Tuesday, April 30, 2013

King's Day

Sunday, April 28, 2013












Thursday, April 25, 2013

Barack Got Video

President Obama got tweets

The science on climate change is clear.
We need to call them out.


Just in: The Association of Honest Brokers Cries Foul



Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Bag Job

Cherry picking is a econometric sport, and figuring out the cost of things is often not as simple as a bunny might wish.  Brian had a few posts on fluoridation discussing the fact that there are not only pros, but also cons, and coming to the conclusion that on balance, and with care in application, the pros win.  Eli's attention was drawn to the question of are non-reusable or reusable bags better, and if so which sort and on what basis.  This, as Eli said, is not as straightforward as a bunny might wish.

There is an obvious part of the answer, the more times a bag is used, the cheaper it is, but how many more times is a good question and what are the problems with reusing a bag is another.

The last has an interesting answer, if you put meat, fish, and milk products into a bag, you have to worry about bacteria, and some of the bacteria, E. coli, for example can be nasty.  Well, you can wash the bags (something Eli has never done, but might start) and doing so reduces the risk of contamination, but increases the amount of water and electricity used.

So what is a Rabett to do?  Well Google is a friend and a quick search turned up Life Cycle Assessment of Reusable and Single-use Plastic Bags in California by Joseph Greene from Cal State Chico.  Besides his own life cycle analysis, Greene presents the results of several others, which pretty much agree with his, each within their own limits. 

The first step is to figure out what bags one is talking about and how to compare them.  On the non-reusable side the running is pretty much made by High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) and paper, on the reusable side we got woven Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) and non-woven polypropylene (PP) and cotton.  To compare all of these, the general agreement is to look to carrying capacity, in which case you need about 1500 HDPE bags to carry about the same amount as 1000 of the others.  Of course, HDPE, bags being very thin often spill the carrots.

Impact indicator
HDPE single- use
Reusab le PP non-
single- use
PP non- woven 8
PP non- woven 52
Reusable LLDPE bag with
40% PCR
single- use
Reusable LLDPE with 40%
PCR bag
8 times
Reusable LLDPE with 40%
PCR bag
52 times
Paper bag
Non-renewable energy, GJ
GHG emissions, CO2 eq
Solid Waste, kg
Fresh water consumption, gal
Mass, g

The amount of water includes that used in washing and manufacture.

While the number of times a bag is used is the major issue, such things as the amount of recycled materials, the cost of disposal, the cost of transportation,  biodegradeability, litter and the effects on fauna and flora are also significant in any decision to tax or eliminate different types of bags. It turns out that  cotton or canvas bags are not a good choice because of their weight and the energy needed to grow the cotton and make the bags.  HDPE bags can be recycled and, with a bit of luck, used one or two times, in Eli's experience maybe 1.5 (breaks the other .5). 

So, on balance, multiple use woven bags made from LDPE with 40% recycled polyethylene are the best choice.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

The Worst Thing In The World

So Eli was in the supermarket with Ms. Rabett, and the checkout clerk went, "Would you like to donate to our owner's favorite charity."  Ms. Rabett knows that this is like asking Eli if he would like to say a nice word about Roger Pielke Jr., and quickly dragged the Bunny away before he could sweetly ask if the supermarket would care to match any donation he made.

In short, this is a cheap way for businesses to pretend they care while doing nothing and annoy Eli at the same time.

I now get why Europeans are disgusted with the European Parliament

The European Parliament last week rejected a fix to their cap-and-trade system that would have set a bottom floor to the price of carbon, a floor that likely helped keep California's system functioning through a tentative start to a better shape (so far).

Among other things that are annoying is that European fossil fuel-dependent industries say that a floor will put them at a competitive disadvantage to Americans, an ironic repetition of what the same American industries say about Indian and Chinese competitors. In Europe's case it also happens to be a lie as far as California's concerned, and dubious in the case of New England (has an existing-if-low price for carbon, and plans to restrict allocations further).

So you've got a system that can work if you make it work. Demanding that the sausage making of government work as well as one's ideal proposal (like a carbon tax that would supposedly emerge unscathed from a political process) is unrealistic, but then the failure to improve the solution is just stupid. The only good aspect is that it's not over - the Parliament left open the door to reconsider their action.

Monday, April 22, 2013

On Mathematics and Science

In the preceding post Eli pointed en passant to an article by EO Wilson where he let the cat out of the bag

and described his own experience

This, of course, brought forth a number of bleats. Eli would, if he were being kind, call these the cries of the inexperienced, if not, those of the clueless.

Wilson is making an important point that everyone is missing, that it is more important to be able to formulate the problem and from the formulation conceptualize the broad outline of the answer before doing the math.

At that point you can go out and learn the math, or learn who the mathematician is who can help you or buy Mathematica or hire a mathturbator. If you think about this in physics story terms, this is pretty much Einstein. His real strength was the ability (and the guts) to par the problem down to its basics not his skill as a mathemagician.  Physicists worship elegance not algebra.

Eli Grabs Another Envelope

Bunnies are not really into complex calculations where the meaning is hidden in the math.  For one thing there is great opportunity to fool yourself, for another, it is pretty simple to mislead others.  To Eli math is something you grab after you have figured out what is happening, and then you grab it in shells, with the easy parts first.  That way if you mess up, you always can look at the inner shell to figure out where you went wrong.  EO Wilson had some recent thoughts about the role of mathematics

and simple models help with forming those concepts.  In a recent previous life the Bunny Collective discussed the relative probabilities for emission by a single vibrationally excited  CO2 molecule that has been vibrationally excited by absorbing a photon.  There are two fates for the little guy, emission of an IR photon.

[1]  CO2* -->  CO2 + hν          Rate constant = kR

and collisional de-excitation by another, say nitrogren or oxygen molecule

[2]  CO2* + M -->  CO2 + M   Rate constant = kM

Plugging in the numbers, at atmospheric pressure the Rabett showed that only one in a hundred thousand excited molecules would emit an IR photon.  As several pointed out, high up in the stratosphere this decreases in proportion to the pressure, but, for example, at ~17 km it is one in ten thousand, and at ~ 25 km one in a thousand.

On the other hand, thermal excitation of CO2, the reverse of reaction [2] is just

[3]  CO2 + M -->  CO2* + M   Rate constant = k-M

so now, in addition to absorbing an IR photon CO2* can be excited by collisions, converting thermal translational energy into vibrational energy. 

How fast a reaction happens is called the reaction rate, and is proportional to the concentration of each reactant and a number called the rate constant which hides all the dynamics, e.g. the quantum chemistry, the probability of a collision having enough energy to actually cause molecular changes, etc.  If the rate of the forward reaction, equals the rate of the reverse reaction,  an equilibrium requires that as many molecules react in the forward direction as in the reverse

[4]  (kM [M] + kR )  = k-M  [CO2*][M]

If  kR < < kM[M] it can be neglected and then [2] and [3] form a simple equilibrium

[5]  CO2* + M = CO2 + M

which can be rearranged to yield

[6]    [CO2*]/[CO2] = k-M /kM = Keq

The next step is to show how thermodynamics allows a simple estimation of Keq and [CO2*].  The emission rate in photons per second per unit volume will then simply be

[7]   kR [CO2*]

Sunday, April 21, 2013

A bad rep for solar tax credit and LEED

Some news and rumors still seem to spread more by word of mouth than online. One of them for me is the issue of potential misuse of solar tax credits in the US, as opposed to feed-in tariffs done elsewhere. Solar tax credits are transferable and cost-based - the higher the cost of the system, then the greater the tax credit that can be sold to other businesses. That's an obvious disincentive to lowering solar costs, but less obviously it incentivizes leasing companies to inflate their cost estimates. When the IRS starts getting involved, that can really damage the political momentum we want to keep in place just as solar becomes increasingly competitive.

The solution is to play clean, folks, and maybe tighter IRS supervision. And maybe a feed-in tariff instead. Same word of mouth tells me the feed-in that's been tried at local levels in California is too small to get business support - we need a state or federal solution.

Similar issue for LEED, an environmental rating system for building design. Word of mouth that I hear is that it's way too easy to game the point system, especially because it's based on design standards instead of actual performance. Additional complication in California is that our state-mandated building design standards do a lot that LEED does, raising the question of what value LEED adds.

I've heard less about the Green Building Council standards, other than that they're supposed to be somewhat more lenient.

Yglesias discusses the issue here. As for his "price carbon" solution, good luck with that, at least on a national level (we're getting somewhere with California's cap-and-trade). Short of that solution, we need to have some performance standards incorporated into the rating system.

How much will the Earth's temperature rise?

Climate sensitivity: how has the Earth responded in the past?

In debates about the change of temperature of the Earth that we can expect in the future, it is illuminating to take a backward glance at the past changes of the temperature of the Earth. How sensitive is the Earth to the buildup of greenhouse gases?

The climate sensitivity is the rise in temperature divided by the forcing (in W/m2). In the absence of any feedback, the climate sensitivity can be shown to be 1/(4 SIGMA T3), where SIGMA is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, (SIGMA = 5.67 x 10-8 W/M2K4), and the temperature is in Kelvin.

Numerically this is a sensitivity of 0.3 K/(W/m2), meaning that if the increase in forcing is 1 W/m2, then the resulting increase in temperature is 0.3 C, in the absence of feedback, when the Earth has come to a new equilibrium with the higher greenhouse gases.

The doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels will produce a forcing of 4 W/m2, which implies, in the absence of any feedback, a temperature rise of

4 x 0.3 = 1.2 C (the no-feedback result).

While global climate models are necessary, it is also valuable to have a model-independent estimate of the climate response to increased CO2. What climate sensitivity did the Earth show during warming that ended the last ice age? This is the large climate change that is closest to us in time (about 10 K years ago), and therefore the most valuable. Earlier times are less relevant, because of continental drift. If you go back 200 million years ago, the continents were not even close to where they are today.

The change in temperature between the ice age and post-ice age was 5 C, and the change in solar forcing was 7.1 W/m2. This implies a climate sensitivity of 5/7.1 = 0.7 K /(W/m2). Multiplying this sensitivity by the forcing expected from a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels, namely 4 W/m2, yielding a predicted temperature rise of

0.7 x 4 = 2.8 C (from the Earth’s climate record).

This is consistent with the IPCC prediction of the rise in temperature (in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2), which is an increase in the range of 1.5 to 4.5 C. This is the change between the new higher equilibrium temperature and the past equilibrium temperature.

Notice that the paleoclimate data implies that the feedback is positive, at least on the time scales of centuries to millennia. (The feedback may well be positive on a much larger time scale of millions of years, but that is not the relevant time scale for human civilization).

Reference: Seinfeld and Pandis, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, (Wiley, New York, 1998).pp. 1102-1103. These authors cite a difference between glacial and interglacial periods of 5 C, and a forcing of 7.1 W/m2, and a radiative forcing for doubled CO2 of 4 W/m2.

This refutes some of the arguments made at WUWT here .

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Friday, April 19, 2013

Games Bunnies Used to Play

Life has changed

When Eli was a bunny we had all sorts of organized disorganized team games, slapball, punchball, stickball, ringolevio, skellzie all with elaborate local rules, seasons to play them in and not, and more. Then there were two bunny games, like box baseball, boxball, stoopball, two person slapball etc.  These were passed down from older to younger kids and brought a real thrill to the proposition that kids should go play in traffic. Parents did not have to drag us to some organized team practice and we objected to needing to come in at night. After all there were streetlights. Right?

What went on in your neighborhood?

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

This Is Where Eli Came In
















A/B = 8 π h ν3/c3



Monday, April 15, 2013

Bob G Returns to Normalcy

Bob Grumbine has a couple of posts( #1 and #2) asking when was the climate normal.  His conclusion is

  • Climate was 'normal' only between 1936-1977
  • 1976 was warmer than any year before 1926
  • 1937 is much warmer than all the preceding years.
In #2, Bob makes some important points about why this matters.  Further, those who insist that GISS needs to redefine its base period for anomalies (1951-1980) might take heed and GISS itself might want to shade a couple of years off. 

California Democratic state convention and Grover Norquist

My two activities this weekend were to listen to the podcast of Grover Norquist speaking to the Commonwealth Club and attending the annual California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento. Norquist played up the libertarian angle, probably a smart move when a conservative addresses a liberal crowd. He definitely threw the Bushies under the bus on Iraq and claimed to oppose occupying nations (something contrary to his position back when it counted). He also claimed the Democrats drive up the size of government to increase the number of people dependent on government and therefore supportive of Democratic positions, making opposition to government spending a partisan issue on purely partisan grounds. A lot of it was either disingenuous or vague, like supporting tort action as a substitute for environmental regulation, when torts are incredibly inefficient and often limited by the Republican Party.

The best part of the Democratic state convention was a panel on strengthening partnerships to communities of color. The really interesting thing these independent organizations are doing is targeting intermittent, low-frequency voters and get them to turn out on issues (not for specific candidates). I can attest from my own campaign that those voters are not campaign primary targets - when you have limited money, you put your effort into reaching someone who votes 80-100% of the time, not 20%. While California is majority-minority, the stats they showed had a majority of voters being white and disproportionately wealthy, and until the electorate reflects the population, they argued that governmental priorities won't reflect popular needs - quite the opposite of the problem Norquist sees of a too-big government.

For myself, I'm not sure whether growing inequality is caused by unfair governmental processes biased against the poor, or by the nature of our current economy, but either reason to me justifies countervailing action. I'm not buying Norquist's argument that we just need government to leave us alone. That doesn't mean he's always wrong though - finding the areas where government doesn't work well or should be less intrusive could be an area of agreement. A cap-and-trade or carbon tax is a good example, as opposed to typical regulation. Just waiting for the Republicans to pick that one up.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

The Bees Are Buzzed

Wright et al, report in Science that "Caffeine in Floral Nectar Enhances a Pollinator's Memory of Reward".  Some flowers, including those of, of course, coffee plants, but also citrus and tea,  incorporate a bit of caffeine in their nectar.  Curiously, according to the authors, all the citrus varieties they studied did this but not all the coffee plants.  As any college bunny getting ready for exams knows, caffeine helps keep you alert and enhances the memory.  Fortunately the bees appear to dislike the taste of solutions with dangerous (to bees) levels of caffeine.  They will not be buzzing your energy drinks but they do have a fondness for sodas.

That's the good news.   The bad news is that bees are disappearing.  One of the causes is the use of neonicotinoid  pesticides and organophosphates.  The later has been used to wipe out Varroa mites, one of the major pests of bees.  It turns out that these pesticides make the bees stupid, wiping out brain cells that the bees use to learn things, like where the good caffine nectar is.  Industry, of course, doesn't want to know

"Christian Maus, a safety manager at Bayer Crop-Sciences which makes clothianidin, cautions that it's tough to determine what happens to bees in nature from this study, because it was conducted on isolated bee brains in direct contact with insecticides, without any of the normal protective barriers or metabolism."
Various organizations have filed a suit against EPA approval of two neonicotinoids because the effect on bees was not dealt with, other organizations are seeking ways to limit exposure.  For example, corn seeds are often coated with the neonicotinoids to protect the seeds from pests.  When the seeds rub against each other in hoppers during planting the neonicotinoids are released.  The newly formed Corn Dust Research Consortium recently accepted proposals to limit the pesticide dust, either by making the seeds stickier or limiting powders seed lubricants needed for flow of the seeds through mechanical planters.

The emphasis here is on commercial apiaries, but anyone walking about, even in the biggest cities knows that wild pollinators are also important.  Eli, for example,rents to a bunch of carpenter bees in his wooden fence.  Large, one could even say bumbling insects, they calmly go about their business, interacting with the birds and squirrels which make the miniature carrot patch a delight.  The wild pollinators are not having the best of times, which is bad news

Garibaldi, et al, again in Science, point out how key these guys are
Human persistence depends on many natural processes, termed ecosystem services, which are usually not accounted for in market valuations. The global degradation of such services can undermine the ability of agriculture to meet the demands of the growing, increasingly affluent, human population (1, 2). Pollination of crop flowers by wild insects is one such vulnerable ecosystem service (3), as the abundance and diversity of these insects are declining in many agricultural landscapes (4, 5). 
 Garibaldi, et al, looked at the relative roles that domesticated and wild pollinators play in 41 crop systems distributed across the globe.  One might call this macroecology.  Burkle, Marlin and Knight,  replicated an  study in a small area, near Carlinville IL done by Charles Robinson in the late 1800s, who categorized the types of pollinators that visited different plants.  That study had already been replicated in the 1970s.

The news is not good.  The number of different interactions between plants and pollinators had declined by almost 50% (ok 46%)
Bee extirpations contributed substantially to the observed shifts in network structure. Of the 407 lost interactions, 45% (183) were lost because bee species were extirpated from the study region; all 26 forbs remained present. It is unlikely that the dramatic loss of bees observed in the contemporary data set resulted from differences in sampling effort between the historic and contemporary studies. Robertson observed the pollinators of each forb species for 1 to 2 years before moving on to other species. In our intensive resurvey over 2 years, we found less than half (54 of 109) of those bee species. Although Robertson’s sampling effort in each season is unknown, we were able to extrapolate our data based on sampling effort and found that our observations were close to the “true” richness (table S1). If Robertson’s sampling was less intense on a per plant species basis than ours, then the bee extirpations are a conservative estimate. Furthermore, the loss of bees was nonrandom, such that bees that were specialists, parasites, cavity-nesters, and/or those that participated in weak historic interactions were more likely to be extirpated (table S2), congruent with other findings. Specialists were lost more than generalists (even after correcting for potential observation bias), despite the fact that their host plants were still present 
With all types of pollinators declining the hard place is not as far away as one might hope.  Jason Tylianakis puts it bluntly
Are concerns of a pollinator crisis exaggerated, and can we make do with better management of honeybee colonies? Two articles in this issue provide compelling answers to these questions. On page 1611, Burkle et al. demonstrate that native wild pollinators are declining. On page 1608, Garibaldi et al. show that managed honeybees cannot compensate for this loss

The Origin of the Two Most Annoying Things in the World

nonono. not the regrets of James Delingpole's mom, or even the "what have I done note" from Chris Monckton's Latin tutor, to name the two most annoying Brit twits, but the blinK, which as any sane bunny might imagine, was born in a bar



There is good news tho, the blinK may be going away but not before claiming a few more victims.  On the other hand, Comic Sans will be with us as long as there are poster sessions.