[Stoves] more on ocean acidification

Thu Aug 8 10:07:51 CDT 2013

Dear Cecil on the Mountain

I want to start my reply with a quote from Larry Ledwick
<http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/about_us/meet_us/max_boykoff/readings/hmi
elowski_2013.pdf> .

"They are drawing a causal relationship from a casual association. The
inverse of their hypothesis is equally likely, ie people who are educated
enough in the principles of science to identify shoddy science when it is
offered up by global warming adherents are more likely to be conservatives.
It also supports the assertion that liberals are more inclined to be
followers of causes and not critical thinkers but prefer to defer to
authority rather than critically judge issues after examining them in
detail, or actively researching the available information."

The principles I am focusing on are 'drawing causal relationships from
casual association' and 'deferring to authority' (or 'appealing to
authority') to validate a claim.

Your questions focus on the former. The 'usual answers' focus on the latter.
Paul O has provided good examples of the latter so please note them.

>Perhaps those somebodies at NASA who claim that acid rain is acidifying the
ocean - rather than reducing its alkalinity - were simply not paying
attention to their high school chemistry because they too were stoned to
appreciate the subtle difference between 'more acid' and 'less alkaline'.

The reasons will probably remain unknown. The effect is of course, what
matters. When it is NASA that says it, we are supposed to take it 'on
authority'. After all they put men on the moon. The departure of James
"death trains" Hansen from NASA is expected to produce some pretty big
changes so let's keep an eye on that. But none of it improves their
knowledge of basic chemistry.

>.so, what are the predictable systemic consequences of an ocean that is
becoming less alkaline? 

People are of course looking into the past to try to make such predictions.
Others are a lot more Hollywood making sciencey-sounding prognostications
that are right out of "The Day After" arguably the lowest science-content
science fiction movie of all time.

The oceans have in the remote past been much closer to neutral or even on
the other side of it into the slightly acidic zone. Watching the shelled
creatures only, they coped fine. That not mean there is any chance in say
the next million years we would see an acidic ocean. It is at present not
possible to create that.

>Is something that humanity is doing causing coral to blanche and die?  

Our mutual friend Austin Bowden-Kirby should pop in for that one. There was
a casual association between the temperatures in the Western Pacific when
there (and other El Nino-unrelated places) was a rise in coral blanching.
However the die off was much larger than regional temperature rises. It
turns out that die off I speak of (a few years ago) was caused by a virus
that attacks the hosted species, which were expelled by the host corals. The
recent die back in Florida was caused directly and immediately by cold
weather and a sudden drop in ocean temperatures. Coral can take heat but not
cold. There are Saudi corals but no Ellesmere Island atolls.

>Are the exhalations and run offs of industrial civilization slowly
poisoning the oceans and turning it into an underwater desert?  

That is a broad question. The traceable effects involve disposed and
processed medicines. I think those effects are real and we need to re-think
the health industry. There are underwater deserts but desert researchers
would all point to the thriving desert life forms that they study so we need
to be careful :). The biggest threat to the oceans may be the dumping of
plastic garbage everywhere. It is amazing how polluted the oceans are with
bits of plastic. Perhaps a bug will evolve that attacks plastic and put an
end to everything from Lego to latex for good.

>Can you or anybody at NASA scientifically differentiate between the noise
of conflicting big data from the tiny signals of a world system under duress
and in danger of being destroyed by anthropogenic excesses?  

Absolutely not. That is why there are so many models. The validation of
models is a controversial topic. Some say because the elements of a model
are individually validated, we can have confidence in the performance of the
assemblage. Consider stove testing. We build mathematical pictures of
performance using certain measurements. Because we make a proper
determination of the temperature if the water in the pot, we might assume
that any conclusion drawn from those readings is valid. That of course is
where the mistakes are made. If the temperature of a pot stops rising, and
heat is still being applied, is heat still being absorbed?

Well, it becomes obvious that the water is boiling and the temperature is
not being applied, so we move to measuring the mass of water being
evaporated as a measure of heat absorbed. Then inferences are made about the
combination of temperature change and mass loss by evaporation. The claims
made I this regard underpin claims for 'heat transfer efficiency'. That is
OK as a rough guide, but there are many routes for heat to enter a pot and
leave without changing the temperature or evaporating water so as one looks
deeper, one sees there are many 'unmodelled' complications. It has so
happened that in recent years the emergence of char making TLUD stoves has
exacerbated the errors in the simple models used for decades and there are
serious consequences for the stove section. Stoves that are really IWA tier
1 performers can get a tier 4 rating for something because of defects in the
models. It is like that with the climate too. To date there are 73 well
known, accessible climate models (GCM's). Not one of them has predicted the
current 200 month stasis in global temperature (indistinguishable from zero
change). That means the models are invalidated. The implications are pretty
serious.

>I nearly flunked HS chemistry so please keep your answers as simple as
possible.  

>What environmental impacts do you think present day climate and oceanic
science tells us humanity needs to collectively manage better because there
is credible evidence that tiny human generated changes in atmospheric and
oceanic conditions have the potential to trigger a cascade of consequences
that - oh my God - could or predictably do lead to a collapse of the world's
environmental balances to the point where industrial civilization as we know
and love it becomes impossible to sustain for billions of humanoids who all
want to be affluent western style. 

Deforestation, including the cutting and wholesale replacement of forests by
mono-cropped biofuel plantations. 

Over-pumping of groundwater reservoirs.

Over-ploughing because it leads to soil loss by water and wind.

Contamination of everything by dumping especially industrial wastes into the
ecosystem.

Over-fishing - we do it in the way hunter-gatherers did before they started
doing agriculture.

We have a lot to learn from the African tribe that lives in the Western
Sahel who move about every 40 years and plant anew all the trees they need
to provide for everything they want to build and eat. They move when the
trees take over the local environment. They were attacked in the press by
'Greens' who bemoaned the loss of open grazing and leaving in their 'wake' a
self-sufficient forest full of food and building materials. I guess you
can't please everyone.

<I remember reading an article from the 1970's written by John Todd, a
marine biologist, about Science for the People in which he recounted his
awakening to the potential threat of ecocide.  He had spent months getting
the plants, corals, fish, crustaceans, worms, and micro flora and fauna in a
salt water aquarium into a healthy and stable balance.  His wife casually
tossed a couple of his freshly dry cleaned jackets onto the back of a chair
beside the aquarium while he was working at Script Oceanic Institute.  The
corner of one sleeve of a sports jacket just barely touched the water.  When
John returned from work in the late afternoon he found everything in his
aquarium had died from the carbon tetrachloride cleaning agents used to dry
clean his coats. His life as a marine biologist was never the same again
because he realized from that moment onward that infinitesimally small
changes in oceanic conditions had the power to precipitate massive diebacks
affecting entire ecosystems.   

He began to research what concentrations of carbon tetrachloride and other
organo-phosphates interfered with the health of a particular type of fish he
knew well and he discovered that their presence in concentrations too dilute
for him to measure (back in the early 1970's) interfered with the mating
rituals of this species.  Its presence made it impossible for the species to
reproduce and therefore threatened the survival of this fish species.  In
fact the inability of these fish to mate - the disruption of their mating
behavior -  was the only way he could measure the presence or absence of
toxic chemicals in concentrations too dilute for the science of that time to
measure, monitor and manage.  

A series of powerful mystical awakenings like this one helped John and
several of his colleagues who later joined forces to found the New Alchemy
Institute at Woods Hole Massachusetts confront the limitations of science
and humanity's ability to control the partially understood consequences of
industrial civilization.  It was this realization that industrial man is in
the same predicament as the sorcerer's apprentice in Walt Disney's Fantasia
that eventually led to to the formation of the New Alchemy Institute. The
sorcerer's apprentice knows just enough to activate the boomsticks but not
enough to turn them off  or control a vast army of scientific automatons
each mindlessly serving the short run interests of their owners.  

That is an interesting story. My wife killed our bright blue pet fish Alphie
(a Beta Fish) by putting him in a cup of tap water. <2 ppm chlorine killed
it in a few minutes.

>Crispin, check out John Todd's (a fellow Canadian) perspective on the fatal
consequences of a tiny amount of CCl4 in a salt water aquarium and perhaps
you will be willing to graciously allow more space for the precautionary
principle in your climate and ocean science.

I have no problem applying the precautionary principle, but it cannot be
applied in one direction - everything has an opportunity cost. Should we
spend money on reducing indoor PM from cooking fires, or clinics that treat
a wide range of diseases? Should we spend money on promoting and researching
biological pest controls in Congo or on natural ways to eliminate malaria?
There is no shortage of lost opportunities each time resources are expended
on something else.

Regards

Crispin

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