The Strident Centrist Blog

That’s what Cambridge University chemist Sir David King is quoted as saying in this article on Wired.com:

Sir David King, a chemist at the University of Cambridge, says the world would be a greener place if only women didn’t find men in exotic cars so sexy. Taken at face value, it seems outlandish - and some would argue chauvinistic - but King raises a valid point, even if it is obscured by the “sports cars and the women who love men who drive them are bad” tenor of his argument.

King, the UK’s chief scientific advisor, told the Telegraph there’s only so much governments can do to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and real progress will come only through cultural change. People, he said, must take a greater personal role in addressing the issue. He singled out women who find drivers of expensive sports cars “sexy” and said they should instead focus their affection on men in more eco-friendly autos

It’s almost completely absent from the mainstream media, and addressed in only a few blogs, including UMM biology prof P.Z. Myers and science writer Chris Mooney’s. But Cyclone Sidr is expected to come ashore in Bangladesh tomorrow. Sidr is now a strong category 4 storm (sustained winds near 150 MPH) and so far has not weakened as predicted as it approaches landfall. There are tens of millions of people in its target area where the Ganges flows into the Indian Ocean, one of the lowest deltas on Earth. Loss of life will almost certainly dwarf that of Katrina and in the worst case could approach or even exceed the 200K plus of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December, 2004.

When you click on an article thumb-nailed on the home page of the Science Daily website, in addition to the piece desired you get links to past articles that their algorithms calculate that you’re likely to be interested in as well. Today I selected a recent article on why the Indian subcontinent collided with the Eurasian land mass at the relatively high speed of 20 cm per year that brought up this link to a six year old piece about the genetics behind the caste system. The opening sentence pretty much sums it up:

In India, members of higher ranking castes are genetically more similar to Europeans, while lower castes are more similar to Asians, according to a study published in this month’s issue of Genome Research.

As for the subcontinent’s ‘lightening’ speed, that’s caused by the fact that it sits on the thinnest layer of lithosphere science knows of.

McClatchy reports that the pessimists’ fears of the environmental consequences of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze were not unfounded. Water quality has gone to hell upstream, and the swifter flow downstream is unfriendly to the sediment-adapted fish species who’ve been there for untold millenia.

But authorities now admit that the dam is generating major problems. It’s created a huge — and heavy — reservoir pressing against the mountains along the Yangtze, making them more prone to landslides. The deep reservoir stretches upriver about 370 miles, impeding the natural flushing action of the river and trapping pesticides, fertilizer and raw sewage. Downriver from the dam, water flows cleaner and faster, adversely affecting aquatic species adapted to sediment in the river.

That’s one of the qualifications listed in this Science Daily piece about two young entrepreneurs’ venture to manufacture and market a more environmentally friendly line of surf boards. Where do you suppose you go to get this degree? It even one-ups Dr. Science of public radio fame.

From ABC News comes this:

From September 3 to September 9, researchers say 69,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappeared, roughly the size of the Sunshine State.

Scientists say the rate of melting in 2007 has been unprecedented, and veteran ice researchers worry the Arctic is on track to be completely ice-free much earlier than previous research and climate models have suggested.

“If you had asked me a few years ago about how fast the Arctic would be ice free in summer, I would have said somewhere between about 2070 and the turn of the century,” said scientist Mark Serreze, polar ice expert at the NSIDC. “My view has changed. I think that an ice-free Arctic as early as 2030 is not unreasonable.”

Sea ice melt will likely reach the absolute minimum in the next few days as temperatures at the North Pole cool and refreezing begins.

From what I read there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what will happen if when the Arctic Ocean is mostly ice-free for much of a summer. Water in its liquid form absorbs much more solar energy than do snow and ice, which reflect much of it back into space. Here’s a post from RealClimate from early this year that addresses the issue. Perhaps we should be thinking of industrial civilization as a laboratory experiment.

Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation, writing in the International Herald Tribune a couple of months back, starts from Sir Nicholas Stern’s observation that climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”, and considers what that might mean for the future , not to mention America’s place in the views of future historians:

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report’s recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

. . .

Underlying Western free-market democracy, and its American form in particular, is the belief that this system is of permanent value to mankind: a “New Order of the Ages,” as the motto on the U.S. Great Seal has it. It is not supposed to serve only the short- term and selfish interests of existing Western populations. If our system is indeed no more than that, then it will pass from history even more utterly than Confucian China — and will deserve to do so.

If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.

You’ve got to wonder what’s behind these poll results from the National Journal. Today, in February 2006, fewer GOP Congress Critters respond with a “Yes” to the question “Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?” than they did ten months ago in April, 2006! Way back then 98% of Congressional Dems answered “Yes”, as did 23% of the Republicans polled. The Dems are still polling the same, but the Republicans are down to 13%!

Is it a non-random sampling issue? Are they living under a huge, immovable rock? Perhaps. But I have another hypothesis. Maybe it’s because a disproportionate number of the incumbent Republicans who lost their bids for reelection this past November were among the diminishing handful of moderate Republicans, and that this altered profile was reflected in the sample.

h/t to Kevin Drum for the link.

Via Slashdot comes this link to a Nature piece about a plan to stuff concrete balls into a mud volcano in Indonesia in an effort to slow down its copious spew rate:

Last week, the government team tackling the disaster approved a plan that will use 1,000 steel chains to try to slow the flow of mud. Each chain is 1.5 metres long and links together four concrete balls — two that are 40 centimetres across and two that are 20 centimetres across. Each ball and chain set will weigh about 300 kilograms. The balls themselves will be modified to maximize their friction with the mud.

The team will start off slowly, dropping five chains into the volcano’s mouth on the first day — possibly as early as this week — and ten on the second, before hitting a high of up to 50 per day until all of them are used.

The scheme was dreamt up by three geophysicists at the Bandung Institute of Technology . . . the project will have a budget of 4 billion rupiah (US$440,000) paid for by PT Lapindo Brantas, the oil drilling company that some locals blame for the disaster.

. . .

The chains will sink into the conduit that has been feeding the hot mud to the surface, Fauzi explains. “We are aiming to get them to go 100 metres down, but the deeper the better,” he says. The goal is to make the channel smaller — not plugging it altogether but, according to a model built by the team, narrowing it enough to slow the mud’s rise and so decrease its flow rate by up to three-quarters. Forced to go around the chains and balls, the mud will give up some of its energy to friction, vibration and rotation, says Nurhandoko. “It will make the mud tired. We’re killing the mud softly.”

Hopefully “making the mud tired” with concrete balls will work better than throwing in virgins.

For 400,000 years up until the late 19th century, the CO2 level of the atmosphere fluctuated from a low of about 125 ppm during the deepest periods of glaciation to about 275 ppm during interglacial periods, such as we’ve been in for the past several thousand years. As described by Mark Bowen in his book Thin Ice, the variations have been correlated with perturbations of the earth’s orbit, and the planet’s orientation within that orbit, that affect the amount of solar energy that reaches the earth’s surface. In about the mid 1880s, however, the CO2 level began moving inexorably beyond 275 and as of 2005 has reached 379.1 ppm. Not only are these levels unprecedented during the 400,000 year period for which continuous glacial core records are available, but the rate of change is without precedent as well. It remains to be seen what the effect of the increasing CO2 levels will be. Plausible scenarios have been presented showing that they could lead to a hot-house environment with rising sea levels as glaciers melt, or that the initial warming could trigger a tipping point of some kind that will change the water chemistry of the North Atlantic such that a new era of glaciation will ensue, with falling sea levels. We, or rather our progeny, shall see.