The first three months of 2016 have been the hottest ever recorded, and by a large margin. Greenland’s massive ice sheet melted more this spring than researchers have ever seen. Warming seas are turning once-majestic coral reefs into ghostly underwater graveyards. And scientists are warning that sea levels could rise far faster than anyone expected by the end of the century, with severe impacts for coastal communities around the globe.
That grim drumbeat of news will loom over the United Nations on Friday — Earth Day — when officials from more than 150 countries gather to sign a landmark agreement aimed at slashing global greenhouse gas emissions and slowing the warming of the planet.
This is the lead paragraph of the Washington Post’s story about climate change and it is very scary. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything so ominous printed, especially in this newspaper.
What has happened is merely a confirmation of the projections that were made in the global climate models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and an indication of worse to come.
In fact, the report from Mauna Loa of a 3 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide levels over a year ago is just one more confirmation that the worst projections can be expected to pan out. Mean carbon dioxide levels have increased from a pre-industrial 280 ppm to a recent record of 400 ppm last year. We can expect further increases until the causes are clearly defined and ameliorated.
It is also possible that crash of industrial civilization and failure of oil production could result in less pressure on carbon dioxide levels. Unfortunately, gasoline is easy to produce from crude oil, albeit with heavy production of toxic byproducts, so the gasoline engine is not likely to disappear unless civilization completely collapses.
In any case, the current global warming from increased carbon dioxide is “baked in” for the next hundred years. Melting of global ice reserves is likely to continue for some time even if we stop producing carbon dioxide now.
Zika Virus Associated with Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis and Guillain-Barre Syndrome
I know I said I wasn’t going to post about Zika virus because there were so many bigger sites making daily posts, but I found one new piece of information that was especially interesting. The American Academy of Neurology issued a press release on Friday, April 15 about a case study of patients admitted to the Restoration Hospital in Recife, Brazil between December 2014 and June 2015. Six patients with Zika virus developed neurological symptoms: four with Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) and two with acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM).
All the patients had symptoms of Zika virus infection, including fever, rash, sometimes severe itching, joint and muscle pain, and conjunctivitis (red eyes.) Neurological symptoms developed immediately or within fifteen days after infection.
Two of the patients had symptoms of ADEM: headache, severe weakness, numbness, and impairment of consciousness, sometimes associated with visual loss. Symptoms of ADEM are similar to those of multiple sclerosis (MS), although in ADEM complete or near-complete recovery is usually seen within six months, whereas in MS, there are repeated and progressive attacks. In addition, in ADEM, there is usually impairment of consciousness during the initial attack.
Four of the patients described had symptoms of GBS: tingling or numbness that begins in the feet and spreads upwards, weakness that spreads similarly, severe pain like aches or cramps, especially in the back, ataxia (difficulty and unsteadiness in walking), weakness of eye, facial, speaking, swallowing muscles, difficulty with bowel and bladder function, rapid heart rate, difficulty breathing, and unstable blood pressure.
Oddly, both of these disorders can also be associated with immunizations, such as mumps-measles-rubella (MMR) shots. They are both believed to be autoimmune disorders. ADEM shows up in MRI scans as white-matter changes, somewhat similar to those seen in MS. GBS is diagnosed by spinal tap that shows elevated immune proteins, although the clinical symptoms are usually considered diagnostic.
These conditions are both signs of abnormal immune reactions to the Zika infection that cause immune proteins to attack the myelin that coats and insulates nerve fibers. Loss of myelin causes nerves to lose their ability to transfer signals rapidly, so signals are weaker and slower than normal. Abnormal nerve signalling causes neurological symptoms– the constellation of symptoms we have just described.
What makes these syndromes relevant is the connection to fetal injuries from Zika virus infection: the fetal damage is neurological, primarily to the central nervous system. There may also be damage to the fetal peripheral nervous system but this has not been studied yet. There may be a common cause of fetal and adult syndromes in Zika infection. The conditions may both be mediated by immunological reaction to the infection, a hypothesis that has yet to be evaluated.
The neurological syndrome descriptions above were taken from two web sites: the National Institutes of Health information pages for ADEM, and the Medscape pages on GBS.
A Sentiment About Reparations for Slavery
We owe a debt that can never be repaid. The only way to compensate the descendants of the slaves and all the others who were mistreated in the past is to do our best to make our current society fair, just, equitable, color-blind, and prosperous. Those who have the most now owe the most to those who now have the least in terms of ending the suffering that still exists. If a descendant of the slaves has a fortune now, then she owes as much in reparations/compensation to her fellow human beings as anyone does.
It is most important and least understood by all that having money or possessions does not make you a good person and not having anything does not make you a bad person. Fortunes are created mostly by luck and inheritance, not personal effort or skill. Even the greatest athlete will admit that his skill is not entirely due to his own personal effort, but to his good fortune at having been born with a great body and being nurtured by a loving family.
We should all be thankful for what we have and glad to contribute anything beyond what we need for our own subsistence to help others in need.
(This note was also posted as a comment to a NYT story about the sale of 272 slaves in 1838 to help save Georgetown University from a debt. Most of those who posted comments didn’t think we owed any reparations to identifiable descendants of slaves, either from that sale or those caught up in 250 years of legal slavery or the 150 years of de facto subservience and violence that still goes on in the South, especially Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia but also including Chicago)
Frederick Douglass Said That
Frederick Douglass: “Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”
Life WIthout Parole for Possession of an Ounce of Marijuana after Prior Felony Conviction
That’s correct: according to the New York Times, the law in Mississippi states that the mandatory penalty for possession of an ounce of marijuana is life without parole if you have had prior felony convictions. Alabama has a law that is only slightly less draconian, as I will describe in a moment. Two other states have no penalty at all for possession of marijuana (that is, they have legalized “recreational use” of marijuana). According to federal law, marijuana is a “Schedule I” substance, that is, it has no recognized medical use and represents a danger to its users (precisely what that danger is may be somewhat vague) that is unacceptable.
The Department of Justice has promulgated a memorandum on this subject which appears to suggest that the federal government’s “priorities” are not served by prosecution of individuals for the mere possession of “small amounts” of marijuana. This memorandum is deliberately vague and insists that it does not provide anyone with any defense against being prosecuted, but it does set forward certain specific “priorities” that are intended to guide federal prosecutors when deciding whether to prosecute individual cases. The priorities include “preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors” (the first priority mentioned) and “preventing revenue… from going to criminal enterprises” as well as “preventing drugged driving” among a number of other issues that are plainly of concern to the federal government.
Regardless of the deliberate vagueness of this memorandum, it appears that the federal government’s priorities do not include prosecution of individual possession or use of marijuana. Federal prosecutors have gone after a number of businesses that distribute marijuana, most commonly by threatening the owners of the property on which it is sold. Prosecutors have also attacked large distributors directly, frequently by disrupting the financial basis of their businesses. However, there have not been any federal prosecutions of individual users that I am aware of in some years.
States are extremely variable in their attitude with regards to marijuana use. For example, in Alabama, there is a case that is headed for the federal Supreme Court that was featured on the editorial pages of the New York Times:
There is a 75 year old man in Alabama who is appealing his sentence to the US Supreme Court because the Alabama State Supreme Court upheld his life without parole sentence for possessing 2.8 pounds of raw marijuana that he grew himself (stems, leaves, and all.) He was convicted of armed robbery twenty years ago and served ten years in prison. For that prior conviction, he now is in an Alabama prison for life without parole for growing a weed. His lawyer is appealing on the grounds that his sentence violates the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishments.
It certainly does seem cruel and unusual to sentence someone to life without parole for possession of marijuana without even having any evidence that he intended to sell the stuff. In fact, the trial judge stated that he would not have passed this sentence except that it was mandatory under the law. The state Supreme Court also was reluctant and the chief justice wrote that the sentence was “excessive and unjustified” but he failed to make the logical conclusion that the sentence was cruel and unusual. This is the conclusion that the defendant’s lawyers wish the federal Supreme Court to reach.
It is clear that even the Alabama Supreme Court lacks the mental ability to make obvious conclusions about its own excessive and unjustified laws. The prosecutors are the ones who are most responsible for the absurdly overstuffed prisons in Alabama, but the judges there are elected from prosecutors and they too are complicit in this denial of human rights.
The New York Times (NYT) was so agitated by this sentence that it published an editorial about the case. For the NYT to write an editorial about it, there must have been a notice that it was being appealed to the Supreme Court; further, the NYT must have found the case to be remarkable. Finally, they found the statements of the judge in the trial and the statements of the Alabama Supreme Court justices to be remarkable.
Today, the federal Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the appeal of this man’s life without parole sentence for possession of 2.8 pounds of marijuana plants, stems, leaves, and roots. By the way, the man was apprehended by police who claimed to be searching for stolen bicycles. They didn’t have a warrant, but they did have the “written” permission of the man’s absent son to perform the search– over the man’s objections in person. There is a definite argument in this case whether the police even performed a legal search.
I know Zika virus is important and spreading every day, and I’m tempted to write updates every time I hear something new about it, but there’s no need for me to do that. There’s a website called “Stat” that handles those updates on a daily basis. They’re specialized in medical news as well as other interesting topics, so I will just direct you to that site for the whole story.
For example, Congress has passed a bill offering financial incentives to companies working on Zika drugs, but a White House spokesman likened it to “passing out umbrellas in the advance of a potential hurricane” (according to the Stat post for today.) A more effective bill to fund studies on Zika and other important things won’t get Congress’ attention until September. This sounds like par for the course for today’s Congress.
Stat also has a link to a Wired post today that offers everything you need to know about Zika virus, from the basics to the details– at least, everything we know today. The Wired post refers to another important post: an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that states that the Zika virus definitely causes microcephaly in fetuses infected in the womb, based on all the evidence we have collected to date. Previously, the microcephaly risk was just a hypothesis, but the accumulation of cases and their interpretation has led scientists to confidently state that it is a fact (or at least, a very very very strong theory.)
So, as much as I’d like to draw traffic to my site with Zika posts, like what happened last year with Ebola, I’m going to say now: go to Stat for the full information. I’m going to stick to the esoteric stuff.
The annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at NOAA’sMauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii jumped by 3.05 parts per million during 2015, the largest year-to-year increase in 56 years of research.
In another first, 2015 was the fourth consecutive year that CO2 grew more than 2 ppm, said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.
“Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years,” Tans said. “It’s explosive compared to natural processes.”
Levels of the greenhouse gas were independently measured by NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory and by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
In February 2016, the average global atmospheric CO2 level stood at 402.59 ppm. Prior to 1800, atmospheric CO2 averaged about 280 ppm.
This web post was made on March 9, almost a month ago, and yet there has been little publicity about this increase in carbon dioxide concentrations– over three parts per million in a year– that dwarfed the usual increase of one part per million per year.
Coal Companies Declaring Bankruptcy
Today I happened upon the website “Climate Denial Crock of the Week” which reports that Peabody Energy, described as ” the world’s largest privately owned coal producer” has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. In the comments section, someone reports that three of the four largest US coal companies have declared bankruptcy in the last week. This site is definitely work a look: ClimateCrocks.
Apparently, the straw that broke Peabody’s back was their purchase of coal assets in Australia. There has been a drop in energy and metals prices since mid-2014, related to slowing in the economies of China and Brazil. In 2011, Peabody did a $5.1 billion leveraged buyout of Australia’s MacArthur Coal, which had reserves of 2.26 billion tonnes of coal in four open pit mines producing over 6 million tonnes of metallurgical coal (used for making steel) a year (these figures from Wikipedia.)
The Washington Post attributed Peabody’s bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy of 45% of the US coal-producing industry, to competition from cheap natural gas in the US market. Natural gas has suddenly become very cheap because of fracking technology. The coal bankruptcies have occurred before US regulations, including the “Clean Power Plan”, could go into effect, so the popular turning away from fossil fuels has not been the cause of the coal industry’s troubles.
While most environmentalists would agree that bankrupting the coal industry is a good thing, it does not appear to be directly due to popular revulsion; rather, competition from the vast quantities of cheap natural gas that have suddenly become available is the cause. It seems to be purely coincidental that prices of solar-derived electricity have fallen to levels comparable to the price of coal and natural gas-produced electricity. Dramatic decreases in the cost of solar photovoltaic systems have stimulated increases in system installation, but there is a long way to go before solar power will supplant fossil fuel power. Advances in power storage and transmission will also be necessary to make fossil electricity a thing of the past.
Reading the paper this morning was depressing. Politics and politicians, big business, war, insurgency, and terrorism. That is why I prefer to read upbeat news sources like Science News, New Scientist, Scientific American, etc. Immersing oneself in science helps one to take the long view, which is always optimistic because of entropy, which always seems to be running in reverse. In fact, I have a theory that we have the theory of entropy backwards. But enough about me.
Science News has an exciting item about what I believe is called a “metamaterial”– in this case, an alumina screen with of 300 nanometer (average) pores 650 nanometers apart partially filled with gold nanoparticles of a range of sizes, about 90 nanometers thick. The size range is chosen so that the gold absorbs light from 400 angstroms (near-ultraviolet) to 10 micrometers (mid-infrared) with 99% effectiveness. The material is said to be self-assembling by “physical vapor deposition” of gold ions in a very low pressure vapor yielding a random range of gold nanoparticle sizes, which saves greatly on manufacturing costs. It is so light that it floats on water.
This material appears to be very dark, blacker than any printed black. When a body of water covered by a layer of this material is exposed to sunlight, it heats water to the point that it evaporates– without boiling. Its greatest advantage besides its relative cheapness of production is that it can be used with seawater and the evaporated water is essentially pure. The potential uses of this material are tremendous, most especially to desalinate seawater.
The work that went into creating this material did not proceed in a vacuum. Much development preceded it; gold, silver, platinum, and other metals were etched with thin parallel lines to a very fine grid using focused ion beams or electron beam lithography. Many different configurations were tried in an attempt to achieve maximum absorption of light at minimal thickness. None of those materials were as efficient in absorbing light as this one, which has the added advantage of being self-assembling. The work is described as creating “ideal absorbers” and the effect produced by these very tiny holes (400 angstroms wide and 165 angstroms apart) partially filled with gold nanoparticles is called “plasmonics.” The new material changes light into heat to vaporize water with 90% efficiency, much better than the 30% efficiency of current photovoltaic cells. This is not quite as efficient as some of the other materials that have been tried including carbon nanotubes, but it is much cheaper to manufacture.
The steam produced by sunlight can be condensed into fresh water, or it can be used to operate a steam engine, or even to generate electricity. There is no mention of what happens to the salt left behind when saltwater is evaporated by this process. If it stays in the water, then eventually the brine left behind would be too concentrated to boil. If it is left on the surface of the panels, then it could clog up the pores very quickly. Clearly, this is a subject for further evaluation.
The effect that absorption of light produces, localized heating at the pores of the material, is called “localized surface plasmon resonance.” A plasmon is a “quasiparticle” consisting of a quantum of plasma oscillation, an oscillation of the electron density in a conducting medium, described as an instability in the dielectric function of a free electron gas. Yes, I was unprepared for the complexity of this “explanation” but I found it in Wikipedia so it must be true (insert irony here.) Plasmons were first described in 1952 by physicists David Pines (the founding director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter and still living at age 91) and his doctoral advisor David Bohm.
This quote from Wikipedia reveals more hidden depths; Bohm worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII but left the US after he was investigated for his Communist affiliations: “Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this, his epistemology mirrored his ontological viewpoint. Due to his youthful Communist affiliations, Bohm was the subject of a federal government investigation in 1949, prompting him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen.”
To get back to the subject at hand: The research behind this new material was developed in laboratories at Nanjing University in China and the State University of New York in Buffalo. The original research publication is in the Science Advances section of Science magazine and is apparently free to read, so you don’t have to have a subscription to Science News if you want to wade into the details. This is a very exciting development, and even if I don’t understand plasmons, I can see great potential for saving the world if it can be produced at scale in time to ameliorate global warming.
I think Robert Heinlein (or was it Isaac Asimov?) said “Any sufficiently complex process appears to be magic to the uninitiated.”
An article in Nature describes new information on the shape of the ground underneath the Antarctic ice sheets that suggests that the sheets could melt much more quickly than previously estimated, contributing 64 to 114 centimeters to the rising sea and resulting in 1.5 to 2.1 meters (5-6 feet) total of sea level rise by 2100. This is also because of “previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs.”
Earlier estimates indicated a rise of one to four feet by 2100, according to the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) National Climate Assessment projections in 2014. Globally, sea levels are already rising faster than expected: according to Wikipedia, 2.6-2.9 mm/year since 1993. Wikipedia says that since 1870, global sea levels have risen 195 millimetres (7.7 in), an average of 1.7 millimetres a year over the entire period. Increasing rates of rise have been seen recently: satellite observations suggest a rise of 3.3 mm a year since 1993.
Uncertainties in drawing ancient coastlines contribute to uncertainty in predicting future sea level rise because tectonic activity has altered the height of the continents over millions of years. These changes have contributed to a potential variation of “35 centimeters or more” in predictions for 2100 according to a Science News article reporting the new Antarctic findings.
Continental uplift caused by groundwater depletion in such areas as California and southern Asia has counteracted some of this sea level rise locally: another research article published online on April 2 describes a rebound of about 25 mm or 0.4 mm a year during the last hundred years. While this will protect the West Coast of the US, it will have little effect on global sea levels.
In the Southern Pacific Ocean, the situation is different. “Changing global trade winds have raised sea levels in the South Pacific about a foot over the past 30 years” (from an article in the NYT last December.) With most of the Marshall Islands less than six feet above sea level now, they are expecting to be overtopped within 50 years by the rising South Pacific. Already, farming on these islands is being wiped out because of salt water infiltrating the ground water table.
This is economically important to the United States due to treaty obligations: the residents of the Marshall Islands have been given legal permission to immigrate to the US because they were displaced by the detonation of 67 nuclear weapons on and over the Bikini Atoll by the US and France. 700,000 people have the right to immigrate to the US because they were moved by the Army as a precaution against fallout before the bombs were set off.
On the top of the world, Greenland’s ice sheet is in trouble too: ” The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.” (from another NYT article, last October, with the ominous title “Greenland is Melting Away.”) A Scientific American article (reprinted from ClimateWire) says that Greenland’s ice cap and glaciers show melting much faster than the rest of Greenland’s ice cover, contributing about ten percent of the whole world’s ice loss. The article says that the ice cap and glaciers are only about 5-7 percent of Greenland’s total ice. It also says that the southeast is melting faster than the northern part of Greenland despite its heavy snowfall. Glaciers in the southeast often feed right into the sea, sending icebergs into shipping lanes (this was the source of the iceberg that sank the Titanic.)
