I know this is trivial, but it so well exemplifies what is wrong with Wikipedia (and there is a lot RIGHT with Wikipedia…I love Wikipedia) that I want to spend a moment on it. Since “D-Day” is a term of art in military planning, Wikipedia is unable (psychologically) to use the term to refer to…well, to refer to D-Day. The term “D-Day” redirects to a web page called “Normandy landings.” I hope that some historian does not come along and mention some other prior Normandy Landing from ancient times because that would make Wikipedia ‘spode.

Also, part of D-Day was the aforementioned airborne assault. Wikpedia is careful to mention that this assault started just after midnight. THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT!!! Because if any of these paratroopers or gliders landed prior to midnight, D-Day would not be a day. that would require at least a paragraph. But wait, if the paratroopers landed just after midnight, they must have taken off before D-Day started! And the ships! Did any of the ships start to sail before midnight that morning! OMG Wikipedia IS going to ‘splode!

OK, enough of that.

Yeah, my father was involved in D-Day but he did not personally invade France. He tried very hard to do so. A member of the Army Air Corps, he wanted to go in on a glider, hopefully to fly one. He applied and his application had a good chance, but he needed corrective lenses and that would have disqualified him. So he cheated. He was a Staff Sargent, and he knew a Staff Sargent in the place where they gave the eye test, so he got a copy of the eye chart and memorized it. I can see it now, had this worked…he surely would have been in one of the movies made about D-Day. Just after the glider takes off pulled by a propeller driven plane, the pilot (my dad) takes the glasses he has hidden away in his service jacket (which I’ve still got, it’s in the closet) and puts them on. The glasses of course, would break on landing and he would be helped to safety by a beautiful (as if it mattered ‘cuz he couldn’t see her) from the Resistance. The rest would be history and I’d be writing this blog post en Francais.

But that didn’t happen. What did happen is that they changed the eye chart and he got totally busted and they sent him back to his regular job, where he then excelled and was awarded a medal by the US Army and the King of England.

There were two main logistical wings to D-Day preparation. One was a fake big giant operation in the part of Enlgand nearest the French shores, which were meant to suggest a planned invasion at Calais. (Pronounced “Calay” in French, “Callus” in Maine). The other was spread across more than 1,000 bases where stuff was being assembled, troops trained and housed, things organized, etc. My father was in one of those bases, not far from London. His job was to manage, as a clerk, the tracking of disassembled airplanes that were dropped on the runway by slow and low flying transport aircraft. The planes were made in the US, then either disassembled or not fully assembled, but still, packaged up as whole planes…plane kits if you will. These were then flown in larger transport planes with either landed and took off quickly, discharged their cargo while taxying, or simply dropped their cargo out the back as they flew over the runway.

Often, the plane would arrive with broken parts for some reason.

Initially, my father’s job was to organize the mixing and matching of parts from the broken planes so that, say, 10 broken planes could be re-arranged to make 9 fully functional planes and a pile of broken parts. Seeing the stupidity in this, he made the strong suggestion that the planes from this source not be made into kits. Rather, he suggested, send over the parts properly packed. A bunch of left wings, a bunch of right wings, a bunch of tails, whatever (I have no idea what parts they would have been). Then, at the base in England, they would simply maintain a stock of parts coming in via aircraft, weeding out any broken parts, and assemble the planes from that stock much more efficiently. The productivity of that Operation Overlord base went up, and he got a medal from the US and British.

Almost 200,000 troops were on the ground in D-Day. In other words, over a 24 hour periods, 185,000 Allied troops were “boots on the ground” with the vast majority of them firing off their guns and being shot at. On that day about 2,500 allied soldiers were killed and another 10,000 wounded (there is no official number). Among the Germans and their friends, between 4,000 and 9,000 were killed or wounded. But the landings did not end during that 24 hour period. Rather, the main effort to move troops and equipment into France ended on about June 11th. Over that period of five days, 326,547 troops, 54,186 vehicles, and over 100,000 tons of supplies had landed. During this period, dozens of Allied and German ships and hundreds of aircraft were destroyed. (Sources: DDayMuseum and TehWiki.)

Let’s compare this to the Iraq War. The Iraq War (the one we just had) ran for over 8 years. The total number of Coalition forces in Iraq was 300,000, about the same as the 326,547 for the Normandy Invasion that lasted 5 days, which in turn was followed by less than one year of fighting to the end of that war. The Iraq war involved military casualties of about 24,219 dead from coalition forces (mainly Iraqi Security forces), with the original invaded Iraqui army and insurgents suffering about 30,000+ dead. It is almost impossible to compare these numbers meaningfully for a lot of reasons. But, clearly, the fact that the 8 year long Iraq War involved about the same number of troops as the Normandy Invasion gives you some idea of the size of World War II.

One of the most interesting movies if you are at all into modern history or military stuff isThe Longest Day, which was based on the book The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day. It is almost entirely a guy film, in that almost all of the characters are men, though there is a beautiful women with the French Resistance character (of course) who did not marry my father, and a bunch of nuns who do not fear bullets (of course). The Longest Day came out in 1962 and was the most expensive black and white film made at the time and retained this distinction until replaced by Shindler’s List. It seems as though almost every male actor of the day is in this film somewhere. All the actors were paid an initial salary of 25,000 to be in the film except John Wayne who felt dissed by having been not asked to be in it initially. When the producers’ plans changed and they needed Wayne, he insisted on a rather larger salary. Oh, and if you do watch The Longest Day, do make sure it is the version where the Germans speak Germans, the French speak French, and the Bits an Americans speak English. (Info about The Longest Day is here.)

(Of course, Saving Private Ryan is also an epic film about D-Day.)

Since 1962 is D-Day plus a couple of decades, all of the actors grew up with D-Day as part of their culture, and quite a few were in the invasion itself. One British actor was a paratrooper, a private, during the war. In the film, he plays his commanding officer and another actor plays him, and they make a little fun of the good old days with a bit of inter-unit humor written into the script. The film touches on all those things that probably happened that D-Day is famous for.

Ike Eisenhower is a bit of disappointment in the film. A major character in real life (he was the Supreme Commander), his role in the movie consists of a single scene with hardly any lines. On the other hand, the actor they got to play him was not really an actor, but just somebody who was a dead ringer for Ike. It is said that Ike, who had subsequently become President of the United States and stuff, considered playing himself in the role, but they couldn’t get him to look young enough, so they got this guy who looked like him and didn’t have him act much, because he really couldn’t act (turns out that’s a skill!).

So, if you want to grasp the Ike part of the story, consider the movie Ike: Countdown To D-Day, where Tom Selleck does a pretty darn good job of playing the Supreme Commander.

The Longest Day Trailer … see if you can pick out the stars:

___________

Image from Wikipedia Entry on D-Day

And now, also from Media Matters, this fun infographic. Share it around!

This day will mark the dividing line – the definitive transition – between a world dominated by the concept of exponential, inexorable growth to one that has the opportunity to come to grips with true long-term global sustainability.

Ever since the dawn of humanity, the population of the planet has been growing (ok, some quibblers may point out that disruptions like the Black Plague or the Dark Ages may have briefly interrupted this inexorable growth, but they were blips in the long history of exponential population growth – see Figure 1). Our institutions, theories of resource use, and economic policies and concepts are all based on an assumption of continued population growth.

Figure 1. World human population (est.) 10,000 BC–2000 AD. Source: originally uploaded to en.wikipedia based on the “lower” estimates at census.gov.

The threats of continued population growth have long been clear: unsustainable use of resources, the challenge of meeting basic human needs for water, energy, and other basic resources, fundamental disruption from now-unavoidable global scale climate change, and the economic challenges of providing jobs, housing, education, water, energy, and transportation infrastructure for rapidly growing populations. These problems are especially severe in poorest regions of the world and the rapidly growing urban areas receiving a massive influx of young people from rural areas.

It is no surprise that some of the greatest remaining challenges with poverty are in precisely those regions where population continues to grow the fastest: parts of Africa and the Middle East. Table 1 shows those countries with population growth rates higher than 3% per year.

Table 1. Countries/Regions with population growth rates higher than 3% per year, 2011

Source: World Bank data 2013.

But the rate of population growth is slowing, as the education of women expands, health care improves, knowledge about family planning expands, and economic growth improves living conditions. The world currently adds around 78 million people a year, down from over 85 million people annually around 1990. And one day the global population as a whole will begin to shrink.

Twenty-five countries or regions (see Table 2 below) are already experiencing flat or declining populations – they actually have negative growth rates – and are moving from the difficult challenge of handling growth to the different real challenge of handling decreasing (and often aging) populations.

Table 2. Countries with zero or negative population growth rates, 2011 (percent per year)

Source: World Bank data 2013.

We don’t know what the ultimate global population peak will be. We don’t know how many additional people the planet can support, even at a low quality of life, or what the long-term stable population of the Earth should be if everyone has a decent quality of life.  But the day is coming when the world’s population will peak and then begin to decline. We should be planning for it now.

Peter Gleick

In a recent study of climate blog readers, Lewandowksy and his colleagues found that the strongest predictor of being a climate change denier is having a libertarian, free market world view. Or as Lewandowsky put it in our interview, “the overwhelming factor that determined whether or not people rejected climate science is their worldview or their ideology.” This naturally lends support to the “motivated reasoning” theory—a conservative view about the efficiency of markets impels rejection of climate science because if climate science were true, markets would very clearly have failed in an very important instance.

But separately, the same study also found a second factor that was a weaker, but still real, predictor of climate change denial—and also of the denial of other scientific findings such as the proven link between HIV and AIDS. And that factor was conspiracy theorizing. Thus, people who think, say, that the Moon landings were staged by Hollywood, or that Lee Harvey Oswald had help, are also more likely to be climate deniers and HIV-AIDS deniers.

This is similar to what we’ve been saying for years. Ideology is at the heart of antiscience, (yes even liberal ideology) and when in conflict with science will render the ideologue incapable of rational evaluation of facts. The more extreme the ideology, the more likely and more severe the divergence from science. Then there is the separate issue of cranks who have a generalized defect in their reasoning abilities, are generally incompetent at recognizing bad ideas, often believing conflicting theories simultaneously, and are given to support any other crank who they feel is showing science is somehow fundamentally wrong. This is the “paranoid style”, it’s well-described, and likely, irreversible. However, more run-of-the-mill denialism should be preventable.

We’ve discussed this extensively in regards to research by Dan Kahan, although I have disagreed with this jargon of motivated reasoning. Chris, however, knows what they’re referring to with their fancified science-speak, ideology is at the root of denial.

Recognizing that the problem of anti-science is not one of a lack of information, or of education, or of framing is of paramount concern. This is a problem with humans. This is the way we think by default. People tend to arrive at their beliefs based on things like their upbringing, their religion, their politics, and other unreliable sources. When opinions are formed based on these deeply-held beliefs or heuristics, all information subsequently encountered is either used to reinforce this belief, or is ignored. This is why studies showing education doesn’t work, the more educated the partisan is on a topic, the more entrenched they become. You can’t inform or argue your way out of this problem, you have to fundamentally change the way people reason before they form these fixed beliefs.

Scientific reasoning and pragmatism is fundamentally unnatural and extremely difficult. Even scientists, when engaged in a particular nasty internal ideological conflict, have been known to deny the science. This is because when one’s ideology is challenged by the facts you are in essence creating an existential crisis. The facts become an assault on the person themselves, their deepest beliefs, and how they perceive and understand the world. What is done in this situation? Does the typical individual suck it up, and change, fundamentally, who they are as a person? Of course not! They invent a conspiracy theory as to why the facts have to be wrong. They cherry pick the evidence that supports them, believe any fake expert that espouses the same nonsense and will always demand more and more evidence, never being satisfied that their core beliefs might be wrong. This is where “motivated reasoning” comes from. It’s a defense of self from the onslaught of uncomfortable facts. Think of the creationist confronted with a fossil record, molecular biology, geology, physics, and half a dozen other scientific fields, are they ever convinced? No, because it’s all an atheist conspiracy to make them lose their religion.

How do we solve this problem?

First we have to recognize it for what it is, as Mooney and others have done here. The problem is one of human nature. Engaging in denialism doesn’t have to mean you’re a bad person, or even being purposefully deceptive (although there are those that have that trait), the comparison to holocaust denial, always a favorite straw man of the denialist, is not apt. Denialism in most people is a defense mechanism that protects their core values from being undermined by reality. And no matter what your ideology, at some point, you will have a conflict with the facts because no ideology perfectly describes or models all of reality. You are going to come into conflict with the facts at some point in your life no matter where you are on the ideological spectrum. The question is, what will you do when that conflict arises? Will you entrench behind a barrier of rhetoric, or will you accept that all of us are flawed, and our beliefs at best can only provide an approximation of reality – a handy guide but never an infallible one?

Second, we have to develop strategies towards preventing ideological reaction to science and recognize when people are reacting in an irrational fashion to an ideological conflict with science. One of my commenters pointed me to this paper, which describes an effective method to inoculate people against conspiratorial thinking. Basically, if you warn people ahead of time about conspiratorial craziness, they will be more likely to evaluate the claims of conspiracists with higher skepticism. We should encourage skeptical thinking from an early age, and specifically educate against conspiratorial thinking, which is a defective mode of thinking designed to convince others to act irrationally (and often hatefully). When we do see conspiracy, we shouldn’t dismiss it as harmless, the claims need to be debunked, and the purveyors of conspiracy theories opposed and mocked. Before anyone ever reads a line of Alex Jones, or Mike Adams, a training in skepticism could provide protection, and with time, the paranoid style will hold less and less sway. People primed to expect conspiratorial arguments will be resistant, and more skeptical in general. The Joneses, Moranos, and the Adamses of the world don’t have the answers, they know nothing, and their mode of thought isn’t just wrong, but actively poisonous against rational thought. As skeptical writers we should educate people in a way that protects them from their inevitable encounter with such crankery. This is why writers like Carl Sagan are so important with his (albeit incomplete) Baloney Detection Kit. He knew that you have to prepare people for their encounters with those with an ideological agenda, that others will bend the truth and deny the science for selfish reasons.

This is what is at the heart of true skepticism. First, understanding that you can be wrong, in fact you will often be wrong, and all you can do is follow the best evidence that you have. It’s not about rejecting all evidence, or inaction from the constantly-moved goalposts of the fake skeptics. It’s about pragmatism, thoughtfulness, and above all humility towards the fact that none of us has all the answers. Second, it’s understanding not all evidence is created equal. Judging evidence and arguments requires training and preparation as recognizing high-quality evidence and rational argument is not easy. In fact, most people are woefully under-prepared by their education to do things like read and evaluate scientific papers or even to just judge scientific claims from media sources.

Thus I propose a new tactic. Let’s get Carl Sagan’s Baloney detection kit in every child’s hands by the time they’re ten. Hell, it should be part of the elementary school curriculum. Lets hand out books on skepticism like the Gideons hand out Bibles. Let’s inoculate people against the bullshit they’ll invariably contract by the time they’re adults. We can even do tests to see what type of skeptical inoculation works best at protecting people from anti-science. It’s a way forward to make some progress against the paranoid style, and the nonsense beliefs purveyed by all ideological extremes. There is no simple cure, but we can inoculate the young, and maybe control the spread of the existing disease.

“If we could get growers to comply with the law, that would revolutionize agriculture in this country,” said United Farm Workers (UFW) national vice president Erik Nicholson  explaining the circumstances that led to the creation of the Equitable Food Initiative. As Nicholson describes it, despite Americans’ intense interest in food and concern for their families’ health, most don’t think much – if at all – about the people who grow, pick and bring this food to market. And while most people not closely involved with agriculture assume that food is grown here under fair and safe conditions and that we have regulations to ensure that this happens, reality doesn’t always match this assumption.

Agriculture has the worst safety record of all US industries, with fatality rates about seven times that of the county’s all-industry average and reported injury rates 3 to 4 times the all-industry figures. “Where are the alarm bells?” asks Nicholson, pointing out that US farm workers continue to die each year from heat, deaths that can been prevented with solutions as simple as shade and water. Average non-supervisory farm work wages are just above federal minimum wage, which means a great many farm workers are being paid the minimum of $7.25 an hour. (Under the Fair Labor Standards Act agricultural work is exempt from overtime, and some small farms don’t have to pay the minimum wage.) Between 2007 and 2009, an estimated 43% of US farm workers surveyed were receiving some form of public assistance. A scan of UFW recent “victories” highlights some of the issues farm workers are grappling with: lack of overtime pay or paid holidays, hazardous pesticide use, health insurance costs, rotation of workers on heavy-labor tasks, and the right to organize.

Nicholson notes the recent increase in food-borne illness and increasing concern about effects of pesticide use, along with the trend toward consolidation in food retailing and ongoing pressure to keep food prices down. “At the end of the day,” he says, “Farm workers are subsidizing this.”

The Equitable Food Initiative (EFI), of which UFW is a founding member, was started to address these issues in ways they typically haven’t been before. By connecting labor and management collaboratively throughout the fresh food supply chain, EFI’s goal, explains project director Peter O’Driscoll, is to ensure not only the safety of food itself but also the health, safety and respect of farm workers and their families. “It’s about changing the culture of compliance,” said O’Driscoll – moving it beyond a “check-list mentality” that focuses on tidying things up for auditors to one that it “ongoing and collaborative.”

When it comes to food safety programs, farm workers have typically not been engaged in any ongoing or substantive way, explained Nicholson. Rather, he said, farm workers have often been discouraged or prevented from sharing information that could jeopardize the outcome of a safety audit. “Our members, many of whom come from generations of farm workers, felt their knowledge and experience was being overlooked,” said Nicholson. (A 2011 survey found that US farm workers had an average of 13 years’ experience.) Many farm workers are still paid not by the hour, but by the piece or volume picked, which discourages anything that would interfere with those numbers. EFI aims to change this whole status quo.

EFI is now in a pilot phase, with one major California-based grower, Andrew and Williamson (A&W), and one major retailer, Costco, fully involved. Food service company Bon Appetit is also involved, as are Farmworker Justice, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Oxfam America and Pesticide Action Network North America, among other organizations. Nicholson describes these groups as unlikely “bedfellows” and says that bringing them together through EFI is an “unprecedented opportunity.”  O’Driscoll explained that EFI is currently in discussion with at least eight other companies and that he expects commitments will be forthcoming from companies beyond A&W as well as with other farm worker unions.

Based in Watsonville, California, A&W’s crops include strawberries, tomatoes, and  cucumbers grown both in California and Mexico. They’re a major supplier to Costco. A&W manager Ernie Farley credits both UFW and Costco as instrumental in getting them involved in the program. A&W has experienced food safety issues and wants to, as Farley said, turn that experience “to good.”

Key to the program are worker-management teams that create what Farmworker Justice communications director Jessica Felix Romero calls “a safe environment” for workers and management to discuss concerns that can range from wages, to occupational and food safety issues. Program participants agree to uphold EFI standards that mean increasing existing benefits for workers, but there is no quid pro quo for doing so, explains O’Driscoll. The idea is that both workers and managers will monitor for ongoing compliance with standards set for labor conditions, pesticide use and food safety issues. This kind of dialogue is not typical at a farm level, she explains. Nor is the idea that farm workers would be engaged in ongoing monitoring of growing conditions that could affect food quality and safety. “Let’s be more diligent on a daily basis” and be willing to say when something is “less than 100%” so we can fix it, says Farley. O’Driscoll and A&W manager Ernie Farley call this a cultural change – change that Farley says isn’t easy.

Food safety isn’t the whole focus of EFI’s program, but it’s helped engage both A&W and Costco. “We don’t want to participate in a product that has gotten to us by the wrong practices,” says Jeffrey Lyons, Costco senior vice president for fresh food. “What’s good for the farm workers benefits the entire supply chain,” he says. Better conditions in the field, including higher pay and fully engaging farm workers in delivering a safer and better product, reduces waste and damage and adds value for everyone involved, he explains. “That everyone in the field understands food safety and safe pesticide use, benefits them and their families. These people deserve our respect and deserve to make a fair living. They’re a valuable asset to us,” he says. This may cost Costco a bit more but it pencils out in value, Lyons explains. “We benefit from the quality.” This, he says, more than pays for itself – taking shortcuts, doesn’t.

“We needed to flip the whole narrative,” says Nicholson. Instead of practices that drive prices down at the expense of workers and product safety and quality, we have to figure out “how to have upward price pressure” by increasing value.

EFI, explains O’Driscoll, is now in the process of finalizing a set of standards on labor rights, occupational health and safety (including pesticide management), and food safety that will be used to inform its work. The challenges are substantial, he acknowledges. As we talk, I wonder out loud if such a model of involving workers directly and substantively with their management and the retailers who buy and sell their products, might also help improve conditions in other industries. “Yes,” says O’Driscoll emphatically.

Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Scientific American, Salon, The Washington Post, The Nation, Mother Jones, Grist, and the Huffington Post. Chasing Molecules was chosen by Booklist as one of the Top 10 Science & Technology Books of 2009 and won a 2010 Gold Nautilus Award for investigative journalism.

This can was used back in the day, before I was born, by my grandfather (who lived upstairs) to burn garbage. The story was about a can of shaving cream. Apparently, one day my grandfather was burning garbage and there was a discarded shaving cream can in there, which should not have been included in the garbage to burn because such a thing could explode. And it did. A piece of shrapnel from the exploding shaving cream can blew a new hole in the side of the burning garbage can, whizzed past my grandfather but missed him, passed through a hole in a nearby chain link fence and took a chip out of a brick in the apartment building next door. As evidence of this event there was an extra, ragged hole in the garbage can and a piece of brick missing visible on the side of the apartment building.

Yeah, I don’t believe it either. I was the youngest of four siblings and telling me tall tales was a family amusement, since the television had not been invented yet.

Anyway, the idea that burning garbage is good for the environment should strike you as wrong, because garbage is … well, it is garbage … and burning it releases all sorts of horrid toxins into the environment. So, burning garbage to produce energy would also be a bad thing. Better to burn something nice and clean. Like coal. Or uranium. Right?

Well, wrong, actually.

Author and science communicator Shawn Otto (Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America) has written an interesting piece on burning garbage to make electricity. It turns out that opposition to waste-to-energy technology is an example of science denialism on the left. Modern waste to energy plants are clean, and may be cleaner than many other forms of power plant. Also, when we burn garbage, we are getting “free” energy, to at least some extent, in relation to the problem of burning fossil fuels. While some of the Carbon released into the atmosphere in burning garbage may be Carbon from fossil fuel sources, much of it is carbon from non-fossil fuel sources (like trees).

Today’s waste-to-energy plants are not your granddaddy’s trash burners, and some liberal groups, like the Center for American Progress, are starting to look at the actual science and reevaluate long-held assumptions in light of new information and increasing concern over climate change. When they do, they are finding that today’s WTEs look surprisingly good for the environment and for fighting climate change.

Shawn’s article is detailed and has numerous helpful graphics. Go read it and become much better informed about the science of waste-to-energy production.

I think that one of the plants Shawn visited during his review of this problem may be the power plant not far from my house in Elk River. That power plant is built on the site of one of the earliest commercial nuclear power plants. That little fact has nothing to do with the topic at hand but I find it interesting nonetheless.

From the Abstract:

Since the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, new observations of ice-sheet mass balance and improved computer simulations of ice-sheet response to continuing climate change have been published. Whereas Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing pace, current Antarctic ice loss is likely to be less than some recently published estimates. It remains unclear whether East Antarctica has been gaining or losing ice mass over the past 20 years, and uncertainties in ice-mass change for West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula remain large. We discuss the past six years of progress and examine the key problems that remain

There are many difficulties with measuring and understanding the dynamics of melting of large continental glaciers, the large ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland. As ice melts from these glaciers, they grow lighter and this allows the underlying bedrock to rise up, and conversely, if snow is added to the surface this increases the amount of depression of the underlying bedrock. For this reason you can’t just measure the surface of the ice to estimate how much has been added or removed. When ice melts on the surface, some of it travels down into the glacier and some comes right off the surface. The ice that goes into the glacier may cause deeper ice to melt, or it may provide lubrication to the base of moving streams of ice. As a glacier loses mass at the edge through calving of ice bergs, and the margin retreats away from the sea, the degree of calving, which is an ice-ocean interaction effect probably decreases. Large masses of ice are “grounded” at the outer margin on a “grounding line” beyond which is floating glacier (not sea ice, but large masses of ice undercut by the sea). The grounding line can move towards the sea or away from it, and the dynamics of this movement are complex and difficult to model or measure. Many of the Antarctic grounding lines occur on surfaces that slope downwards in the inland direction, which makes the dynamic a bit more complicated to measure.

Major changes that have improved estimates include adding dimensions to some of the models, such as considering both vertical and horizontal forces along grounding lines. Also, newer models use a finer resolution. However, the increase in resolution is thought to be insufficient; current models are not calculated at fine enough resolution to include numerous smaller ice streams that are narrower than the sampling density of the models.

It appears that the range of uncertainty of ice-melting models has improved significantly over the years so greater confidence in their predictions may be warranted. The best estimates of future contribution to sea level rise of melting glaciers is still highly variable, however.

The current estimates of contributions to sea level rise in mm per year from various studies are between 0.59 and 0.82 from the major ice sheets, between 0.71 and 1.4 for ice caps and glaciers, about 1.1 for thermal expansion, and a negligible but positive amount from changes in terrestrial water storage. These modeled amounts sum to 1.66 mm per year or 3.11 mm per year depending on the set of sources that are used. The observed change in sea level rise over the period from 1993=2008 is 3.22, so there is good agreement though the models are a bit light.

These numbers are small, but they are larger than previous estimates and observations. Still, compared to the potential sea level rise when one considers that the ice in the continental glaciers equals several meters of ocean water, near future sea level rise may be expected to be relatively low if these models are correct and account for everything. Over a century of time, this amounts to about 300 mm, or one foot, of sea level rise. If, however, oceans are warming more than the air at present and a few more episodes of that occur over the next century, this may be considered a minimal estimate. One foot does not sound like a lot of sea level rise, but it is enough to remove extant barrier beaches. Also, flood tides would not be increased by one foot, but rather, more exponentially. This is how a sea level rise of about this order of magnitude over the last century managed to contribute to the flooding of the lower Manhattan subway tunnels when the region was struck by Hurricane Sandy last year.

But there is a problem. Several areas of uncertainty exist in the models that are currently in use, and my impression is that these areas of uncertainty could be associated with dramatic errors in sea level rise estimate. The dynamics of grounding line changes, the role of lubrication at the base of glaciers (which can cause ice streams to speed up on their way to the sea) and the effects of warm currents shifting their position in Antarctic to cause more melt at the boundaries are among those factors that are least known and that have the highest uncertainty. Also, the seaward edge of continental glaciers are not only held in place by their grounding line on the continent, but also by more distal parts of the floating segment of the glaciers being pinned on prominence. As far as I know the effects of pinning being disrupted or lost are not included in any of the models. Also, I’m pretty sure that the effects of sea level rise on grounding and pinning have not been adequately addressed.

That these issues may be a problem is empirically suggested. The paleo-record shows that continental ice melting and associated sea level rise may occur in fits and starts, with steady melting punctuated by brief periods of extreme melting. The current models don’t seem to predict this sort of event, though these events probably happen.

Hanna, E., Navarro, F., Pattyn, F., Domingues, C., Fettweis, X., Ivins, E., Nicholls, R., Ritz, C., Smith, B., Tulaczyk, S., Whitehouse, P., & Zwally, H. (2013). Ice-sheet mass balance and climate change Nature, 498 (7452), 51–59 DOI: 10.1038/nature12238

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