Category Archives: environment

Hobby-Horse News

Oh God, it’s a hobby horse news day! Not content with creating a brouhaha over Susanna Reid’s cleavage there are two other news stories at the moment which are guaranteed to wind up the clockwork in my hobby-horse.

First of all there’s the report that Daylight Saving Time (aka. Summer Time) may well be bad for you.

Apparently putting the clocks forward an hour plays havoc with our body clocks and circadian cycles.

Well yes, of course it does. Haven’t you ever noticed?

Apparently this may be a contributing factor to an increase in heart attacks following the Spring clock change.

I wonder why I keep saying that we should abandon Summer Time and keep GMT the year round.

The majority of the global population doesn’t keep Summer Time (see the map here), so why do we need to? People increasingly work flexibly these days, so it shouldn’t matter that, within broad zones, we all have a clock which says noon when the sun is directly overhead (as GMT defines for the UK).

Secondly, we’re told that SE England is running out of water and that the water companies are about to impose hosepipe bans.

I don’t see why this should come as a surprise. Yes, we’ve had a couple of dry winters. But we also use excessive amounts of water.

Many years ago we were advised by our masters that we should shower rather than bath because it uses less water. This, however, created two problems which clearly weren’t foreseen. (A) that people would have more powerful showers, and spend more time in the shower, so they often use just as much water per shower as they for a bath. And (B) that people will shower every day; some even several times a day.

Neither is necessary, unless one is doing a really dirty job. And frankly most of us aren’t.

Back in the good old days we used to bath once or twice a week, or if we fell in the duck pond. Which was fine as long as we had a decent wash every day. The majority of jobs, and our environment, are now a lot less dirty than they were. So why do we need to shower every day?

Answer: We don’t. A good daily wash with a shower a couple of times a week is fine. This is what I do and I don’t think all my friends are too polite to tell me I smell.

That though is only part of the water problem. We flush too much water down our toilets unnecessarily. Loos do not need flushing after every pee. Or if they do, a quick 1-2 litres is enough, not the 4 litres even most modern dual flush cisterns provide. I also get incensed when I see people hosing down their houses or washing the car and leaving the hose running water away down the gutter while they polish and buff.

But the water companies are not blameless. We know many water companies are struggling with old Victorian water mains and sewers. But they really do need to do more to stem burst mains as soon as they appear and not leave them running water to waste for days, weeks or even months. Not only would this save loads of water but it must also save money in the long run.

Meanwhile, yes, let’s have a hosepipe ban and let’s have it properly enforced. Then let’s install water meters on every property. It seems the only thing that Joe Public understands is being hurt in the pocket.

Now remind me why most of us live in the driest quarter of the country? Oh, maybe it’s something to do with sun and warmth? But then again, maybe not; after all this is England!

I haz not Cheezburgr

There’s a small piece in the February issue of Scientific American which reflects my views on the necessity of revising our agricultural policies.

I reprint it here as it is heavily based on a SciAm weblog post by David Wogan and largely quotes from an earlier weblog post by Waldo Jaquith both of which are in the public domain.

The Impracticality of a Cheeseburger

A fast-food staple reveals the pros and cons of industrialization

What does the cheeseburger say about our modern food economy? A lot, actually. Over the past several years blogger Waldo Jaquith (http://waldo.jaquith.org) set out to make a cheeseburger from scratch, to no avail.

“Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical — nearly impossible — to make a cheeseburger from scratch,” he writes. “Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive — requiring a trio of cows — and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it”.

That the cheeseburger — our delicious and comforting every man food — didn’t exist 100 years ago is a greasy, shiny example of all that is both right and wrong with our modern food economy. Thanks to fertilizers, genetically modified crops, concentrated farming operations and global overnight shipping, much of the world was lifted out of starvation (but not malnutrition, ironically enough) because it could finally grow sufficient quantities of food with decreasing labor inputs.

But these same advances that allow food to be grown out of season and in all corners of the globe contribute to a whole host of environmental problems, from deforestation and nitrogen loading of water sources (and the resulting dead zones) to the insane quantities of water being consumed.

The “industrialization of food,” as author Paul Roberts puts it, is a relentless cycle driven by razor-thin price margins that force food processors to adopt more advanced techniques to produce even more food at lower prices. This system will only be exacerbated as food demand increases. Recently David Tilman and Jason Hill of the University of Minnesota released a study anticipating that global food demand could double by 2050. It’s doubtful that our current, impractical food economy can sustain that demand.

HS2 is Go for Liftoff

Another meaty post. Someone please find out what being put in the tea this month!?

So the government have approved the plans for HS2, the high speed rail link to be built to connect London, Birmingham and (maybe) later Manchester and Leeds. The alleged cost is said to be £33bn with a payback over a 60 year period.

Business want HS2, as do the government, the rail industry and the construction industry. So would you if it safeguarded your salary, stock options and pension, reduced unemployment and potentially increased tax take.

Most of the local communities and the environmental groups don’t want it. They believe the environmental costs are too high and the business case doesn’t stack up. Even the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is only lukewarm. Added to which governments don’t have a good track record of managing such big projects for the public good.

The Stop HS2 campaign have said “It’s a white elephant of monumental proportions and you could deliver more benefits to more people more quickly for less money by investing in the current rail infrastructure.”

Friends of the Earth have made a similar comment, although as one would expect in more strident terms: “We need to revolutionise travel away from roads and planes, but pumping £32bn into high-speed travel for the wealthy few while ordinary commuters suffer is not the answer. High-speed rail has a role to play in developing a greener, faster transport system, but current plans won’t do enough to cut emissions overall — ministers should prioritise spending on improving local train and bus services instead.”

The Department for Transport has said that 22.5 miles of the first phase (to Birmingham) would be enclosed in tunnels or green tunnels [essentially a deep cutting with a tube put in it, over which grass, trees and soil are placed] and another 56.5 miles of cuttings would significantly reduce “visual and noise impact”.
But the environmental impact will be immense. So there will be a tunnel under much of the Chilterns (and so there should be) as well as large swathes of the London section of the route (we can’t clear enough land to do otherwise). But cuttings and green tunnels do nothing for the environment. They may reduce noise and visual impact but that’s all they do. They still destroy the countryside (taking out swathes of land many times wider than the actual track) through which they are built, cutting through woods, fields, etc. and creating huge piles of spoil.

And that leaves aside the huge disruption that will be created. Disruption not just along the route itself, but to existing rail infrastructure like London’s Euston Station which will have to be largely rebuilt.

Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if the government invested the money in sorting out our current rail infrastructure as FoE suggest? Forget all this franchising and get the rail industry back in public hands where it belongs; re-integrate it and invest properly in the infrastructure to get the network running efficiently and to time. If managed independently and properly by someone like Richard Branson who isn’t going to take any old nonsense from anyone, and who has a track-record of managing corporate business, then we should see increased capacity and reduced fares because the whole enterprise is more efficient and provides the service that’s wanted.

I find it hard to believe that this would cost more, create fewer (local) jobs or bring fewer benefits. Network Rail believe that such investment in the existing infrastructure will cost as much as HS2 for little benefit. But they would, wouldn’t they. They need a huge corporate project to help justify their existence against a backdrop of falling rail performance.

There’s more to any society than testosterone-fuelled corporate bullies building their salaries, share options and pensions. It’s time, once again, to listen to the people on the ground who are going to be most affected. But I doubt it’ll happen, if only because those against this hare-brained scheme are split into some 70 groups — they too need to be integrated if they are to be effective at overturning this nonsense.

[And before anyone accuses me of NIMBYism, it isn’t. I don’t care that the route runs just a mile from my house; the mess and disruption can’t make this bit of west London much worse than it already is. I do, however, care about the impact on Perivale Wood, a piece of ancient preserved woodland which abuts the proposed route; but that’s a relatively minor consideration in the overall scheme of things.]

Bugger! We've Overcooked It!

This week’s New Scientist (dated 7 January) has a rather worrying article reviewing the 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, 40 years on. (The article is behind a paywall, so I can’t link to it.)

The Limits to Growth was much reviled at the time for being far too pessimistic. But if the article is correct in it’s assertions then Limits was also pretty close to the truth and the chickens are now coming home to roost — probably before we have time to wake up and smell the coffee let alone finish building the chicken coop.

Very broadly Limits, and the article, support my contention that everything needs to be reorganised, reduced and managed — and unless we do so PDQ we’re doomed. But then it appears we may be doomed anyway.

Here are a few key extracts from the New Scientist article…

[S]imulations, far from showing growth continuing forever, or even levelling out, suggested that it was most likely that boom would be followed by bust: a sharp decline in industrial output, food production and population. In other words, the collapse of global civilisation.

[I]t is widely believed that Limits predicted collapse by 2000, yet in fact it made no such claim […] Now, with peak oil, climate change and the failure of conventional economics, there is a renewed interest.

World3 […] took what was known about the global population, industry and resources from 1900 to 1972 and used it to develop a set of equations describing how these parameters affected each other. Based on various adjustable assumptions, such as the amount of non-renewable resources, the model projected what would happen over the next century.

Assuming that business continued as usual, World3 projected that population and industry would grow exponentially at first. Eventually, however, growth would begin to slow and would soon stop altogether as resources grew scarce, pollution soared and food became limited […] [T]he human ecological footprint cannot continue to grow indefinitely.

If present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will he reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a sudden and rather uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity […]

More industrial output meant more money to spend on agriculture and healthcare, but also more pollution, which could damage health and food production […] [I]n the real world there are delays before limits are understood, institutions act or remedies take effect. These delayed responses were programmed […] The model crashed because its hypothetical people did not respond to the mounting problems before underlying support systems, such as farmland and ecosystems, had been damaged […] they carried on consuming and polluting past the point the model world could sustain.

[W]here growth of population and industry were constrained, growth did level out rather than collapse […]

In some runs, they gave World3 unlimited, non-polluting nuclear energy — which allowed extensive substitution and recycling of limited materials — and a doubling in the reserves of non-renewables that could be economically exploited. All the same, the population crashed when industrial pollution soared. Then fourfold pollution reductions were added as well: this time, the crash came when there was no more farmland. Adding in higher farm yields and better birth control helped in this case. But then soil erosion and pollution struck […] Whatever the researchers did to eke out resources or stave off pollution, exponential growth was simply prolonged, until it eventually swamped the remedies. Only when the growth of population and industry were constrained, and all the technological fixes applied, did it stabilise […]

[I]n 2008 […] a detailed statistical analysis of how real growth compares to the scenarios in Limits […] concluded that reality so far closely matches the standard run of World3.

Limits took account of the fact that birth rates fall as prosperity rises, in reality they have fallen much faster than was expected [but an] updated study using World3 in 2005 […] included faster-falling birth rates. Except in the stabilising scenario, World3 still collapsed.

Bit of a bummer really. But nothing that surprises me. Still it’s depressing if you believe it. And there seems to be little we can do about it at a personal level other than consume less, breed less, be much more eco-minded and keep shouting at those we invest with power. But that’s only any good if we all — or at least a large enough percentage of us — do it. And so far we seem to be emulating ostriches. Although maybe, just maybe, the current recession and international financial chaos might be the wake-up call and our saviour. I ain’t holding my breath though.

But then I likely won’t be around to see (the worst of) what’s to come. It’s the rest of you — our children’s and grand-children’s generations — I feel sorry for because it’s our and our parents’ generations who have buggered it up for you.

Bad karma all round. 🙁

On the Efficacy of Wind

What do you do in England on Christmas Bank Holiday Tuesday? If you’re anything like some around here you give your thoughts to power production, and specifically the viability of renewables.

There’s an interesting thread on this on Facebook. It’s worth reading.

Most there seem to be coming to much the same conclusions, though via a different route, that I did back in October in my consideration of the whole problem of environmental reform. Nuclear really is the least worst option at least in the medium term.

Links of the Week

This week’s small selection of the curious and not-so-curious you may have missed …

According to a recent survey people spend too long in the shower and use too much water. And it isn’t as green as we were told. Now there’s a surprise!

But then no wonder we go for the therapeutic, because according to uSwitch the UK is the worst place in Europe to live. Well it is if you care about what they measure. For geeks like me you can follow their method, recalculate the scores, exclude things you don’t care about and add in other things you do care about. But you’ll still get much the same answer. 🙁

HornetNow here’s a seriously WOW! image. Yes it’s a European Hornet, Vespa crabro; a humongous but relatively docile wasp**. Sadly you don’t see them often. But just look at those compound eyes … and the detail which I’m sure shows the substructure underneath the eye. I’ve looked out other images of hornets and they all seem to show the same eye substructure. Absolutely amazing!

** Note. Hornets are brown and yellow, as in the image. If what you see is black and yellow it’s a wasp, not a hornet, regardless of its size. Please leave all these creatures alone. They generally won’t attack you unless you provoke them. Wasps and Hornets are superb predators of other insects, on which they feed their grubs. Without them we’d be knee-deep in caterpillars etc. They also chew up old wood for their nests. Besides Hornets are becoming endangered.

If you had a pet monkey, would you feed it crap food and never let it exercise or play and tell it how stupid and ugly it was? No, you’d love your pet monkey! So love your Monkey!

We all make mistakes. They’re nothing to hide. But we all do hide mistake, because they make us feel stupid. Don’t be afraid of Stupid. Stupid means self-awareness. Stupid means you’re learning. Love your Stupid.

How Green is Your Green?

The answer may depend on the quantity of rare earth elements used.

A few days ago I spotted an article on the web under the headline Your Prius’ Deepest, Darkest Secret points out that many products which appear to to reduce ones environmental footprint actually contain relatively large quantities of rare earth elements, which have to be mined and refined — a dirty process at the best of times.

Neodymium magnets turn wind turbines. Cerium helps reduce tailpipe emissions. Yttrium can form phosphors that make light in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Hybrid and electric cars often contain as many as eight different rare earths … Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you’ll be hard-pressed to find something that doesn’t contain at least one of the rare earths, from smartphones to laptop batteries to flat-screen TVs. They’re also crucial for defence technology—radar and sonar systems, tank engines, and the navigation systems in smart bombs.

No surprise therefore that the demand for rare earths is sky-rocketing and mining is expanding accordingly. Mining and refining produce mountains of waste from rock spoil to harsh acids as well as consuming gargantuan quantities of energy. And mining companies don’t have good track records at reducing and managing any of this.

Another side of the coin is that many of these elements are used in such small quantities that recovering them from old products and recycling them becomes equally as hard as the original refining.

As I pointed out here and as the article concludes: What good is green technology if it’s based on minerals whose extraction is so, well, ungreen?

Gawdelpus.

Links of the Week

This week’s catch-up on things you may have missed, and which I missed writing about. This week: Sex and Science.

Now I know all maps are a 2D projection of a 3D surface, but I’d never realised before quite how many different ways there were of doing the map projections.

Does bestiality increase your risk of penile cancer? Why would anyone even think to want to find out?

First there was the Human Development Index — a sort of generalised national “happiness rating”. Then someone decided to add some greenness and turned the whole thing upside down.

Lots of interesting, quick and easy video explanations of physics at Minute Physics. Worth a look — and not just for geeks.

Vulvanomics — on female genital cosmetic surgery. Why would anyone? But then as a fully paid up mail I will never understand.

Antibiotics with a side of steak. Worrying commentary on agribusiness.

And finally …

Some lucky women are having orgasms in an MRI scanner. Now how cool is that?

But they’re doing it to show that only Epilepsy brings more activity to women’s brains than does “self-stimulation” to orgasm.

We live in a strange world!

Fukushima Revisited

I’ve not written recently about the nuclear disaster in Japan following March’s earthquake and tsunami. This is largely because there has been little in the way of new news. However a few days ago an IEEE Spectrum report was released which looks at the first 24 hours at the nuclear facility following the earthquake and highlights some of the design and procedural errors which exacerbated the disaster.

Although the situation in the reactors was clearly far worse than we had been led to believe, I’ll not extract the report here: you can read a summary on-line. And it is worth reading: it’s clear, lucid, gives a flavour of just how complex these situations really are, how much wasn’t know (or wasn’t told) and how people react under extreme pressure.

What I will do is mention the six major lessons which have been highlighted by the report, with the inevitable handful of comments. This should be sufficient to show where there were errors in the design of plant and procedure. Before that there’s one important thing to note:

[The] report is based on interviews with officials from the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the International Atomic Energy Agency, local governments, and with other experts in nuclear engineering, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of official reports.

So it isn’t just make-believe; it should be good stuff. Anyway here are those lessons:

Lesson 1. Emergency generators should be installed at high elevations or in watertight chambers.
Sounds obvious, doesn’t it. But it all comes down to good risk analysis. If you aren’t expecting significant flooding it makes great sense to put plant, especially emergency generators etc., on the ground: they’re excessively heavy and when operating generate huge amounts of noise and vibration.

LESSON 2. If a cooling system is intended to operate without power, make sure all of its parts can be manipulated without power.
Again sounds obvious when stated like that, but far too easy to overlook, although good design reviews should have picked this up.

LESSON 3. Keep power trucks [mobile emergency generators] on or very close to the power plant site.
Why would we do that? Isn’t a central facility more cost effective? In this case no, it may not be!

LESSON 4. Install independent and secure battery systems to power crucial instruments during emergencies.
Same comment as for Lesson 2.

LESSON 5. Ensure that catalytic hydrogen recombiners (power-free devices that turn dangerous hydrogen gas back into steam) are positioned at the tops of reactor buildings where gas would most likely collect.
You’re never going to get a big build-up of hydrogen inside a containment building are you. Wait: isn’t that what a containment building is for? But be honest, how many of us would have thought of this?

LESSON 6. Install power-free filters on vent lines to remove radio-active materials and allow for venting that won’t harm nearby residents.
Again, see Lesson 2.

What remains clear to me is that the plant, the systems and the procedures worked correctly, and were implemented correctly, as they were designed. What failed is the 40-year-old design and the procedures which didn’t go far enough in their disaster scenario planning.

We would (and do) do much better now and will do even better as a result of this disaster. Because of its safety critical nature, the nuclear industry is like the aviation industry: every accident (and near-accident) is analysed for the underlying root cause(s) and there is a culture of incremental improvements and (where necessary/possible) of retro-fitting improvements. Notwithstanding the fact that Fukushima was (and is) a disaster, exacerbated by continuing failures in transparency and communication, I see this as a positive experience which should make nuclear power safer and more acceptable — not the reverse.

The biggest disaster is the effect on the displaced and frightened people which is largely psychological and social rather than medical; and that’s in large part down to the obfuscation and half-truths of the TEPCO and Japanese government communications. One day governments will learn that total transparency is the only safe course of action.

Weekly Links

Here’s this week’s selection of interesting articles you may have missed. And what a selection it is!

Turning the lights off won’t save oil, says Melissa C Lott in the Scientific American blog. Maybe not, but it will save coal and gas, reduce emissions and stop wasting our (increasingly expensive) electricity.

“Put that fly down! You don’t know where it’s been.” But Rob Dunn does. Again in the Scientific American blog.

The Divided Brain is an 11 minute video in which Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the left and right halves of the human brain. It’s not simply “emotion on the right, reason on the left” but something far more complex and interesting. Love the cartoons!

Max Davidson in the Daily Telegraph defends old-fashioned words against the influx of new text-speak.

And here’s yet another from the Sci Am blog … Ingrid Wickelgren goes looking for the secrets to a happy marriage. And finds some unexpected answers.

The right to keep your pubes. A feminist perspective on shaving for childbirth. I dunno what’s so feminist about it; seems like a basic right to me.

And lastly, if I hadn’t read this here, I wouldn’t believe it. Londoners are being told to stop shagging for a bit, ‘cos the Mayor doesn’t want girlies dropping bairns in the streets during the sacred cow Olympics. Maybe Boris needs to make sure we keep the lights on!