There's a new fire near Boulder. It's only 300 acres, but it's burning the flatirons, it's heading toward NCAR, and there are evacuation notices dropping.
The High Park Fire is still burning at over 87,000 acres.
My friends Susan and Galen have been evacuated from Colorado Springs. My best friend (their daughter) just told me that the fire has burned the home of one of her former students, that it's down the street from the school she taught at until this summer. People from my writing group have been evacuated, or we haven't heard from them at all.
@PatrickSandusky: This is colorado springs right now. Look at this photo and be shocked. Its f'ing armageddon here
Even away from the fires the air smells like barbecue. It's hazy. The horizon closes in, unnaturally for Colorado. Ash falls from the sky in some areas, like it did during the Hayman fire years ago. It's the most disturbing snow imaginable, gray fluff when it's hot and dry and you can look the sun in the eye because it's a angry orange ball cloaked in smoke.
9 active fires are burning right now: High Park, Chimney Rock, Flagstaff, Last Chance, Little Sand, Waldo Canyon, Stateline, Treasure, Weber. These are all places I have been, mountainsides that are old friends, trails I've hiked.
This is all I have, a dry recounting of names and facts. I know I would feel this helpless if I was home. I will feel this helpless when I'm home over the weekend. Because what can you do against fire? It's a force of nature. It's unseasonably hot days, no rain, and an uncountable number of dead pine trees, killed by beetles breeding over too many mild winters. There is nothing a single human being can do about that.
Is this climate change? People arguing over that are missing the point. Climate change is not one single event. It's the culmination of years and decades of gathering warmth and more easily attained extremes. So is this a warning? Perhaps. Years of warm winters and hot summers? Perhaps. There isn't anything a single solitary human can do about that either.
There's some hope that good could come from this, in the sense that this will consume the beetle-killed trees, and maybe it'll cut down on the number of pests. What we really need are our desperately cold winters back, two in a row. But so far that hasn't happened, and I don't find a lot of hope that it will soon.
But now I just feel helpless, sitting 1100 miles away and clicking reload on news feeds over and over while Colorado burns.
This letter caused me a lot of incoherent sputtering this morning.
First, I'd like to address the specific claims made by Senators Inhofe and Vitter and Congressman Issa, then I'd like to say a few words about the main premise of the letter itself.
I'll go through this section by section. What I have to say here is the result of me spending some quality time with Dr. Google. My findings are not necessarily definitive, or complete. So if you dredge up any points that I've missed or gotten wrong - or have arcane knowledge that I manifestly do not possess - please let me know and I'll add any new facts to the pile and swiftly correct mistakes.
Inspector General Investigation of the National Academy of Engineers Report
The Republican letter implies that there was misconduct in the report, because scientific peer review for findings was claimed where none existed.
From the IG's report:
All DOl officials interviewed stated that it was not their intention to imply that the moratorium had been peer reviewed by the experts, and that when the experts' concern was brought to their attention, they promptly issued an apology to the experts via conference call, letter, and personal meeting.
And:
All DOI officials interviewed stated that it was never their intention to imply the moratorium was peer reviewed by the experts, but rather rushed editing of the Executive Summary by DOI and the White House resulted in this implication. After reviewing different drafts of the Executive Summary that were exchanged between DOI and the White House prior to its final issuance, the OIG determined that the White House edit of the original DOI draft Executive Summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed by the experts.
So basically, the Inspector General's report says that any implication that there was peer review - and it was only an implication, not a stated fact - was a mistake that the preparers of the report freely owned up to and apologized for.
Also from the IG report, in regards to the complaint that information quality assurance was violated:
While the 30-Day Report's Executive Summary could have been more clearly worded, the Department has not definitively violated the IQA. For example, the recommendation for a moratorium is not contained in the safety report itself. Furthermore, the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report's recommendations. The Department also appears to have adequately remedied the IQA concerns by communicating directly with the experts, offering a formal apology, and publicly clarifying the nature of the peer review.
The Republican letter also alleges blatant political influence. Having read the Inspector General's report, that's a baseless accusation on their part.
I will note that the Inspector General's report was requested by Senator David Vitter (and Congressman Steve Scalise). To be honest, after reading through the entire thing, I wonder if Senator Vitter is just feeling a little aggravated that the Inspector General didn't find the steaming heaps of politicized scientific misconduct he was desperately hoping for. What's in the Republican letter reads like a mountain being made from a mole hill.
National Research Council Review of IRIS Formaldehyde Assessment (EPA)
The NRC's review can be found here if you'd like to read it yourself.
This seems to be the most damning part of the NRC's review:
The report finds that EPA supports its conclusions that formaldehyde can cause irritation to the eyes, nose, and throat; lesions in the respiratory tract; and genetic mutations at high concentrations. Furthermore, the report finds that the evidence is sufficient for EPA to conclude that formaldehyde exposures are a cause of cancers of the nose, nasal cavity, and upper throat. However, the draft assessment has not adequately supported its conclusions that formaldehyde causes other cancers of the respiratory tract, leukemia, or several other noncancer health outcomes. Also, the assessment should consider additional studies to derive noncancer reference concentrations (RfCs), which are estimates of lifetime concentrations to which someone could be exposed without appreciable risk of particular adverse health effects.
This one is a little less clear cut, I think. The NRC makes valid points about the EPA overstating the research to pin leukemia on formaldehyde, for example. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies formaldehyde in group 2A, which means "probably carcinogenic to humans." This is generally not the same as "you will get leukemia."
"I'm extremely glad I fought so hard for this review by the National Academy of Sciences, which really is the gold standard in terms of scientific assessment," Vitter said. "It confirms what I feared -- serious shortcomings and bias at the EPA. Louisiana citizens should be able to count on EPA conclusions and advice. This study shows that we can't."
Which I think is a very nicely crafted attack, since it implies that the EPA is completely unreliable instead of overcautious, which seems to be the case here.
Personally, I'd rather agencies were too cautious about health risks than not cautious enough. Though that is no excuse for a lack of scientific rigor.
US District Judge Oliver Wanger's Decision Criticizing Agency Scientific Work and Testimony in Federal Court
The snide tone of that particular opinion piece notwithstanding (because hey, I'm not going to begrudge someone a bit of snideness when I revel in it myself!) the job losses seem to be more about drought than pumping restrictions. (Estimated 16,000 jobs lost due to drought, 5,000 due to the restrictions.)
However, the rest of the points in the Republican letter are a bit more difficult to tackle. If you'd like to read the entirety of the judge's opinion here it is, and I'd recommend you put on your asbestos underwear first, because it's a doozy. Judge Wanger has some very nasty things to say about the scientists in this case, the juiciest bits of which are cited in the letter to the Administration.
But at times, Poole said, Wanger has gone too far. "We have argued in certain cases … that he has basically made scientific calls when there's a dispute between scientists that are improper for him to make" under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. "He shouldn't be the arbitrator for scientific disputes. Congress has given that role to the expert agencies."
I haven't been able to find any detailed information about the testimony given by the two scientists. So at this point, I feel like it devolves into a he-said she-said, where Judge Wanger feels that the witnesses are not credible, and the EPA says it continues to support their findings. I've found several articles that have questioned Judge Wanger's accusations that the scientists are contradictory on the grounds that he has mistaken scientific uncertainty for attempted deceit. I really can't say one way or the other.
What just boggles my mind is that Chairman Jaczko is basically being attacked for taking a "better safe than sorry" approach to a nuclear disaster. One can only wonder what the reaction would have been if he'd just stuck with the evacuation zone that the Japanese government had drawn.
But really, this is all beside the point.
Public trust in federal scientific work is waning and the academic community has gone so far as to call the situation a "crisis." Accordingly, we request that you provide us with an accounting of your activities in response to serious questions raised about the quality of science utilized by this Administration.
Looking over the list of issues in the Republican letter, one thing struck me the most - scale. They want to talk about public trust in scientific work? I'd be curious to know how many people outside of the San Jaoquin valley - and outside of those that have a serious hate on for the EPA - knew about Judge Wanger and the never-ending delta smelt war? How many people have had their trust of science scarred by the EPA overstepping and placing leukemia risk in a report about formaldehyde instead of just sticking to nasal cancer? How many people had their trust in the government shaken by Chairman Jaczka recommending Americans not remain within 50 miles of the meltdown at Fukushima instead of a more modest 20 miles?
I am not in any way saying that scientific misconduct - whether it involves overstating one's case or acting with too much haste - is acceptable. (Though sometimes in the intersection of science and policy, haste is required and mistakes are made.) But I think I am well within my rights to talk about scale.
What hurts the public trust of science more? The DOI erroneously implying that something had been peer reviewed when it hadn't, or Senator Inhofe calling climate change (and thus the robust science backing it), "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people"?
What hurts the public trust of science more? Judge Wanger calling Dr. Jennifer Norris a zealot, or Congressman Issa dogpiling on the Climate-gate-that-wasn't and saying, "It’s very clear that an inconvenient truth has been replaced by a convenient lie – we’d like to get to the bottom of the lie."?
The shear sack required for these men to continually attack biology and climate science then set themselves up as "defenders" of science to score a few cheap political points, is breathtaking.
With "friends" like these, enemies need not apply.
Everyone should read this post. It's by Dr. Bailles, one of the co-discoverers of the so-called "diamond planet" that the media was having squee spasms about recently. He pointedly notes that his discovery wouldn't have been at all gleefully received if he was, say, a climate scientist, despite the fact that the scientific process and peer review is the same.
Which I think is a really good point. Everyone loves hearing about awesome astronomy things, and you never see the media seeking "balance." And by "balance," I mean, "finding a dissenting voice on the fringe of the science to provide the illusion of fairness when, in fact, the dissenting voice is the minority and has often failed to address the criticism of his or her peers."
But, you know, "balance" is way easier to type.
And Brian Dunning of Skeptoid just put an episode out about fracking. I did a coupleof posts about that myself, almost two years ago. Generally, I think Brian did a good job, and the episode is worth a listen. His ending point is excellent - it's important to separate the science from how much you loathe Halliburton, for example.
The only complaint I've got is for part of the episode he refers to natural gas drilling as "mining" for some reason I can't fathom, and even refers to wells as "mines" in a couple of instances. That started driving me a little crazy after a while. But then he uses "wells" and "drilling" in other parts of the podcast, so I'm not sure what's going on with the vocabulary choice.
Also, I would have liked to hear Brian mention that fracking fluid is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, due to a 2005 amendment. This is something I still personally think needs to be changed due to the possibility of surface contamination. There are sites like FracFocus, which sounds like it's built on voluntary disclosure. As far as I know there's no other federal requirement of disclosure (please, correct me if I'm wrong) though it sounds like a lot of states have laws now. Ultimately, your mileage may vary depending upon how evil you may think the various oil companies are, but I do have my doubts that fluid additives would be disclosed without a legal requirement; if nothing else, a lot of the additives are proprietary.
In a few short hours, I'll be on my way to the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, to participate in the coring portion of the Bighorn Basin Coring Project. Things are moving much faster than expected - the rig is already at Polecat Bench, where it wasn't planned to be until Friday, because coring went so quickly at the first location, called Basin Substation.
This was kind of a surprise, but a good one. It also means my advisor and I are scrambling to get up to the Basin as soon as we can. And that instead of one two week stretch, I'll be coming back to Denver with her, and then flying back out to Wyoming on July 31 to help out at the third site. (The third site, Gilmore Hill, is on BLM land and we're literally not allowed to start until August 1.)
I've set up a twitter account for just BBCP-related stuff. I don't know how many good pictures I'll get, since I'm on the nightshift, but here's hoping! Please follow and spread the word. It's a chance to see some science in action.
So why should you care about this project? Two words: climate change. In geology, the present is often the key to the past - we can observe processes today and use them to figure out the how and why of ancient rocks. During the PETM, the Earth's climate changed remarkably, and in a fairly short period of time. I've written about it in more detail here, and you can also get more information on the project's website. While the Bighorn Basin Coring Project is focused on understanding the PETM and many related issues, there is also this to consider:
This will allow us to investigate, in an unprecedented way, the high-frequency climatic and biotic variability of a continental depositional system during greenhouse conditions.
There are no guarantees in science, but there's a possibility that this time, the past might provide a key to the present. Climate change induced by a rapid influx of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? While it's not a perfect parallel (for the PETM it was methane, rather than our own carbon dioxide), it still could be very relevant. And I would think it's something we want to understand well before our personal contributions of carbon get anywhere close to the rather voluptuous 6800 gigatons of methane that went into the atmosphere during the PETM. (As of 2004 we were at ~500 Gt.)
One thing we're hoping is that we'll not only capture the PETM, we'll also maybe get some data for the other, smaller hyperthermals in the Eocene. How much carbon input equals how much climate change? As part of a species with a vested interest in climate not changing much, that's a question I'd personally like to examine, and I'm hoping I'll get my chance.
(And don't worry, Mom, I'll watch out for snakes!)
At this point, I know better than to accept at face value what an article claims that a scientific paper says, so I set out to find the paper - particularly since for once I have a chance of understanding at least some of the paper since it's about geology! I had to comb through the RawStory article that the Alternet article links to in order to actually find the paper in question. Which is:
Giampiero Iaffaldano, Laurent Husson, Hans-Peter Bunge, Monsoon speeds up Indian plate motion, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 304, Issues 3-4, 15 April 2011, Pages 503-510, ISSN 0012-821X, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2011.02.026.
The article is available on ScienceDirect, though you may not be able to read the whole thing for yourself if you don't have a subscription to the service. You should be able to at least read the abstract, which should give you the gist of it.
So what does Alternet take out of this paper? "Climate change can affect plate tectonics, oh shit, that's why we've got all the huge earthquakes OH MY GOD."
I will point out that there's one VERY salient quote from Giampiero Iaffaldano (the lead scientist) that's in the RawStory article that Alternet leaves completely out:
Iaffaldano stressed that his study did not mean that global warming would translate to stronger earthquakes happening more often, with the relevant patterns developing over "the order of millions of years."
"Of course earthquakes do occur at the boundaries between plates because of plate motions, but our work doesn't imply at all that we will see an increase in these types of events," he told AFP.
Emphasis added by me. This little omission really leaves me wondering about the motivations of the Alternet author.
As for the paper itself, what does it actually say, and is it interesting? The paper does make a reasonable case for linking climate change with an effect on plate motion and speed. However, the important part that also gets left out of the Alternet article is that this link is explored on a million year scale. It's an examination of how the change in climate over the last 10 million years or so - the climate change in question being a strengthened Indian monsoon - has affected the erosion of the Himalayas, which ultimately lead to decreased resistance in the convergence between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates.
Now, personally, I find this fascinating, since it links relatively "fast" surface processes (eg weathering and erosion) to much slower tectonic processes. I think that opens up a lot of very interesting research questions - Iaffaldano points out that he's curious to see if there's a climate signature to be found in other fairly recently uplifted areas.
But I think for general interest, it's VERY important to note that when we're talking a scale of millions of years - which is what plate tectonics operates on - the current climate change we are inflicting on the planet is NOTHING in terms of duration. It's not even a blip. Now, if we keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere and manage to really fuck things up in the long, long, long, long term, maybe in ten million years future humans or aliens will be using simulations to wind the tectonic clock back and say, "DAMN, look at those plates move!" But this will have no measurable effect on our short little human lives.
It really bothers me that an interesting study is being misrepresented in this way. While I appreciate wanting to add some urgency to the issue of climate change - trust me, I do, BIG TIME - this is not the way to do it. It smells like a scare tactic, and it plays into the hands of the climate change deniers.
From mid-July to the beginning of August, I'm going to be outdoors, in Wyoming. No, I'm not crazy. Yes, I have a good reason for doing this. Because in the summer, that's when we'll be coring through the Willwood Formation in the Bighorn Basin. And this is a big deal.
The Willwood Formation is about Eocene in age, and sits on top of the Paleocene Fort Union Formation. The Willwood Formation is mostly a lot of paleosols (lithified soils) and river sandstones. And more importantly, the sediments that form these rocks were laid down during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and then the later, smaller thermal maximums during the Eocene. As a quick summary, taken from a thesis proposal I've been using in order to beg for money1:
The sedimentary geologic record can be used as a window into the past conditions of the Earth, including the climate in which sediments were laid down. In the Cenozoic, there are many examples of shifts in global climate. Potentially significant to the modern climate in which humans live are the hyperthermal events that occurred during the Eocene. Hyperthermals are relatively brief (~100,000 years) warming events that coincide with the release of massive amounts of carbon from terrestrial reservoirs. The most well understood of these hyperthermals is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 55.5 million years ago. During the PETM, 6,800 Gt of carbon were added to the shared carbon pool of the atmosphere and ocean, and global temperatures rose 5-9° C (Sluijs et al. 2006, Zachos et al. 2008). Slightly more recently (53.7 Ma), the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 (ETM2, also called ELMO) occurred. ETM2 is about half the size of the PETM isotope excursion (Lourens et al. 2005), and generally much less well understood.
This project is a big deal, for several reasons. Just to start, coring is not a cheap process, and this project is funded by a pretty major grant from the NSF. But what's more important is what we hope to learn from the cores. The PETM is of great interest to climate scientists and geologists right now, because it's perhaps our best historic example of what humans are currently doing to the planet. There weren't a bunch of little proto-horses in the Eocene burning oil so they could roar around in ridiculous cars, but it was a sudden, rapid surge of carbon being put in to the atmosphere, even if the source is being debated.
This is important because, no matter how many people2 in the world are short-sighted and basically sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "Lalala can't hear you" every time someone brings up this science, that doesn't make it any less real and pressing.
The paleosols, which are what I'm mostly interested in, can tell us a lot about how the local climate shifted in response to the PETM. This is important, since most human beings have a vested interest in their local environment not suddenly changing and, say, making it impossible for them to grow food. Also, one of the cores will be through the ELMO thermal maximum, which I think will end up providing a valuable set of comparative data. There's already some pretty robust data for the PETM in the Bighorn Basin, and the cores will give us even more. If we then compare that data to what we come up with from ELMO, that may give us a sense of just how far a local environment will shift pushed by how much carbon - because it may not need an input as big as that in the PETM to really mess things up.
Hopefully, that's enough to get you interested! The BBCP has a facebook page now, here. When we're actually coring during the summer, there will be a blog for the project hosted by Smithsonian, which I'll link to when it's up. I'll also no doubt be blogging about it here, and I think I'm going to be responsible for tweeting about it as well.
The coring is going to run from July 13 through August 8. I'll probably be on the rig from July 19 through the end of the project, since I'm going to try to go to TAM before I head up to Wyoming. I'll also be on the night shift the whole time - coring is a 24/7 process - so I guess I'll be documenting BBCP - After Dark3.
Once we've got our cores, we'll actually be sending them out of the country (since this is a project with multinational investigators!) to Bremen, Germany. They'll be living at the Marum core repository, which is also where all of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program cores go. That means in January 2012 (if I can find the funding for it!) I'll be heading off to Bremen for three weeks of intensive core prep, description, and sampling.
And then, science! Lots of science!
Year two of grad school is looking ridiculously exciting.
1 - It's a time-honored scientific endeavor. I wish I was joking when I say that.
2 - Here, I use the term people in place of the perhaps more true but less polite term: idiots.
3 - I actually volunteered for this. If you knew how badly I sunburn, you would understand why. I also don't like the heat, and it'll be much cooler at night.
References
Lourens, L. J., Sluijs, A., Kroon, D., Zachos, J. C., Thomas, E., Rohl, U., Bowles, J., and Raffi, I. 2005. Astronomical pacing of late Palaeocene to early Eocene global warming events. Nature, vol. 435, p. 1083-1087.
Zachos, J. C., Dickens, G. R., and Zeebe, R. E. 2008. An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics. Nature, vol. 451, p. 279-283.
Yes, I know, this is why you read my blog, because I'm informative AND classy.
I've finally started doing my initial readings for my grad school project, which I really should have gotten moving on months ago. I don't know if being out of school for eight months has just destroyed my ability to manage my time, or maybe I lack the sense of urgency that actually being in school and having solid due dates provides. Either way, I'm trying to read a couple per day.
What I'll be working on in grad school is a project examining the local change in climate in the Bighorn Basin during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Here's something of a broad summary at io9 of the PETM and why it's significant, but if you're too lazy to read even that extremely conversational post, the one sentence summary is: Temperature went up, a lot of species died, and there are many suspected parallels between those events and the climate change we are facing today. So the PETM is an area of current interest in a lot of fields, because it may further our understanding of current environmental events.
In the io9 article, the emphasis is on the catastrophic event that might have thrown the environment out of whack, either massive volcanic activity or a meteor impact. I think that tends to give the events of the PETM a little less urgency on the surface, since today we're not facing world-altering volcanic activity OR a meteor strike. Instead, we're facing whatever threat our own fossil-fuel burning activities might cause. Whatever the ultimate carbon contribution to the atmosphere, billions of humans tooling around in cars is certainly less... well, dramatic than seas of basalt flooding large swathes of the continents.
The articles I've read so far have been interesting because the focus hasn't been on a big, sexy, catastrophic kick-off for all of the carbon that caused the rapid (4-8 degrees C ocean surface temperature rise in a few thousand years) temperature increase, but rather a sort of positive feedback loop from degassing of methane hydrates in continental shelf and deep ocean sediments. This is supported by examining carbon isotope ratios, which show distinct, rapid (geologically speaking) shifts in the ratios that might show multiple pulses of carbon input (Bains et al 1999). This sort of geologically instantaneous is pretty much consistent with either an impact or methane hydrate dissociation. And since we're looking at possibly several discrete events it's unlikely that every one of them was an impact.
The most interesting paper I've read so far is from 2002; it only looks at a single site, but the isotope data there indicates that there was a brief period of ocean surface warming prior to the massive methane release - the great geological fart, so to speak (Thomas et al). Of course another of the papers suggests that methane hydrate dissociation doesn't necessarily have to be thermally triggered; a significant amount of methane could be released because of submarine seismic or volcanic activity, or even gravitational slumping (Bains et al).
So the scenario that these papers build up is that something triggered the release of a large amount of methane into the atmosphere. It did what greenhouse gases tend to do, and this might have caused a reinforcing effect that could have lead to more methane getting put into the atmosphere. And then things got hot and uncomfortable. Of course, the initial cause of the methane hydrate dissociation is still a matter of question. Maybe it was seismic activity, or an impact that started this chain reaction, so to speak, and the methane release just added insult to injury. The Thomas et al paper suggests that the dissociation was thermally caused (as indicated by the brief period of surface warming prior to carbon being dumped into the the atmosphere), and that's really the most worrying scenario. Because if we're looking at temperature driven methane dissociation, the ultimate source of that temperature change at the end of the Permian wouldn't be relevant in today's world - it would be the temperature change happening at all, and driving further warming.
Sea surface temperature already is increasing. At the site in the Thomas paper, they're estimating about a 2 degree C surface temperature increase before the methane hydrates dissociated and made a beeline for the atmosphere. We're not really that far off from that sort of increase in some areas of the ocean right now. (Of course, what the surface temperature was at the time is not stated and may not be something we know for certain.) The real take home is that it very well could be a positive feedback situation: you get a little warming, it sets off a big geological fart, that adds up to more greenhouse effect and more warming, and pretty soon the Earth starts sounding like it had the baked bean special at the Chuckwagon last night.
Now, these are of course only a few papers, and this is a complicated subject. The mechanisms for warming in the PETM are still a subject of great debate, and new data is coming in constantly. But it's certainly something to think about. There very well may be lot more carbon waiting out there than just what we're burning to run our cars and power our cities, and it could be waiting for a thermal cue to bubble up to the surface and make things quite unpleasant for thousands of years to come.
Silent but deadly, indeed.
ETA: A very nice anonymous commenter pointed me toward a summary of the current research (as of 2008) on the methane hydrate issue. It's still a very viable hypothesis and the challenge remains figuring out exactly how a massive methane burp would relate to the ocean warming, and exactly how much carbon we're talking about, here. Also:
...no study has uniquely demonstrated that oxidized CH4 (or another compound) was the source of the carbon addition. There are also issues regarding the mass of carbon injected during the PETM, and whether gas hydrates at this time could furnish such a quantity.
So there are still questions that need to be answered. But I'd say the three papers I read here are still pretty much in line with the main body of the research, including the questions still remaining to be answered.
A Transient Rise in Tropical Sea Surface Temperature During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. James C. Zachos, et al. Science 302 (2003). DOI: 10.1126/science.1090110
Mechanisms of Climate Warming at the End of the Paleocene. Santo Bains, et al. Science 285 (1999). DOI: 10.1126/science.285.5428.724
Over at Science There's a letter with a veritable laundry list of signers regarding the recent (and not so recent) unconscionable attack on climate science by the media, politicians, and others. It's very much worth the time it takes to read.
We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively.
And now he's after a climate change scientist. Oh my stars and garters. Cuccinelli has come across pretty steadily as a climate change denier, so investigating Michael Mann for "defrauding taxpayers" over grants for global warming research carries a nasty whiff of intimidation. Don't like the science? Attack the scientist's reputation. Anyway, I think Phil lays it all out quite nicely.
I do have to say one thing I've found interesting on Phil's post is the comments. Because as you would expect, the minute the Bad Astronomer tippy-tapped out:
To be clear: the climate is changing. There is zero doubt about that. None. Anyone telling you differently has an agenda to ram, and it’s one that is decidedly not realistic.
...the trolls and deniers came scooting out of their dark corners of the internet. What's fascinating me is how disjointed some of the comments seem from the actual post.
My dramatic reenactment:
Phil: Cuccinelli is a jerk! Inhofe is a jerk! Politicians that abuse their power to try to intimidate scientists who come to conclusions they don't like are jerks! RAR!
Commenter: But what about MY feelings????? How dare you call ME a denier!!! OMG I feel so attacked!!!
I don't know. Maybe the people writing those comments are actually Cuccinelli and Inhofe under assumed names? Otherwise... goodness, we are getting a little defensive, aren't we.
Conveniently enough, there's a Scientific American article about the use of basalt as a CO2 sink, which was posted yesterday. I suppose that using basalt for its CO2 sponging abilities isn't a bad second option; if nothing else, there's a lot more basalt in the world than there is easily available ultramafic rocks. Basalt is being produced every day from volcanoes, while ultramafic melts would be very uncommon in this day and age. To get an ultramafic rock, you need a much higher degree of melting of the mantle peridotite than you'd normally get, now that the Earth has cooled off a bit.
Depending on the type of basalt, you'll also get olivine in it, which is what I talked about yesterday as the main constituent of ultramafic rocks, the thing which weathers so nicely once you add a little carbonic acid. I doubt that you could go much less mafic1 than basalt and still get much bang for your buck.
The reason for this comes down to Bowen's Reaction Series, the terror of all first year students of geology. The reaction series is really just a simplified description of how magmas crystallize, because different minerals are stable at different temperatures and pressures. We're most concerned with the left side of the series, in this case.
So let's pretend we've got some mafic (but not ultramafic) magma, which spews to the surface and becomes lava. The first thing that will crystallize in it as it starts to cool is olivine. As the lava continues to cool, some of the olivine (not very stable at these low pressures) will react with the remaining melt and begin forming pyroxene. More cooling, and the pyroxene starts converting over to amphibole. Melt composition also plays a big role, but that's getting a little too complicated for a Tuesday before I've had lunch, I think. By the time all your lava has cooled down, you're going to end up with a mixture of what's more stable at the surface, such as pyroxene and amphibole.
That's generally how the reaction series works. The important thing to keep in mind is that the higher you are in that reaction series, the less stable the mineral is at the surface. And the less stable it is, the easier it is for carbonic acid to come along and work its magic. Ultramafic rocks are ideal for this because they're mostly olivine. Depending on the type of basalt, there are still a lot of minerals that break down very easily, such as pyroxene - and some basalts do have significant amounts of olivine in them still.
This still has the same pitfalls and questions as using the ultramafic rocks, I think. The biggest being, of course, that if you think it takes a long time for an ultramafic rock to weather, it's going to take even longer for basalt.
I'm also really wondering about the one sort of throw-away statement at the end of the article:
Already, a proposed coal-fired power plant proposed in Linden, N.J. includes plans to pump captured CO2 emissions into an offshore sediment, albeit not a basalt one.
Putting aside the the cringe-inducing phrase "an offshore sediment," I'm wondering what exactly the goal is, there. Are the sediments in question ones that they expect the CO2 to react with? Are they just hoping the sediments are going to hold on to the CO2 long enough that it'll be someone else's problem, which is often the goal when we're talking about injecting carbon down somewhere deep in the ocean? That's a little worrying.
1 - Just in case you didn't know, all this "mafic" business is just a reference to the major non-silica components of the rock. Mafic is shorthand for magnesium/ferric (ferric meaning iron) since there's a lot of those elements in this sort of rock. You'll also hear "felsic" which is shorthand for feldspar/silicate, which you find in abundance in rocks like granite.
I imagine a lot of people haven't even heard of peridotite, or don't know what ultramafic rocks are, which is fair enough. Most people aren't geologists, and have a hard time getting excited about rocks. I actually hadn't heard of looking at ultramafic rocks for carbon sequestration until I took introduction to Geochemistry last year. After that, yes, I thought it was a pretty exciting concept.
Now, the reason we were talking about this in geochemistry is that the carbon sequestration comes down to a very basic chemical reaction that occurs every day - the chemical weathering of rocks. Most rocks in our lives are some form of silicate; their chemical formula is SiO2 plus some other junk, and the crystalline structure is usually the silica tetrahedra arranged in different ways around the other junk. Most chemical weathering of these silicates comes from CO2 dissolving in rain water to make carbonic acid, H2CO3. Rain is actually naturally a little acidic, since it's made up of water plus a little carbonic acid. It falls, runs over rocks, and then you end up with something like this:
Mg2SiO4 + 4CO2 + 4H2O ⇌ 2Mg2+ + 4HCO3- + H4SiO4
Where the water and carbon dioxide are what make up the carbonic acid. In this particular equation, the rock in question is olivine, the main constituent of peridotite. So basically, it's:
So chemically, you can use this kind of reaction to get CO2 out of the air. And peridotite is certainly a good candidate for this kind of reaction. Olivine has a mineral structure that's basically individual silica tetrahedra jumbled together; it's not really stable at surface conditions, and it's easy for the tetrahedra to get picked off by whatever happens to come by. That's why olivine weathers away much faster than something like quartz, which has a very organized framework and doesn't allow a lot of room for party crashers. Once you've got the olivine broken down via this process, then you can separate out the ions and acid. The magnesium, you could make in to salts, or perhaps there's a good industrial use for it. The bicarbonate just needs some calcium, and then you end up with limestone, which is the end result we want for getting the carbon chemically locked away. The silicic acid could be precipitated in to amorphous silicate if nothing else.
Honestly, I can't say why people aren't excited about this possible solution to getting carbon out of the air. It's got its problems that need to be figured out for sure, though not necessarily more than any other proposed sequestration method. Off the top of my head:
The reaction is normally extremely slow, as noted in the articles, so you do have to find a way to speed it up. And in so doing, a way to speed it up that doesn't involve producing more carbon via energy usage than what you're taking out of the atmosphere.
Once you've got your schmutzed-up former olivine, you still have to put it somewhere. One suggestion my geochemistry teacher had was to just toss it in to old mines, which isn't really that bad of an idea. But there's still a question about hauling tons and tons of rock anywhere, to be honest.
You'd need to have a good, energy efficient way to get carbon out of the atmosphere and then dissolved in to your water.
And I'm sure there are more questions than that. But I also don't think these are more difficult questions than the ones that come with any proposed carbon sequestration scheme. It even has its advantages; once your carbon is chemically locked in to limestone and you toss that limestone down an old mine, you don't really have to worry about it again. The dissolution of limestone does release the carbon, but you're not going to have to worry about that until millions of years in the future, when there's been some uplift and the contents of the old mine are exposed to weathering. I'd say that's easier to deal with than figure out how to keep CO2 in gas form from escaping a reservoir you've injected it in to.
Most people I've explained this to have thought it was actually a very exciting idea, if one that's so far just on paper. The big thing is that very few people have even heard about it, as is pointed out in the articles I've linked to. Maybe it's because it's difficult to get most media excited about talking rocks, unless we're talking molten rocks that are poised to destroy a town, and then they're all over it. Of course, one might argue that it's more important to pump money in to research on finding energy sources that aren't going to produce so much carbon dioxide. Fair enough, but until we get there it really wouldn't hurt to figure out how to stuff at least some of that excess CO2 back under the global couch cushions, so to speak. Or I suppose there are some that might say that none of this is a matter of concern, but I think I've already established that I wouldn't want to sit next to them on the bus anyway.
Mike Littwin did a lovely opinion piece in the Denver Post about it today. I don't often read the local paper (unless they inexplicably have cattle mutilations as the front page story, as if the health care debate and even Tiger Woods had ceased to exist), and I hear a lot from my mother about how the opinion pieces in the paper practically slosh with crazy these days. But it looks like at least some of the time, they're getting it very right.
There is nothing particularly new in doubting what you don't understand. There are flat-earthers even today. But some things have changed. The Internet has made more information available to more people than ever before. But it also has led to what you might call a democratization of the facts, in which everyone's "facts" turn out to be equal.
So, Japan is being invaded by swarms of jellyfish, and we're being inundated with stinking, toxin oozing slime of the variety that doesn't carry firearms to townhall meetings. The simple fact sheet on the algae doesn't speculate as to cause, but the jellyfish are being pretty strongly linked to rising ocean temperatures.
Really, the jellyfish article is fascinating. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the image of a fishing boat capsizing due to a net bulging with giant, alien-looking jellyfish.
