The adage “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” does not quite capture the following pair of situations. It’s more like “damned if you could (but you can’t), damned if you couldn’t (but you kind of did).”
First, the “damned if you could (but you can’t)”. On April 4 at 3:40 p.m., a magnitude 7.2 earthquake rocked Baja, Mexico, and was felt well north. The event elicited the following post on Twitter 16 minutes later from New Age lifemeister Deepak Chopra: “Had a powerful meditation just now--caused an earthquake in Southern California.” (Lawrence Krauss, too, lays into Deepak on page 36 for his lack of understanding of quantum physics. There’s plenty to bust Chopra about.)
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With this final column I will transition Sustainable Developments from Scientific American to the home page of the Earth Institute ( www.earth.columbia.edu ). Although I will continue to contribute occasional essays to the magazine, I will use this last regular column to say thank you and take stock of the deepening crisis of sustainable development.
During the four years of this column, the world’s inability to face up to the reality of the growing environmental crisis has become even more palpable. Every major goal that international bodies have established for global environmental policy as of 2010 has been postponed, ignored or defeated. Sadly, this year will quite possibly become the warmest on record, yet another testimony to human-induced environmental catastrophes running out of control.
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For decades, apocalyptic environmentalists (and others) have warned of humanity's imminent doom, largely as a result of our unsustainable use of and impact upon the natural systems of the planet. After all, the most recent comprehensive assessment of so-called ecosystem services -- benefits provided for free by the natural world , such as clean water and air--found that 60 percent of them are declining. [More]
Drinking water - Environmentalism - Human - Environment - Water
Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their sixth blog post for Scientific American.
The rooster in the room next to us crowed loudly at sunrise, and we despondently got out of bed with the goal of finding Fundi [see photo at left] , the town of Kalinzi's elusive stove maker. We found him farming and arranged to meet with him after work at the seventh hour of the Swahili clock, 1 p.m. international time (Swahili time starts with the first hour of sunlight and is therefore six hours behind). [More]
Tanzania - Swahili language - Engineering - Dartmouth College - Thayer School of Engineering
How much will it cost to protect an endangered fish in South Carolina? The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) wants local utility Santee Cooper to make several changes to its dams on Marion and Moultrie lakes, which would help endangered shortnose sturgeon ( Acipenser brevirostrum ) to pass through the dams and breed. But Santee Cooper says the changes NMFS wants will cost more than $100 million. [More]
National Marine Fisheries Service - South Carolina - Santee Cooper - Endangered species - Fish
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report from the group working on global warming's impacts contained at least one error. "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate," the report notes. [More]
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Climate change - Global warming - Environment - Climate Change: The Ipcc Response Strategies
Engineers are always plugging away to get better energy efficiency out of our products -- like cars that guzzle less gas or light bulbs that burn brighter on fewer watts. But even if we replaced all today's bulbs with energy-sipping LEDs, the world might not see any energy savings, according to a study in the Journal of Physics D . [JY Tsao et al, http://bit.ly/bdAclU ] Because the more efficient lights get, the more light we tend to use.
The researchers looked at light consumption since the year 1700. Even though today's compact fluorescents are 500 times more efficient than candles and whale oil lamps, what we spend on overall lighting hasn't gone down. It's just increased proportionately to our wealth. For the past 300 years we've consistently spent just about seven-tenths-of-one-percent of our gross domestic product on artificial lighting. And the researchers think this trend could continue, because many parts of the world still haven't satisfied their appetite for light.
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Last September I wrote my first column for Scientific American , and this September marks my last one. In writing on science issues relevant to our culture and society, there is an inevitable tension between sticking just to science issues and commenting on potentially hot-button social issues. I have tried during the past 12 months to strike some balance, but without fail those issues that stir the greatest outrage also stir the greatest interest.
Nothing seems to stir more discussion than pieces about science and religion, an observation that reminds me of the comment that Henry Kissinger reputedly made about academic disputes: they are so vicious because the stakes are so small. After all, science will continue irrespective of religious opinions, and I expect organized religion will continue to be a part of the cultural landscape, too, largely unaffected by the ongoing march of human knowledge, as it has been for centuries.
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An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but can knowing its genetic secrets help feed the 9 billion people expected on this planet by 2050? Scientists hope so, especially considering they have added wheat this week to the list of crops that have had their genetic instruction set read. [More]
Wheat - DNA - Apple - Agriculture - University of Liverpool
It looks like a solar-powered treadmill, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) say they have created a flat, conveyor belt-like device that could clean up oil slicks far more efficiently than anything used at the Deepwater Horizon site. They key is a nanoparticle-infused, water-repelling mesh coating a conveyor belt. As important is the device's ability to work autonomously as part of a larger team of devices, which M.I.T. calls a Seaswarm . [More]
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Oil spill - Conveyor belt - Deepwater Horizon - Oil
This Sunday, August 29, is the fifth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, which touched off one of the most egregious and most publicized tragedies in modern American history. Scientific American published an article in 2001 that predicted precisely the kind of destruction the storm wrought, based on computer models of hurricane paths and storm surges. Unfortunately, politicians and engineers responsible for flood protection did not listen to the scientists who were running the models. After 1,400 people died in the wake of Katrina and the nation’s pitiful emergency response , Louisiana and the federal government convened several independent panels of scientists and engineers to propose ways to better protect New Orleans and the entire Mississippi Delta from future hurricanes. [More]
Hurricane Katrina - New Orleans - United States - Mississippi Delta - Earth Sciences
SEPTEMBER 1960 EVOLUTION OF MAN-- “Mutation, sexual recombination and natural selection led to the emergence of Homo sapiens. The creatures that preceded him had already developed the rudiments of tool-using, toolmaking and cultural transmission. But the next evolutionary step was so great as to constitute a difference in kind from those before it. There now appeared an organism whose mastery of technology and of symbolic communication enabled it to create a supraorganic culture. Other organisms adapt to their environments by changing their genes in accordance with the demands of the surroundings. Man and man alone can also adapt by changing his environments to fit his genes. His genes enable him to invent new tools, to alter his opinions, his aims and his conduct, to acquire new knowledge and new wisdom. --Theodosius Dobzhansky”
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Why do the roiling, black clouds of a thunderstorm produce lightning? Ben Franklin and others helped prove that such lightning was discharged electricity, but what generates that electricity in such prodigious quantities? After all, storms generate millions of lightning bolts around the globe every year--even volcanoes can get in on the act as the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull did when photographs captured bolts of blue in the ash cloud. [More]
Lightning - Electricity - Energy - Thunderstorm - Benjamin Franklin
A massive 245-hectare fire near the town of Moapa, Nev., did $2.5 million worth of property damage in July and destroyed the Warm Springs Oasis , home to the little-known moapa dace ( Moapa coriacea ), an endangered fish that lives in the springs. But despite fears to the contrary, the fish were able to get out alive, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) reported. [More]
United States - United States Fish and Wildlife Service - Fish - Habitat - Endangered species
Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their sixth blog post for Scientific American.
After hearing many rumors, we finally received confirmation that the famous Dr. Jane Goodall was actually in town to celebrate 50 years of chimpanzee research in Gombe National Park . This discovery came about after finding out that the Land Cruiser that we had reserved to drive to Kalinzi had been used to escort Dr. Jane Goodall to one of the villages. We took our unexpected delay with alacrity as we considered how incredible of an opportunity it was to be in the presence of a living legend. When we finally arrived in Kalinzi, we made our way past the cornucopia of emerald green bananas at the market to the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) field station, which would serve as our headquarters for the rest of the summer. [More]
Jane Goodall - Tanzania - Jane Goodall Institute - Gombe Stream National Park - Chimpanzee
These are boom times for oil-eating microbes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to BP's Deepwater Horizon accident that has added some 600 million liters of hydrocarbons to those waters. And now research published online in Science on August 24 shows that an array of new and unclassified oil-eating bacteria are feasting on the newly rich resource of hydrocarbons. [More]
Oil spill - Gulf of Mexico - deepwaterhorizon - BP - Environment
If the 20th century was an expansive era seemingly without boundaries--a time of jet planes, space travel and the Internet--the early years of the 21st have showed us the limits of our small world. Regional blackouts remind us that the flow of energy we used to take for granted may be in tight supply. The once mighty Colorado River, tapped by thirsty metropolises of the desert West, no longer reaches the ocean. Oil is so hard to find that new wells extend many kilometers underneath the seafloor. The boundless atmosphere is now reeling from two centuries’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions. Even life itself seems to be running out, as biologists warn that we are in the midst of a global extinction event comparable to the last throes of the dinosaurs.
The constraints on our resources and environment--compounded by the rise of the middle class in nations such as China and India--will shape the rest of this century and beyond. Here is a visual accounting of what we have left to work with, a map of our resources plotted against time.
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With all due respect to T. S. Eliot, maybe the world really does end with a bang, not a whimper. Whether of our own creation (nuclear holocaust) or of nature’s (asteroid impact), plenty of cataclysms could doom civilization--perhaps even putting the survival of the species in jeopardy. We assessed the likelihood of several doomsday scenarios, from oft-discussed threats such as climate change to more fanciful ideas such as quantum fluctuations that would destroy our universe. The probabilities listed here are not scientific fact--an impossible goal when estimating the possibility of unprecedented events--but informed conjecture based on researchers’ expert opinions. We also relied on those opinions to approximate how catastrophic each event would be, ranging from 1 (localized chaos) to 10 (good-bye, universe).
KILLER PANDEMIC [More]
Climate change - Environment - T. S. Eliot - Species - Probability
Coral, the reef-building organisms responsible for some of the oceans' most vital ecosystems, are in trouble around the world because of climate change, ocean acidification and human interference. But lots of people are also trying to save coral reefs before it's too late. Here's a roundup of some of the latest research into this important class of organism. [More]
Climate change - Coral reef - Ocean acidification - Ocean - Environment
Mimicking volcanoes by throwing particles high into the sky. Maintaining a floating armada of mirrors in space . Burning plant and other organic waste to make charcoal and burying it --or burning it as fuel and burying the CO2 emissions . Even replanting trees . All have been mooted as potential methods of " geoengineering "--"deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment," as the U.K.'s Royal Society puts it. [More]
Geoengineering - Royal Society - Charcoal - Current sea level rise - Climate change
Last week's post served up facts from Power to Save the World (Vintage, 2008) by Gwyneth Cravens, whose book forced me to see nuclear energy in a more positive light. At the risk of destroying what little credibility I still possess, I'd like to urge readers to check out two even more provocative analysts of the risks of nuclear energy. [More]
Energy - Nuclear power - Nuclear - Gwyneth Cravens - Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy
A New York City postal processing facility that was contaminated during the 2001 anthrax attacks is now the site of the largest " green roof " in Manhattan. [More]
Green Roof - Manhattan - 2001 anthrax attacks - Construction and Maintenance - Sustainable Architecture
Editor's note: This story is part of a series of online exclusives about natural phenomena and human endeavors we'd like to see come to an end. They are connected with the September 2010 special issue of Scientific American called " The End ".
The meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES (pronounced "sight-eez") this past March was a decided defeat for the Atlantic bluefin tuna . Delegates voted 72 to 43 not to restrict fishing and international trade of the tuna so prized for its sushi that stocks are estimated to be at 15 percent of their historic levels . Although dismayed, conservationists remain upbeat, because they have at their disposal other management tools that could save the species. [More]
Fish - Tuna - Thunnus - Environment - CITES
Daylight Savings Time The extra hour of sunshine comes at a steep price [More]
Daylight saving time - United States - Business - Standard time - Clock
Imagine giant fields filled with photovoltaic solar panels, soaking up rays. The best spots to put such panels are obviously sunny, with little rain. But such places often come with lots of dust. And the panels have to stay dust-free: just a seventh of an ounce of dust per square yard of panel can decrease solar power conversion by 40 percent. And panels in Arizona might get covered with four times that much dust each month.
Cleaning the panels conventionally uses precious water. So researchers are turning to dust-cleaning technology developed for one of the driest, dustiest locations possible: Mars. The work was reported at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society. [Malay Mazumder et al]
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The best places to collect solar energy are also some of the dustiest on Earth and beyond, a quandary that leads to inefficiencies in how well the cells are able to convert strong sunlight into renewable electricity. The solution, according to new research, is to coat solar cells with material that enables them to chase away dirt particles on their own with the help of dust-repelling electrical charges. [More]
Solar power - Arizona - Electricity - Middle East - Energy
Fifty-nine percent of the endangered species recovery plans issued by the U.S. government between 2005 and 2008 mention climate change as one of the major threats facing the species, according to a study published in Conservation Biology .
The study, which examined 1,209 species recovery plans published between 1975 and 2008, was authored by Tony Povilitis, president of Life Net Nature, and Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).
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Researchers have been visiting locations in the western North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea for more than two decades to better understand the large patches of plastic that have formed there. Although the mysteries surrounding exactly how the plastic gets to these locations, where it comes from and what impact it's having on marine life remain unanswered, a team of scientists has now published perhaps the most analytical study of the patches to date based on data collected by research vessels over a 22-year period, between 1986 and 2008. [More]
Atlantic Ocean - Oceanography - Marine biology - Research - Caribbean Sea