NNadir
NNadir's JournalYou know what "they" always say...
Je comprends ici ce qu'on appelle gloire : le droit d'aimer sans mesure.
(It's not actually "they," it's Albert Camus.)
Love it.
Why Joe Biden's bid to restore scientific integrity matters
This is in Nature in the career feature section. I would expect it's open sourced:
Why Joe Biden’s bid to restore scientific integrity matters Virgina Gewin, Nature 17 Jan 2022.
Subtitle:
Excerpts:
Three days later, despite assurances from local weather bureau officials that the claim was false, Trump showed reporters a map in which the storm’s projected path seemed to have been altered with a Sharpie permanent marker. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency, endorsed Trump’s assertion.
In June 2020, a NOAA review panel found that Neil Jacobs, an atmospheric scientist and the agency’s acting administrator, and Julie Roberts, its deputy chief of staff and communications director, had “engaged in misconduct intentionally, knowingly or in reckless disregard” for the agency’s scientific-integrity policy by backing Trump’s incorrect assertion.
The incident, dubbed Sharpiegate, features in ‘Protecting the Integrity of Government Science’, a long-awaited report that the Biden administration’s Task Force on Scientific Integrity released last week (see go.nature.com/3ztsjv6; see also Nature 601, 310–311; 2022). Ordered by the current US president seven days after his inauguration in January last year, the task force’s review of scientific-integrity policies at federal agencies sets out how trust in government can be restored through scientific integrity and evidence-based policymaking.
The report calls for an overarching body that works across federal government agencies to ensure and promote best practices, and to tackle scientific-integrity violations by senior officials that cannot be handled at the agency level. These include political interference and suppression or distortion of data.
Related Story
How to protect US science from political meddling after Trump
According to the Silencing Science Tracker, Sharpiegate is one of some 500 documented attempts to restrict, prohibit or misuse scientific research, education or discussion since Trump’s election win in November 2016. The tracker is a joint initiative of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (a non-profit organization that assists climate scientists who are silenced or face legal action because of their findings or fields of study) and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, both based in New York City...
...In October 2019, after 40 years as a federal scientist, toxicologist Linda Birnbaum retired from her post as a director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Durham, North Carolina, part of the National Institutes of Health. She says that politically motivated assaults on scientific research and findings reached new depths in March 2020.
“The overt attacks on science clearly came to a head with COVID-19,” Birnbaum says, citing as an example the tight controls placed on what officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could and could not say about it.
During the Trump administration, Birnbaum says, she was discouraged, even blocked, from speaking to the press...
...In September 2017, marine biologist Peter Corkeron and his colleagues published data on a significant decline in numbers of the North Atlantic right whale1. But he alleges that his NOAA superiors ignored his findings until they were published, despite his repeated warnings about the severity of the situation, dating back to February 2016. North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) recovery had been a point of pride at NOAA, Corkeron says. But once the agency anticipated being sued by conservation and animal-protection groups for failing to prevent whale numbers decreasing, he declined to fall in line with the decision by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service to stop putting information on the whales’ status in e-mails or internal memos...
...Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, hosts the EDGI’s mirror of an EPA database whose records track the agency’s enforcement of federal environmental laws. This mirroring makes the information more accessible and understandable to the public. “We are actively building partnerships with academics and NGOs to use these tools to share EPA enforcement data in meaningful ways to engage the public,” Wylie adds.
The team also interviewed 50 long-term federal-agency employees and wrote ‘The First 100 Days and Counting’ (see go.nature.com/3tmxa2f). This report documented the fossil-fuel industry’s influence on the Trump administration, changes in how climate science was presented to the public and the administration’s hostility to scientific research and evidence...
It's worth reading the whole document.
Including salinity gradients in life cycle analysis.
One of the most important environmental decision making tools is "Life Cycle Analysis," LCA, for which a plethora of software applications have been developed over the last decades.
Although these tools are very valuable and very useful, their accuracy is dependent on the weighting of variables, uncertainties, and inevitably, whether variables are included at all.
One of the more common entries in this kind of software is human health; for example I posted a graphic with estimated data for the health impact of the generation of reliable electricity in another post I wrote today, to wit:
Here's table 2:
14. I decided to cherry pick a time to respond to this silliness. Right now, in "percent talk" German...
But the health of human beings is just one consideration; one that should be equally important in my view is the health of ecosystems, said health impacting all those who come after us.
In recent years, I have been considering the issue of desalination of seawater - which I basically support as a necessity since we have done nothing at all to address climate change - but I do not, and no one should - assume that desalination is remotely without environmental impact. Any desalination program needs to address salt gradients as an environmental factor, even if the energy requirements can be addressed by the use of heat exchanger networks to capture what is currently "waste heat."
It is therefore pleasing to encounter this paper as I did this morning: Modeling the Impact of Salinity Variations on Aquatic Environments: Including Negative and Positive Effects in Life Cycle Assessment (Alba Roibás-Rozas, Montserrat Núñez, Anuska Mosquera-Corral, and Almudena Hospido Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (2), 874-884).
Some text from the paper:
However, to the best of our knowledge, just five research works have tried to model the impacts of salinity changes on the environment. (12) Although a new impact category addressing salinity was proposed, (13?15) to the best of our knowledge, it has never been included in an LCA study. (16) Two assessment methodologies focused on soils, modeling salinity impacts according to variations in soil conductivity and linking them with food production and crop diversity loss. (17,18) Two other methodologies focused on aquatic systems, shaping the effects of salinity variations according to ecotoxicity models for water environments. (6,9) They were only partially successful for several reasons, as ecotoxicity is currently based on the observation that the sensitivities of different species to a chemical follow a normal distribution, so increased exposure will generate increased impacts. (19) However, the impact of salinity is not only linked to concentration increases but also to concentration decreases (systems can become saltier or fresher), so an approach based on ecotoxic models would fail to describe these effects. Moreover, salt is not a pollutant or a toxic substance, but an essential element, so ecotoxic models might not be valid to describe its behavior. Hence, a critical improvement of these methodologies is necessary. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide a framework for the evaluation of the impacts of salinity changes in aquatic ecosystems...
Given the collapse of water systems driven by the ongoing and accelerating collapse of the planetary atmosphere while we wait for the so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come, there will be desalination schemes far more broader than those already in use. As the authors point out, changes in salinity are already being driven by climate change; further human manipulation, including that which I support, will have additional impacts.
I believe this paper raises a very important point, and I applaud the authors for publishing it.
Have a nice weekend.
I decided to cherry pick a time to respond to this silliness. Right now, in "percent talk" German...
carbon intensity for electricity is exactly 400% that of France, respectively 416 g CO2/kwh for Germany compared to 104 g g CO2/kwh for France.
(9:45 AM US (EST), 1/22/22)
For most of the week, when I checked in, the German carbon intensity was between 325% and 375% that of France, so I decided to cherry pick at time just like all of the anti-nuke "renewables will save" us do and have been doing here for 19 years.
I note with due disgust that Germany removed clean energy capacity that is reliable to replace it with very dangerous forms of energy that is also reliable but kills people, coal.
This fact will be obvious to anyone who opens the electricity map, at any time: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
They still report in the bar graphs on the left side for Germany what the nuclear energy capacity was before the Germans decided to shut it an replace it with coal: 62.6 GW. Around the world the capacity utilization of nuclear energy is the highest of any form of energy, generally exceeding 90%, but in France right now, where four reactors are shut for inspection, the capacity utilization of nuclear energy is 80.36%. (In the three remaining German nuclear reactors in operation it must be close to 100%.)
My mouse failed while I was writing this post, and in the time it took to replace it with a spare, German carbon intensity rose to 429 g CO2/kwh compared to France's fell to 102 g CO2/kwh, making German carbon intensity in "percent talk" 482% higher than that of France. As of this writing the capacity utilization of all the wind turbine is 16.44% (10.5 GW/61.8GW) and solar is running at 5.08% (2.97GW/58.4GW) capacity utilization.
Let's go with the French nuclear capacity utilization, 80%, for argument to show how many people in Europe Germany is killing with its decision to displace nuclear energy with coal. At 80% capacity utilization the 62.6 GW of now largely shut nuclear plants would be producing if the Germans hadn't decided to kill people by shutting them down would be 62.6 GW * 0.8 = 50 GW rounded to the nearest integer.
There are probably thousands of references in the scientific literature to the estimation of mortality per TWh of electricity. I'm not going to waste precious time to confront another issue of bad thinking of the type that routinely presents itself by listing a ton of them, but am going to go with a publication in the Lancet family of journals, since these deal with public health and medicine and because this one has a nice breakdown of the mortality connected with reliable energy.
It's here: Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.
Here's table 2:
Now let's be clear, the Germans embraced the policy that was advanced here and elsewhere early in my tenure in blogging, specifically that the purpose of trashing wilderness and mining the shit out of the planet for so called "renewable energy" was to displace nuclear energy. Few advocates, if any, ever talked about replacing dangerous fossil fuels. I note that immediately on leaving office, German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder who first put this ignorant policy in place immediately took a job in Gasprom.
That Angela Merkel, a scientist, continued with this policy certainly reduces both her scientific credibility or honesty in my opinion.
How many people, referring to Table 2 did German policy kill per day?
Let's estimate:
As of this writing Germany is producing 20.7 GW of coal power, an amount of energy that German nuclear plants could have easily produced were it not for fear and ignorance on the part of anti-nukes. If this were the continuous average amount of coal energy that Germany produced over a 24 hour period, it would amount to 0.497 TWh. If we're inappropriately generous to the Germans and pretend that they aren't burning lignite but are burning only anthracite, this works out to 0.497TWh * 24.5 deaths/TWh = 12.2 deaths per day, a rate that would produce approximately 4,460 deaths per year and roughly 40,000 serious illnesses.
The corresponding numbers for replacing the same coal power level, 20.7 GW with nuclear would be close to zero (0.094 deaths/day) working out to 3 deaths/year.
Were these figures to hold in the German wind energy nirvana that all our anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, want to applaud, German energy policy is killing about 4500 people per year, if and only if they actually burn enough coal on average to address the unreliability of their wind junk and their trivial solar junk. Note, that the Lancet figures refer most likely to continuously operated coal plants. It is very likely that the "zeroth" law of thermodynamics, the one involving the fact that all thermal systems move toward continuous temperatures when in contact, means that the Germans have to burn coal to get up steam without producing any electricity, another way unreliability kills people.
The continuous utilization of misleading "percent" talk, and the repeated nonsense statements that so called "renewable energy" is better than nothing, is pure intellectual garbage. Renewable energy, as demonstrated in the above crude calculations is worse than something that "something" the Germans had in their portfolio but closed in a fit of lying, nuclear energy.
As for stupid remarks about how long it takes to build a nuclear plant, I note with contempt that the Germans shut existing nuclear plants, killing people in the process. The Chinese have no problem turning out nuclear plants, and in another time, before the rise of ignorance on the part of people who may be metaphorically compared to arsonists complaining about forest fires, the United States built more than 100 nuclear reactors in a period of about 25 years while providing the lowest cost electricity in the world.
It's clear that the ignorance of anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nuke anti-nukes" depends wholly on selective attention. I've personally lived through decades of "100% renewable energy" statements by year such and such. They were all garbage thinking then, and the remain so today.
Ignorance kills.
Have a nice weekend.
The disturbing EPA limits for metal content of sewage sludge to be distributed on land.
As an advocate of nuclear power people here and elsewhere like to prattle to me about so called "nuclear waste," despite the fact that used nuclear fuel has a spectacular record of not killing or injuring anyone. (I oppose all efforts to "dispose" of so called "nuclear waste," since I don't think it has to be, or should be considered "waste." It's too valuable to throw away.)
There are two forms of waste that do kill people, constantly and in vast numbers. The first of these is the dangerous fossil fuel wastes that are (inappropriately in my view) not usually called "wastes," air pollution, consisting of aerosolized heavy metals, particulates, sulfur and nitrogen oxides, to name a few.
The second most deadly waste is familiar to everyone on the planet, fecal waste. Fecal waste kills many hundreds of thousands of people per year, most them children.
I came across a commentary on this topic today in this paper in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology.
Can International Nonsewered Sanitation Standards Help Solve the Global Sanitation Crisis? (Clément A Cid, Francine Abiola, and Markus Starkl Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (2), 699-706)
I have had a few minutes to scan it and read excerpts. It discusses a currently widely utilized technique for disposing (or using) sewage sludge, and I'm sure it will be an interesting read if I find time.
One thing that did catch my eye was a table discussing the limits of metals established by regulations for the metal content of sewage sludge to be distributed on land, including presumably agricultural fields.
It's here: 
It's possible, apparently, to be within regulatory limits to dump almost a gram of lead/kg on land, seemingly including agricultural land. Given the biological half-life of mercury and cadmium this is also disturbing.
For the record I favor supercritical water reformation of sludge, "steam" reformation, or the related dry reforming in which CO2 is the oxidant. Currently these practices for this form of serious waste, human fecal waste do not include reformation, although I do see it discussed in scientific papers from time to time. These schemes would work, among other things, to help close the extremely important phosphorous cycle for anthropogenic phosphorous sources.
A perovskite I really like for the electrolytic reduction of carbon dioxide.
Nine times out of ten these days when one runs across a paper on the subject of perovskites these days, it's about cesium lead halide perovskites, or related perovskites, for proceeding with the fantasy that solar cells can address climate change. Four or five decades of such talk has done nothing to address climate change or to reduce reliance on dangerous fossil fuels, but you know what they always say, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again." In the solar case, many people feel we should keep trying, the ongoing and accelerating collapse of the atmosphere notwithstanding because it's not results that count, but its the warm and fuzzy thoughts that count.
About five or ten years ago, I was fascinated by perovskites, specifically mixed oxide oxygen deficient peroxides for use as oxygen permeable membranes. For about a year or so I devoted a regular period of each week of entering papers into a spreadsheet along with the formulas of the perovskites and columns for each element in their composition so that I could sort them.
Despite all the stuff you hear about the supposed solar and wind "miracle" being a reason to "electrify everything," electricity from all sources is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy. Back in a strange land called "reality" the fact is that electricity is overwhelmingly produced by combusting dangerous fossil fuels and dumping the waste directly into the atmosphere at no cost to anyone other than the people who die from air pollution and of course, all future generations.
It's a fact. Facts matter.
There is a slight caveat to the degradation maxim however, which is that if electricity is generated using waste heat, it may be acceptable to endure the thermodynamic losses associated with energy storage if those losses are exceeded by the energy recovered from waste heat. That is, if the overall efficiency of the system is very high, it acceptable to lose some of it in the storage of energy. (My son recently argued with me while preparing for invited graduate school interviews that "heat network" implies some other than the way I use it, and on reflection, he's right and I'm wrong, so I'll use other language going forward.)
So there's this paper, which happily I came across today, which suggests a use for clean electricity - of which there is only one type, nuclear electricity - during off peak hours:
Anion Fluorine-Doped La0.6Sr0.4Fe0.8Ni0.2O3?? Perovskite Cathodes with Enhanced Electrocatalytic Activity for Solid Oxide Electrolysis Cell Direct CO2 Electrolysis Caichen Yang, Yunfeng Tian, Jian Pu, and Bo Chi ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2022 10 (2), 1047-1058
Iron is of course, an Earth abundant metal, and nickel is, more or less, although mining it for lithium batteries and other purposes has a very severe environmental impact. Lanthanum and strontium cannot be considered entirely "Earth abundant" but both are components of used nuclear fuels, and strontium, at least for a period of about half a century when recovered from used nuclear fuels has the happy property of being radioactive and heat generating. (Heat is required to make oxygen migration in oxygen deficient perovskites effective.) Let's face it, any effort to scale this work is going to work in an setting that while worthwhile, will be esoteric.
I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this paper, but here's a short excerpt from the introduction:
The cathode plays a significant role in the sandwich structure of SOECs for the electrocatalysis of gases. While the state-of-the-art material Ni–YSZ (nickel–yttria-stabilized zirconia) has been widely studied as a SOEC cathode for CO2 and/or H2O electrolysis, (2?4) some critical challenges still exist in CO2 electrolysis. For instance, susceptibility to impurities, easy agglomeration, deactivation at high overpotentials, and especially redox instability are the bottlenecks of the Ni–YSZ cathode. To alleviate or avoid these problems, perovskite-based ceramic materials with satisfactory redox stability have been attempted as potential SOEC cathode candidates. Typical perovskite oxides include La0.2Sr0.8TiO3??, (5) La1–xSrxCr1–yMyO3?? (M = Mn, Fe, Ni, Co), (6) La1–xSrxFe1–yNyO3?? (N = Ti, Ni, Mn), (7?9) and Sr2Fe1.5Mo0.5O6??. (10) However, the comprehensive electrocatalytic activity of these perovskites is still insufficient compared to that of Ni–YSZ. (11) For improving their electrocatalytic activity, modification focused on A-site and B-site of perovskites has been carried out in the last decade. A-site Pr-doped La0.75Sr0.25Cr0.5Mn0.5O3?? (LSCM) was prepared to enhance the ionic conductivity and electrocatalytic activity, and the polarization resistance of the resulting electrode at 800 °C was decreased by 25%. (12) On account of the flexible oxidation states of Ce, it was doped into La0.7Sr0.3Cr0.5Fe0.5O3?? (LSCrF), resulting in more oxygen vacancies and favorable CO2 chemical adsorption accommodation. (13)
Note the presence of the wind solar fantasy; it's useful to evoke it for getting grants I think, although it has been useless to address climate change. However, as is the case with many such papers the reference to solar and wind does not preclude electricity generated more sustainably, i.e. by nuclear energy, particularly in exergy recovery settings.
Let's jump to the paper's conclusion:
It is notable that a problem with many perovskite oxygen deficient oxygen permeation membranes is that they lack stability in CO2 and CO. These seem to not suffer from the same stability issues in the presence of carbon oxides as others about which I've written.
Cool paper I think.
"In Hollywood, you haven't really made it until you've been recognized by those in parasitology...
The full quote was found in the Nature Briefing to which I subscribe by email, the January 19th edition where it was the the quote of the day:
“In Hollywood, you haven’t really made it until you’ve been recognized by those in the field of parasitology.”
Actor Jeff Daniels gamely responds to the news that a newly described species of nematode has been named after him. Tarantobelus jeffdanielsi kills tarantulas, just like Daniels's character in the 1990 film ‘Arachnophobia’. (Variety | 3 min read)
Reference: Journal of Parasitology paper
The link to the Variety article is here: Newly Discovered Parasitic Worm Named After Jeff Daniels
The original paper is found here: TARANTOBELUS JEFFDANIELSI N. SP. (PANAGROLAIMOMORPHA; PANAGROLAIMIDAE), A NEMATODE PARASITE OF TARANTULAS (Dillman et al. J Parasitol (2022) 108 (1): 30–43.) For some reason I don't have access to this journal through my normal channels, but the full paper can be access via Bioone using Google Scholar.
Be kind to your tarantulas and keep them away from Tarantobelus jeffdanielsi
At this hour, German electricity comes in at 420 g CO2/kwh; France 101 g CO2/kwh overall and...
69 g CO/kwh for power generated in country.
6:10 PM (EST US) 01/17/22.
Eco2mix France
Electricity map
The wind is blowing again in Germany and the wind turbines in the country are producing 18.4 GW, 28.66% capacity utilization.
The wind however is not blowing so strongly as to stop coal from being the largest source of electricity being generated in Germany, with coal plants producing 26.1 GW of electricity. Natural gas is producing 7.8 GW of German electricity.
The good news for the Germans about the wind blowing is that the coal waste they are dumping into the planetary atmosphere is blowing in the wind toward Poland. That's good news for the French as well. Coal waste kills people whenever coal plants operate normally.
This winter, to speak in much loved "percent talk," I have yet to see the carbon impact of German electricity to be less than 200% that of France; I've seen it as high a 500% that of France.
In Cuba, the job of "sex sorter" is going to be supplanted by machines.
I came across this article this afternoon: Nuclear technique cuts mosquito numbers in Cuban trial.
The last sentence in the article is this one:
I hope retraining will be possible for the sex sorter workers being displaced by automation.
The effects of defaunation (birds, largely) on plants' capacity to track climate change.
I came across this paper in the most recent issue of Science: The effects of defaunation on plants’ capacity to track climate change Fricke et al., Science 375, 210–214 (2022)
It is the paper featured on the cover of this issue:
Some time ago, in connection with my opposition to the wind industry, which has been, is, and always will be useless at addressing climate change, I posted a thread on this website which included reference to a book that inspired it in my electronic files:
The post is here:
A Minor Problem For Sound Science of the Effect of Offshore Windfarms on Seabirds: There Isn't Any.
The book inspiring the post was this one: Why Birds Matter. At the time of the post I stated that I wished the book didn't have to be written, but it had to be.
Chapters 5, 6, 7 in the book, are all about plant dispersal via seed dispersal by the action of birds.
It would appear from this recent paper in Science that the decline of birds is becoming - dare we say? - a problem, not that this problem is going to result in the ongoing process of converting vast stretches of wilderness into industrial parks for wind turbines.
I can't spend a lot of time going through the paper's details, but can briefly excerpt a few things, since I have access to it and I suspect most people don't.
From the introduction:
Plants today are experiencing mutualist loss as a result of past and ongoing defaunation (9) as well as climate change (10), with many populations needing to shift hundreds of meters to tens of kilometers per year to track their climatic niche (11). Further, novel communities are assembling as species introductions and shifting ranges result in cooccurrence of species that do not share coevolutionary history (12). The mutualistic interaction networks that assemble in these communities will likely influence whether certain plant species persist and spread (13). Developing the ability to predict how novel interactions and interaction extinctions affect seed dispersal function at macroecological scales is key for monitoring global human impacts on ecosystem functioning and forecasting future vegetation dynamics.
Predicting species interactions and quantifying how they affect ecosystem functioning are pressing goals for ecologists, and a growing consensus supports doing so by using a trait-based approach (14, 15). Specifically, researchers can predict interactions by modeling the links between observed interactions and species’ traits such as body mass in predator-prey interactions (16) or bill and corolla length in hummingbird-plant interactions (17). Complementary data, often also related to traits, can establish how interactions translate to ecosystem functioning (18, 19)...
Later on in the text:
Figure 3 is here:
The caption:
(A) Spatial variation in the long-distance dispersal index. (B to D) Percent change in dispersal, relative to current estimates, for the natural scenario, the extinction of threatened and endangered species, and the extirpation of introduced species. (E and F) Change in long-distance dispersal function versus change in species richness and functional diversity in the current scenario relative to the natural scenario, averaged within ecoregions represented by at least 10 grid cells.
The country where most DU types live, the United States, looks rather ugly I think.
But don't worry, be happy. I suggest you watch car ads showing some $50,000 electric car speeding past a wind turbine industrial park is some desert laced with access roads. Maybe you'll feel better.
It wouldn't do much for me, but then again, I'm unusual in this regard. I don't consider the industrial wind industry to be "green." I think it a sick and unsustainable affectation which is doing nothing if the "something" in question is addressing climate change.
I hope the weekend has been pleasant for you despite the threat of difficult weather on the East Coast, for those of you who may live there as I do.
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