Figure A: The knee of a bee

I recently bought a 80-800x USB microscope. It has really good quality for less than $40, and I’ve been using it to get up close and personal with crystals, dead bugs, and gross parts of my anatomy. Feast your eyes!

A wasp, with a bizarre, insectile tonguemouththing. Proboscis. Weird.

One of my moles. Maybe it’s time I get it looked at, hm?

I wasn’t too thrilled to find out that I had warts, but they grow on you.

Iridescence in a bead of thermite residue.

Copper sulfate blocks

Feathers of copper acetate

Copper acetate closeup

I hope to get some polarizing filters and videotape the growth of chiral crystals, like sugar or vitamin C. Stay tuned…

WARNING: This procedure involves heat and the end product is a powerful oxidizer. Don’t get burned and don’t get it on yourself – wear gloves, splash-resistant goggles, and an apron. I had a spill of ~15%, all over everything, including myself. It was okay, but only because I followed safety protocols. I didn’t have the apron though, and I had to get pantsless.

Hydrogen peroxide is an interesting substance; it’s formula is H2O2, meaning that it is composed of two hydrogen atoms bonded to two oxygen atoms.

Figure 1. Behold, the hydrogen peroxide molecule!

It is a powerful oxidizer, decaying into water and free oxygen. This is because the bond between the two oxygen atoms, called the peroxide bond, is unstable. Some substances which contain the peroxide bond are even explosive, like triacetonetriperoxide. Because it’s an explosive precursor, and somewhat dangerous on its own, concentrated hydrogen peroxide can be difficult to come by. The weak 3% solution found in drugstores is all that is available to DIYers, hobbyists, and other scientists outside of the mainstream chemical supply chain.

Fortunately, it is relatively trivial to increase the concentration from 3% to around 30%. There are several tutorials on the subject at YouTube (TheChemLife; zhmapper, nerdalert226) so I’m going to focus on measuring the concentration of the end product, a procedure which the videos tend to treat very qualitatively. I hope this tutorial will be informative and useful, even outside of punklabs; the process is easily generalized and density is important in many fields, including medicine and winemaking.

The concentrating procedure is pretty simple: pour about 500 mL of the 3% solution into a beaker and heat it, forcing the excess water to evaporate until there is a tenth as much liquid left (peroxide boils at 150 C, compared to 100 C for water.) There are only a couple of tricky points: the liquid must NOT boil, only steam – if it starts boiling, the peroxide will decay. Bits of dust and dirt will also cause disintegration, so the equipment must be kept very clean and free from scratches.

Okay, so after a few hours, I have about 50 mL of liquid. I drop a bit into a solution of corn starch and potassium iodide, and the mixture turns black, a positive test for oxidizers. I add a squirt to some sulfuric acid and copper wire, and the metal wire begins bubbling and the solution begins to turn blue with copper sulfate*. This reaction is faster and more vigorous than when I try it with the 3% solution, so I’ve clearly succeeded in increasing the concentration, but to what level? To answer that question, I’m going to measure the density of the solution.

Figure 2. The Densitometry Setup. Note the safety equipment. Note also the lab notebook, which is essential. Other sights include a bit of iron oxalate, tongs, and a desiccator.

Here’s my setup. I don’t have a nice buret with a stopcock, so instead I have repurposed a graduated medical pipette (I picked up a huge box of these at the Scrap Exchange). This is controlled with a valve and a syringe plunger. It’s a little drippy and derpy, not great for dispensing a planned volume, but it works fine to measure the amount that has been dispensed, which is sufficient for our purposes. The milligram scale was lent to me by a friend after armed thugs stole my old one (thanks, B!) The brown glass vial is good for containing peroxide, since light speeds up its decomposition.**

Once the room and the beaker are at the same temperature (20 deg C), I draw about 8 mL of my peroxide up into the pipette, and start adding peroxide a bit at a time. By the time I had figured out the fluidics system, I’d added about 3.0 mL, so that’s where the data start. I then would squirt a bit of peroxide into the vial, note the volume and the mass, and repeat. I took 8 different measurements this way.

Then, after I put everything away and cleaned up, I sat down with a cup of coffee for a bit of data entry.

Figure 3. Data, in analog and digital form. This is a page from my lab notebook, and the spreadsheet in gnumeric (inset).

I usually store my data in spreadsheets, and my processing and analysis with Python. Once the spreadsheet file is ready, I get started and load up my data.

$ ipython –pylab

In [1]: import xlrd
In [2]: phial = xlrd.open_workbook('densityData.xls')
In [3]: data = phial.sheet_by_index(0)
In [4]: raw_volume = data.col_values(1)[5:]
In [5]: raw_mass = data.col_values(3)[5:]

Next, I take a quick peek at the data just to make sure that everything is as expected.

In [6]: plot(raw_volume, raw_mass, 'bo')

Figure 4 Plotting the raw data.

Looking good; the data are nice and linear, meaning that the slope (and therefor the density) is well defined. But this is the raw data, which include the mass of the bottle. I also didn’t start at zero on my pipette, just wrote down the volume the liquid was at when I took each mass measurement. It doesn’t matter too much, but strictly speaking, we want to compare just the mass of the liquid in the bottle to the volume of liquid drained from the pipette. Let’s go ahead and calculate that (it’s a lot like calculating temperature anomaly.)

In [12]: volume = array(raw_volume) - 3.0*ones_like(raw_volume)
In [12]: mass = array(raw_mass) -9.988*ones_like(raw_mass) 

Much better. Now, to get some basic statistics on these data, let’s apply a linear regression.

In [13]: from scipy import stats
In [16]: (m, b, r, p, std) =stats.linregress(volume, mass)
In [17]: (m, b, r, r**2,  p, std)

Out[17]:
(1.1189534883720933,
0.067450581395348319,
0.99932418729044048,
0.99864883130369941,
7.7125664942037092e-10,
0.01680292147514929)

It’s mostly the slope, m = 1.12 g/mL, which we’re interested in.

In [16]: linFit = polyval([m,b], volume)
In [29]: plot(volume, linFit, 'r-')
In [30]: plot(volume, mass, 'bo')
In [31]: title('Mass vs. Volume for H2O2')
In [32]: xlabel('Volume (mL)')
In [33]: ylabel('Mass (g)')
In [36]: text(1.25, 4.5, 'M = %fg/mL*V + %fg'%(m,b))

Figure 4. The mass of peroxide is plotted as a function of its volume, and a linear regression applied.

Now that we have the density, we can use this graph from H2O2.com.  (It’s derived from Easton et al 1952. The paper actually reports on density measurements at 0, 10, 25, 50, and 96 degrees, so these are probably interpolated curves).  We’ll draw a horizontal line at the measured density (~1.12 g/mL) until we hit the curve corresponding to the temperature (20C). Then we draw a vertical line and read off the concentration where it crosses the horizontal axis. Result? The concentration is about 32%. (Figure 5)

Figure 5.

You may wonder why I went through so much trouble of taking multiple data points and calculating a trend line. If density is defined as mass per volume, then surely I can measure it in one go, by massing a single sample of known volume. Right? The problem is that any one such measurement might be a little wonky. Maybe one fewer drop than usual wiggled out, or a draft of air was pushing down a little on the scale. Look back at Figure 4; see the data point third from the end, visibly above the trend line? If I was only taking one measurement, I might get unlucky enough to get an outlier like that one.  By using a linear regression, I can aggregate the data, and hopefully all those small outside factors will tend to cancel out.

Another reason is that the linear regression allows us to calculate uncertainty in the slope of the line, and therefor in the density. There are good online explanations of this, so I’m just going to churn through the equations.

In [26]: N = len(volume)
In [27]: unc = std *sqrt(N/(N*sum(volume**2)-sum(volume)**2))
In [28]: unc
Out[28]: 0.005463100999105781

We can thus report the density as 1.119 +/- 0.005 g/mL. If we wanted, we could use the uncertainty in the density to calculate the uncertainty in concentration the same way we calculated the concentration estimate: plot lines at 1.119 + 0.005 g/mL for the upper bound, and 1.119 – 0.005 g/mL for the lower bound and work backwards to get a confidence interval of concentrations. In our case though, the uncertainty is so small that it’s about the width of the original line not really worth propagating.

I feel comfortable just calling this 32% peroxide. Success!

* An easier, quicker test is to add peroxide to a catalyst that causes it to decay, but I didn’t have any manganese dioxide or horseradish on hand. Also, everyone loves copper sulfate.

** This is really a moot point, since I am keeping this sample in the fridge, and there is not even a lightbulb to philosophize about. But it’s also why you buy peroxide in opaque bottles.

~~~

Easton, M., Mitchell, A., & Wynne-Jones, W. (1952). The behaviour of mixtures of hydrogen peroxide and water. Part 1.?Determination of the densities of mixtures of hydrogen peroxide and water Transactions of the Faraday Society, 48 DOI: 10.1039/TF9524800796

You might remember a while back I got interested in researching the statistical thermodynamics of poker tournaments. To briefly recap, I was treating the distribution of chips amongst players as a probability distribution, which meant that I could use the concept of entropy to describe the distribution. Entropy in thermodynamic systems is associated with how ‘spread out’ the energy is in that system: A hot cup of coffee in a cold room has low entropy while warm coffee in a warm room has high entropy. In a statistical system like a poker table, entropy measures how evenly distributed the chips are between the players. When the players start the tournament with equal amounts, the entropy is at a maximum. When one player wins all the chips, the entropy is at a minimum. Already things are interesting – entropy in this statistical system must decrease with time, in stark contrast with the second law of thermodynamics. And we haven’t even looked at what happens between those two points!

Poker entropy

To better understand the behavior of tournaments, I needed a way to play them and replay them, to turn them into something other than tables of names and numbers. The first representation worked well at illustrating the distribution, but failed to capture the dynamics; except in catastrophic rearrangements, it was not always obvious how the chips moved around from hand to hand.

[link]

What’s going on is, I’ve whimsically renamed the players for anonymity, and then represented the size of their stack with a circle. Each hand is then represented by a transaction in which chips flow from one or more players to a single winner, with chip flow represented by black lines whose size is representative of the magnitude of flow. I find this hypnotic.

If you don’t care about coding, feel free to skip down….

How exactly did I put this together?

Zeroeth, we have to get our tools together.

import pickle, sys    #file IO utilities
import pygame    #pygame library
from pygame.locals import *    #more pygame stuff
from math import sin, cos, pi, sqrt    #math tools

First, there is a great deal of tedious regular expression slicing and dicing that you have to do to convert a tournament history file into usable data; I’ll be merciful and skip that. So I’ve finally bundled up the data in a couple of files.

vial = open('dat/cash_timeline.dat','r')
 cash = pickle.load(vial)
 vial.close()

vial = open('dat/flux_timeline.dat','r')
 flux = pickle.load(vial)
 vial.close()

Now, it’s time to start drawing. I’m using the PyGame module to do the drawing; there are other options like TkInter, of course.

pygame.init()#    start yer engines!
windowSurfObj = pygame.display.set_mode([700,700])# build a window
pygame.display.set_caption('Poker Face')# name it
fontObj = pygame.font.Font('freesansbold.ttf', 24)# get ready to write on it

Next, we have to build a table for the players to sit at. Let’s make it a circular table. Since the players’ stacks will be represented with circles, we’ll call the table a megacircle. It’s going to be invisible, but we need to build it anyway so that the players will have a place to sit.

centerx, centery = 300,300#    center of the megacircle
radius = 175#    size of the megacircle

Now, we have to give each player a seat at the table. We want them to be evenly spaced, so I used a trick I remembered from abstract algebra: the roots of unity of a polynomial of degree n form an n-sided polygon in the plane, and in particular have easily computed coordinates. I used this fact to arrange seats for the seven starting players (I also identify them with a color):

for i in range(0, len(allPlayers)):#    give each player a color and a location.
    color_dict[allPlayers[i]] = colors[i]# colors for everyone!
    place_dict[allPlayers[i]] = (centerx+int(radius*cos(2*pi*i/len(allPlayers))), centery+int(radius*sin(2*pi*i/len(allPlayers))))#   take your seats.

Now we’re ready to replay the tournament, looking at the stacks and fluxes between.

while hand < 675:#    for each hand...
    windowSurfObj.fill(white)#    erase everything
    win = winner()#who won this hand?
    for playa in allPlayers:#    for all of your players, consider each     individually.
        if flux[playa][hand] < 0.0:#    did they lose money this hand? if so....
            width = arr(abs(flux[playa][hand]))#then the width of the line connecting them to the winner is proportional to their loss.
            pygame.draw.line(windowSurfObj, black, place_dict[playa], place_dict[win], width)#    draw that line.

On top of that, we draw the circles representing players’ holdings. The pygame canvas is like a real life collage; when you add something, it covers up things that were already there. The circles will cover up the rough ends that are left from drawing those lines.

for playa in allPlayers:#circle round, everyone...
    rad = arr(cash[playa][hand])#radius of circle
    pygame.draw.circle(windowSurfObj, color_dict[playa], place_dict[playa], rad)#draw circles.

Let’s also give them nametags.

for playa in allPlayers:#    his name was robert paulson.
    msgSurfObj = fontObj.render(playa, False, graph)#    type the name in graphite letters.
    msgRectObj = msgSurfObj.get_rect()#    take the text as a whole....
    msgRectObj.topleft = place_dict[playa]#    .... and put it next to the  player's seat
    windowSurfObj.blit(msgSurfObj, msgRectObj)#    this basically just glues everything together.

…and then there’s a bit of mostly vestigial keybindings, not interesting enough to really talk about. Next we update the display, which sort of finalizes what we’re going to see on the screen:

pygame.display.update()

And then I save each frame as a single image, like a slide in a slideshow.

pygame.image.save(windowSurfObj, 'frm/frame%d.jpeg'%(hand))

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: We’ve drawn the slide, and it’s time to move on to the next:

hand += 1

Now, once we run this script, we’ll see the animation. We’ll also get each frame of the animation individually, bundled as a file. This way, we can just zip it together with a handy command-line program called ffmpeg:

>ffmpeg -fimage2 -i frame%d.jpeg -r 12 HxW demo.avi

Add some titles and background music using openshot, and you have a data visualization as open sourced as it is heart-pounding.

Note that this is a flyby, not a walkthrough, of pygame and python. For the full, original code, derps and all: http://pastebin.com/Anqe3eGS

… to here.

Part of the reason I wanted this bird’s eye view is to take a closer look at the dynamics of the game. Entropic processes often lead to what are called dissipative structures. The second law of thermodynamics insists that entropy must increase; dissipative structures are the routes and means by which this happens. The large-scale currents between the warm equator and cold poles are examples of dissipative structures; on a smaller scale, so are eddies and dust devils. Living organisms are dissipative structures which convert free energy (food) into heat.

I have already discussed Dr. Arto Annila’s paper, Economies Evolve by Energy Dispersal (Annila & Salthe 2009) which frames ecosystems and economies as dissipative structures. They explain, “Eventually, when no further and faster means to consume free energy and no additional sources are found, the economy reaches a steady-state, just as an ecosystem attains a climax, the mature state with maximal gross transduction.” I think that you can see this in the figure and the visualization. After each player loss, the system is placed out of equilibrium and has to readjust to a new steady-state.

Dr. Annila has also used thermodynamics to frame game theory, pointing to its physical science origins. (Anttila & Annila 2011). This paper explores the general concept of ‘utility’ which gaming strategies aim to maximize, proposing that the payoff for a strategy is actually the rate of entropy increase which it entails. Game theory can apply to chemistry, poker players, or ecosystems; in each case, it’s thermodynamics that motivate molecules, individuals, and populations. “…the behavior of many systems, including decision-making processes, could be described as natural processes so that entropy is the universal payoff function … The quest to consume free energy in least time is ubiquitous and independent of mechanisms.”

One observation that I think gets highlighted is the  ‘ringing’ after a major transition like the loss of a player. The loss of cyan around hand #5 in figure 1 seems to trigger a bit of it – look at the oscillations in entropy as the sudden influx of free energy disperses throughout the table. Dr. Annila was kind enough to send some thoughts on this project, and it seems that such ringing might have theoretical basis as well:  “At these occasions the path-dependent process display discontinuity … One could even expect to see some damping oscillations.” Watching the video animation, it is clearer exactly how that dispersal takes place, and how the network of interactions allows nonlocal connections between players, a characteristic of dissipative structures.

The good news on this front is that I’ve met a friend who is excited about sharing their collection of tournament histories. Stay tuned for updates as the numbers get crunched…

~~~

Annila, A., & Salthe, S. (2009). Economies Evolve by Energy Dispersal Entropy, 11 (4), 606-633 DOI: 10.3390/e11040606

Anttila, J., & Annila, A. (2011). Natural games Physics Letters A, 375 (43), 3755-3761 DOI: 10.1016/j.physleta.2011.08.056
 

• More hard-hitting commentary!
• More sassing of people who don’t understand graphs!
• Updates on previous projects! Coming Soon
• Audiovisual delights!
• More sweet hax!
• Fractals and fungaloids!
• Pentagons and pentagrams! Coming Soon
• More dry ice! (The shark puppet will also return.)

Not bad! As consistent readers might have noticed, the big news behind the scenes is that I have gotten involved in another production space, LumShop. Not only is it providing facilities for DIY Spectro development, it is also kindly hosting my chemistry lab! This will end well, I’m sure.

So what’s next?

• Even more hard-hitting commentary and sass
• More fractals and fungaloids!
• Augmenting and measuring the concentration of hydrogen peroxide!
• Third generation DIY Spectro!

Between this lineup and my lab, I’m sure the site will stay busy, but if you have any requests or suggestions, leave a comment!

Human influence on the environment has increased dramatically over the last 10,000 years, to the point that some geologists have argued that human reworking of the earth defines a new geologic age, The Anthropocene. (Zalasiewicz et al, 2008) Much of the focus has been on relatively robust, tangible changes in biogeochemistry. Examples include:

• the climate change and ocean acidification resulting from the addition of fossil fuel emissions to the carbon cycle.

• megafaunal extinction, accelerated erosion (Zalasiewicz et al, 2008) and nitrogen fixation resulting from the spread of intensive subsistence patterns
• the loss of stratospheric ozone resulting from the release of novel chlorofluorocarbons

However, fleeting and less tangible effects are also important. Two examples are:

• the light pollution resulting from urbanization and transportation infrastructure
• changes in the acoustic environment resulting from direct addition of sonic energy and memes, as well as indirect sources.

A year-long composite view of the earth at night, showing human light generation. White lights are cities; blue lights are fishing boats; green lights are natural gas flares, and red lights are ‘ephemeral light sources’, interpreted as fires. Image from  NOAA National Geophysical Data Center – click for source + discussion.

Light pollution, the scourge of urban astronomers, is a well-accepted phenomenon with serious consequences. A 2004 review begins:

In the past century, the extent and intensity of artificial night lighting has increased such that it has substantial effects on the biology and ecology of species in the wild. We distinguish “astronomical light pollution”, which obscures the view of the night sky, from “ecological light pollution”, which alters natural light regimes in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Some of the catastrophic consequences of light for certain taxonomic groups are well known, such as the deaths of migratory birds around tall lighted structures, and those of hatchling sea turtles disoriented by lights on their natal beaches. The more subtle influences of artificial night lighting on the behavior and community ecology of species are less well recognized, and constitute a new focus for research in ecology and a pressing conservation challenge. (Longcore & Rich 2004)

The amount of sonic energy released by human activity is recognized as an urban nuisance as well as an occupational safety concern. It also has recognized ecological effects: urban European robins have begun singing at night, when they have less acoustic competition. (Fuller et al 2007) Frogs have begun changing the pitch of their croaks in order to talk over traffic noise (Paris et al 2009)  In addition to sonic energy, human activity has released sonic memes into the environment. A meme is a self-replicating information pattern; jokes and computer viruses are two examples of memes. A person or computer acquires a meme and then spreads it, through retelling or infected emails. Sonic memes, such as ambulance sirens and cellphone ringtones, have been picked and repeated by songbirds. (Stover 2009) This is very interesting: human memes, the basis of Richard Dawkins’ ‘extended phenotype’ concept, have organically extended into other animals’ extended phenotype. (Recent reports of dolphins mimicking human speech are also very interesting in this context. The reverse flow also occurs, as animal communications are repackaged as ringtones or ambient music.)

It’s perhaps no surprise that our ships and sonar have made the oceans alarmingly loud, but human activity has influenced the acoustic environment in indirect, often surprising ways. Anthropogenic carbon emissions are drastically changing ocean chemistry: the oceans have become more acidic with an average decrease of 0.1 pH since the industrial revolution (IPCC AR4 2007 WGII Ch.1). pH is a logarithmic measure of acidity, so a pH change of 0.1 is a 125% increase in hydrogen ion concentration. In addition to the effects on corals and other organisms which depend on a more basic ocean, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium have made a surprising prediction: acidification may make the oceans louder in certain frequency ranges. (Hester et al. 2008) At the same time, changes in climate have resulted in catastrophic outbreaks of bark beetle. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have argued for a sonic component to these outbreaks, in which bark beetles home in on acoustic signals released by trees stressed by dehydration. (Dunn & Crutchfield, 2006)

What is the sound of one beetle chirping? It has a spectrogram like this one from the Acoustic Ecology Institute – click on the image for more spectrograms and recordings!

Considering the scale and significance of human influence on the sonic and optic environments, there is a great deal we could learn from widespread ecological monitoring of sound and light. The review cited earlier reccomends: “measurements of light disturbance should be included routinely as part of enviromental monitoring protocols“. (Longcore & Rich 2004) In the oceans, tools like NOAA’s autonomous hydrophone array have uncovered a great variety of information, including some rather Lovecraftian anomalies, with names like Bloop, Julia, Train, and Slow Down. In spite of these monitoring efforts, the Acoustic Ecology Institute’s David Dunn recently reported that “very little is known about the extent of anthropogenic noise in the sea, or the effects of such noise on ocean species.“

Here’s a module’s eye view of an environmental monitor for sound and light pollution. I’d like to see a distributed array of these, keeping tabs on he photons and sound waves around us.

On land, monitoring of sonic ecology has thusfar been fairly transient and concentrated on localized and/or urban settings (eg, Alicia-Pou et al2005; Maisonneuve et al 2006). In order to build a better database of the sonic landscape, I would envision a semi-autonomous terraphone array, mimicking NOAA’s aquatic model. This array might be produced and maintained by citizen scientists, an implementation I discuss in more detail at ArkFab. Beyond anthropogenic sound and light pollution, the dataset from this monitoring program could be useful in other ways. For example, a record of animal sounds could directly give information about their populations in a given region; indirectly, it could be used to infer information about populations of their predators, prey, and symbiotes. Over time, this data could be used to understand migration patterns and ecological succession. Widespread light measurements may provide insight to a phenomenon called global dimming. Global dimming is the effect of airborn particles (such as pollution) to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, by reflecting it directly or by spawning reflective clouds. Some studies have indicated that the dimming has recently begun to decrease, while other studies disagree. Widespread light-level monitoring might help address open questions about the climatic effects of clouds, as well as provide information for trying to understand the effects of global dimming and brightening on local ecosystems.

“The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades.”

José Alicea-Pou, Olga Viñas-Curiel, Wanda Cruz-Vizcarrondo, & Osvaldo Alomar (2005). Monitoring of the Environmental Noise Level in San Juan, Puerto Rico Environmental Quality Board

David Dunn, & James P. Crutchfield (2006). Insects, Trees, and Climate: The Bioacoustic Ecology of Deforestation
and Entomogenic Climate Change Santa Fe Institute Working Paper arXiv: q-bio/0612019v1

Fuller, R., Warren, P., & Gaston, K. (2007). Daytime noise predicts nocturnal singing in urban robins Biology Letters, 3 (4), 368-370 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0134
Hester, K., Peltzer, E., Kirkwood, W., & Brewer, P. (2008). Unanticipated consequences of ocean acidification: A noisier ocean at lower pH Geophysical Research Letters, 35 (19) DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034913

Longcore, T., & Rich, C. (2004). Ecological Light Pollution Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2 (4) DOI: 10.2307/3868314

Nicolas Maisonneuve, Matthias Stevens, Maria E. Niessen, Peter Hanappe, & Luc Steels (2009). Citizen Noise Pollution Monitoring The Proceedings of the 10th International Digital Government Research Conference

Kirsten M. Parris, Meah Velik-Lord, & Joanne M. A. North (2009). Landscape Function
Frogs Call at a Higher Pitch in Traffic Noise
Ecology and Society, 14 (1)

Rosenzweig, C., G. Casassa, D.J. Karoly, A. Imeson, C. Liu, A. Menzel, S. Rawlins, T.L. Root, B. Seguin, & P. Tryjanowski (2007). Assessment of observed changes and responses in natural and managed systems. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Dawn Stover (2009). Not So Silent Spring Conservation Magazine, 10 (1)

Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Smith, A., Barry, T., Coe, A., Bown, P., Brenchley, P., Cantrill, D., Gale, A., Gibbard, P., Gregory, F., Hounslow, M., Kerr, A., Pearson, P., Knox, R., Powell, J., Waters, C., Marshall, J., Oates, M., Rawson, P., & Stone, P. (2008). Are we now living in the Anthropocene GSA Today, 18 (2) DOI: 10.1130/GSAT01802A.1

Magnesium sulfate crystals, clingin’ to a petri dish. Chillin’.

Another quick lab snap. These are some nice crystals I grew. I was washing an earlier, less photogenic crystal garden with alcohol, and catching the runoff in a petri dish. I let it evaporate and was greeted with this happy little accident! The crystals are magnesium sulfate, available as Epsom salt at most pharmacies.

Okay, checking their blog… mhmm… skim the headlines, clickety clicky….

… oh sweet cthulu, rise from your watery slumber and please make it stop.

The linked article describes environmentalism as factually challenged and lacking a vision of “the overall big picture”; let us categorically examine the main evidence presented in support of this thesis:

1. “global warming, or climate change, or whatever they feel like calling it now” has been grossly exaggerated.
2. Lighter cars are inherently more dangerous than gas-guzzlers.
3. Recycling is bad.
4. Fossil fuels can be greenwashed.

Ready? Let’s go.

“Why is [head of NASA's GISS program and accomplished geophysicist Dr. James] Hanson [sic] so important?” – Carolina Review columnist Alex Thomas

I was disappointed by the coverage of climate change. I expected it to be lousy, and it was, but I didn’t expect it to be so… unsatisfying. The only evidence presented is the claim that Dr. Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony was critically flawed, greatly overestimating the amount of temperature change to come. This is a PRATT, a Point Refuted A Thousand Times, so my treatment will be a bit superficial.  (For more detail, read this)

Some of Hansen’s scenarios gave realistic predictions, and some didn’t. The real question is why.

A climate simulation isn’t a magickal box that spits out numbers. In order to run it, you have to input certain parameters, like how bright the sun is, the greenhouse gas concentrations, and so on. For the past you might have direct measurements or proxy records; the future is not only unwritten, but contingent upon human agency. So you have to come up with plausible scenarios for what’s coming. Maybe we cut down on fossil fuel usage; maybe we ramp it up; maybe we relax clean air standards; maybe we have a nuclear war. You run the scenarios you’re interested in on climate models, and you compare, contrast, and interpret the output. One of the scenarios that Dr. Hansen used (“Scenario A”) overestimated greenhouse gas emissions – but not carbon dioxide. Scenario A assumed that we continued to emit CFCs, which are potent greenhouse gasses. Because they threatened the ozone layer, CFCs were phased out under the Montreal Protocols, which went into effect in 1989 – the year after Hansen’s testimony. Nowhere in the Carolina Review article do we hear about such confounding factors, nor the general success of government regulation in cutting down on ozone depletors. Nor is there mention that Scenarios B and C match observations well (see above), nor that Hansen’s 1981 predictions were freakinshly accurate. * Also, why is Dr. Hansen important? Because he was an adviser to Al Gore, of course!

“Usually investigators only present and discuss the risk to occupants of the car or truck in question—as if society at large has no stake in the mayhem caused by some vehicles as long as those riding in them aren’t themselves killed.” – Wenzel and Ross 2008

The article uses climate change as a pivot point to launch into an attack on fuel efficiency. Light, fuel efficient cars, the argument goes, have less momentum and less structural strength than the heavier SUVs, for intuitive physical reasons, and thus offer less protection in a crash. This is certainly plausible, but the bigger picture is always more complicated – and interesting! Although the Carolina Review claims that “Lighter cars are more dangerous for people, and contribute to more deaths of people,” their cited  source actually reports on a slightly different measurement: the death rate to the drivers themselves. This is of course an important consideration, but it’s hardly the only or the most important. Also important is whether the car prevents driver injury, whether it protects the passengers, and the damage it deals to the motorists, pedestrians, and wildlife it collides with. A car designed with sharp metal hood ornaments or dash knobs might kill a bicyclist or give the driver a nasty gash; an explosive rear gas tank might incinerate passengers but allow drivers to escape; a heavy van built on top of two long metal spears might punch through the side of a subcompact but cushion its driver from anything but bruises. None of these designs are ‘safe’, but could well have low driver death rates. (Incidentally, that last example is not an exaggeration – the industry term for SUV design is ‘aggressive’, and for a reason.)

“Most conventional SUVs are merely carlike cabins bolted onto the frames of pickup trucks, which include two longitudinal steel beams that can act like spears or fork tines when striking a car, often overriding a bumper in a frontal crash or punching through a door in a side impact.” (Text and image Wenzel and Ross 2008)

It seems extremely plausible that part of the reason that small, light cars are unsafe to people in them is that SUVs are unsafe to people outside of them! Automobile safety is much more complex and much more optimistic than CRDaily’s ‘big picture’ narrative: a recent analysis (Wenzel and Ross 2008) found that “drivers are just as safe in cars as they are in SUVs and pickups. This result is easily explained: Although the risk of dying in a collision is often lower in SUVs and pickups, their high center of gravity makes them more susceptible to rollovers.” ** They also found no particular reason to support the idea of an engineering trade-off between gas mileage and safety. The whole thing is very interesting and readable – check it out! (My favorite part is their discussion of pickup truck deaths.)

“Isn’t it nice that while recycling has to be picked up, garbage just evaporates once you put in in the dumpster?” – Peter Coffey

That pretty much sums up the Carolina Review’s argument against recycling, actually. They point out, correctly, that energy, infrastructure, and time have to be invested in order to recycle our waste. But the default alternative is garbage, which also requires fuel, infrastructure, and time to process, while also requiring ever-bigger landfills and a heavy diet of raw materials. (Reducing consumption and production are of course unthinkable, because The Economy, dammit. Besides, what about the vibrant dumpster-diving ecosystems we’d destroy?)

“…there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.” (Marx) Image via grist.org

Actually, they go one step further and tell us that recycling is *worse* than just throwing out our garbage: “ recycling actually INCREASES greenhouse gas emissions. [...] Recycling newsprint actually creates more water pollution than just making new paper.” It seemed a bit hard to believe that virgin paper production (cutting down trees, letting topsoil wash into streams and creeks, bleaching the wood pulp, etc) was less polluting than recycling newsprint, (in principle safe enough to be an elementary school activity.) Five minutes on Teh Google confirmed my suspicions: this talking point, the National Resources Defense Council explains,“is, simply, absurd. Far from producing more hazardous pollution than virgin mills, modern paper recycling mills produce virtually no hazardous air or water pollution or hazardous wastes.” The source the Carolina Review presents is a sketchy-looking New York Times opinion piece, apparently heavily influenced by the Cato Institute. It claims that “for each ton of recycled newsprint that’s produced, an extra 5,000 gallons of waste water are discharged.” Nope! the NRDC reports that “new paper mills that recycle 100 percent newsprint do not even consume or discharge a total of 5,000 gallons of water per ton of manufactured product,” let alone an additional 5 kGal. “ By contrast, the virgin “pulp and paper industry is the largest industrial process water user in the United States.”“

“I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality … Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It’s as simple as that.” – George Carlin

Our final moment of wisdom from the Carolina Review is their defense of fossil fuel mining. It’s not that bad, right? After all, “companies like Peabody Energy …  have actually restored thousands of acres of mined lands”.

We are expected to believe that a bit of landscaping can undo the demolition of a half-billion year old mountain range.

Even if mining could be cleaned up, coal would still be dirty. Restoring mine sites doesn’t do anything about the toxic ash that remains waiting to flood nearby communities. “The solution from a conservative’s stand point is to let the companies develop better technologies,” we learn, but a fossil fuel company is premised upon carbon emissions – better technologies alone aren’t going to address the deeper issues at work.

Finally, even after noting a dramatic counterexample (BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill), they argue that energy CEOs’ self interest will prevent environmental damage. “It seems like they fail to realize that even oil executives live in the same world as us, and even drink the same water we do.” This is absurd – in many respects, the people who have extraordinary wealth, the 1% of the Occupy analysis, do not live in the same world as the rest of us. No Dow Chemical exec drinks the same water as the children in Bhopal, India. Oil spills and coral reef collapse makes them grumble about the price of luxuries; it doesn’t undermine their entire food supply. When record-setting heat waves hit, they have air conditioned houses to retreat to; the homeless do not, to say nothing of the third world. Their dogs don’t die of heat stroke.

“[U]sing false statistics, making cars more unsafe, and failing to realize all programs sponsored by a company is not the solid foundation for a debate.” – Alex Thomas

So the conclusion? Carolina Review’s online articles are better than their print. Not only do they not require recycling, there’s no danger of getting in trouble if you repurpose/reuse/upcycle them!

___

*During the writing of this article, Hurricane Sandy faceplanted on the East coast, fulfilling another of Hansen’s predictions – the flooding of West Side Highway.
** The original source cited (Edmunds.com) does briefly mention these factors, but treatment is qualitative and not very satisfying.

“Airbag“

Wenzel, T., & Ross, M. (2008). Safer Vehicles for People and the Planet American Scientist, 96 (2) DOI: 10.1511/2008.70.3638

Don’t forget the boiling chips!

It’s won’t spin a stir bar, but a clothes iron will do fine as a hotplate! You can see that I’ve secured this one to the lab bench with wood and a clamp for extra stability.

Learnin me some GIMP skillz

I later realized that I could actually generalize the bulk of the proof into a lemma: Any subset of a totally bounded set is itself totally bounded.

Images used:

• Solar Prominence by NASA SDO
• A Coccolith from PlanktonNet
• Unusual Martian Spheres photographed by Opportunity
• A backlit fungus I photographed and some doodles made by my L-system code.

A constant source of frustration for me is communicating the local importance of global problems. Climate change is real, and it’s serious – but at the same time it can be intangible and diffuse. I live in the North Carolina piedmont, hours away from the beach. I can explain to my neighbors that ocean acidification is a serious problem, that the demise of coral reefs would mean the loss of food and resources for the third world. But even if they believe me, even if they agree that it’s bad news, it can still be hard to see how global warming effects them personally, as a homeowner, a farmer, a pet owner or the parent of a young child, a worker with a daily commute. How does carbon dioxide pollution impact North Carolina and beyond?

“rock me momma like the wind and the rain//rock me momma like a hurricane“

Let’s start at the beach. An obvious problem here is rising sea levels. As the ocean heats up, it expands; as ice heats up, it melts and drains into the sea (or, it calves, falls into the sea, and then melts). This causes a slow but steady rise in sea level. Sea level is predicted to rise by a meter (maybe more) over the 21st century, and 4-6 m over the next few centuries. This is bad news bears – in many coastal counties, more than 10% of the population lives within a meter of high tide. The threat to homes and businesses is worsened by storm surges, which will also be higher as the seas rise [Strauss 2012]. North Carolina has a unique relationship with sea level rise. The coastal salt marshes have recorded 2,100 years of sea level history in their smelly mucky sediments; the ocean stayed relatively stable up until about 1880, when it began to creep upwards. The average rate of sea level rise for the NC coast over the 20th century was ‘greater than any other persistent, century-scale trend’ in the marsh’s memory. During this time period, the seas rose 3.5 times faster than they did even during the Medieval Warm Period, and regional sea level rose faster than model predictions over the 20th century (though the uncertainties involved overlap.) [Kemp et al. 2011]

Sea level rise at the North Carolina coast over the past two millenia. Things are pretty stable, even during climatic episodes like the MWP – until we get to the late 19th century. Then the hockey stick gets hockey stuck. GIA is glacial isostatic adustment, an additional factor which must be considered. It deals with the fact that the North American landmass is still rebounding from the weight of Ice Age glaciers. Image from Figure 2 of Kemp et al. 2011

But what’s really special is the state legislature’s reaction to the rising tide. This June, the NC Senate infamously outlawed the use of accelerating sea level scenarios in planning urban development. The usual astroturfing seems to be at play: the money trail for this legislation leads back to the Locke Foundation; spokespeople and nonprofits proliferate to establish a consent factory. These hijinks are as cynical as they are asinine: not only is global sea level rise accelerating [Church & White 2006], but North Carolina is at the southern end of a ‘hotspot’ where the sea is rising 3-4 times as fast as the global average, [Sallenger et al. 2012] putting its coastline at exceptional risk. The legislation is also a lovely inversion on a popular skuptik trope, that of an authoritarian scientific Orthodoxy dictating Truth and squelching dissidents. In this case, it’s the state government which has declared which climatic scenarios are kosher and which are thought crimes, favoring the least alarming. The proposed law would not merely declare what course sea level rise will take in the years to come, but also prohibit state planning agencies from considering alternatives. Not content to legislate straight marriage as the only valid relationship, the Old North State is considering straight lines as the only acceptable graph.

“You need to move indoors right now.”

- Meteorologist Dr. Forbes, on Philadelphian extreme weather.

It’s Friday night, 29 June, and forecasts of a sweltering weekend have already started to come true. I am sifting through hardware at work when the power goes out. It takes a moment to register: I’m plunged into inky darkness and I wonder if I can navigate through the bicycle frames, boxes of bolts, detritus, without falling on my face. The air compressor has shut off; the only sound is the wind-blown debris clattering on the metal roof and the bleat of my laptop, now on battery power. With a wireless USB stick, I still have an internet connection, and I pull up a radar map.

Oh wow.

I run outside. The moon is fullish, weird, clouds zipping past it and ringed with haze. There’s lightning in the distance, but I doubt there will be rain, and the wind! It’s no wonder that the power is gone. The nearby stand of pine trees is arching under the gusts. I wonder if I’m safe: If a tree blows over, the warehouse will probably withstand the impact, right? But the doppler map shows a blobby red and green line advancing and the national weather service is issuing alerts like they’re going out of style. Would I be able to see a funnel cloud coming? What does a green sky look like when there is no light? A few drops of rain fall but they evaporate almost instantly and wouldn’t have coated the ground had they lasted. The wind strengthens and the trees bend further. I hold up my arm to protect my eyes from the blowing dust; the gravel of the parking lot is bigger than quarters, but it’s nonetheless skittering around under the force of the gusts…

An instance of derecho storm damage. In a warming world, trampoline jumps on you! Photo via Twitter – click for linky.

I was fortunate enough to only catch the weak, southernmost tail of a devestating storm called a ‘derecho’, which ripped across the mideastern US with hurricane-force winds, killing 22 and leaving several million without electricity (and thus air conditioning) in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. A week later the mercury was still boiling over and half a million people were still in the dark. At least 82 people would die from the heat, including two children in Chatanooga, one 3 and the other 5. The windstorm and the searing heat didn’t just coincide; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes that conditions which lead to heat waves also lead to derecho formation: “Some of the most intense summer derechos … occur on the fringes of major heat waves. Two notorious examples include the Mid-July 1995 derechos that affected New York and Canada, and the more recent Ohio Valley-Mid Atlantic derecho of June 2012. The relationship is more than statistical. It turns out that the meteorological conditions favorable for large-scale heat waves often also are conducive to derechos“.  My fear of funnel clouds wasn’t unfounded, either: derechos are associated with tornado formation. [NOAA]

What exactly does this wild weather mean? After all, records do get broken occaisonally, even in a world with a stationary climate. But then again, broken records are only part of the story; records-setting events would be distributed more or less equally through the record with an inverse relationship to record length (derp) in a stationary climate, while in reality these events are clustered towards the end of the record. Recent research has investigated the significance of this observation, finding the probability of such an event to be quite low in a stationary climate, less than 0.1%. [ Zorita, Stocker, &  von Storch 2008 ] It’s also true that the temperatures of successive months are correllated, meaning that the probability of each breaking records are not independent events. We should think carefully about the significance of strings of record-breaking events. But many semi-reasonable probability estimates indicates that the current hot period would be very unusual without climate change.* I’ve always agreed that we should be careful in attributing individual weather events to anthropogenic global warming; that it was usually more meaningful to attribute long-term trends to climate change rather than unique events. “If a baseball player takes steroids, she will hit more home runs, but no individual home run can easily be connected to steroid use,” the reasoning goes. It’s good to be careful, but… I just don’t know anymore. We’re doing a large-scale geophysical experiment; its hard to believe that accellerating CO2 forcing up by more than an order of magnitude [Joos & Spahni 2008] without seeing spectacular effects, and meanwhile spectacular events are occurring. At what point does the null hypothesis shift from “observed unusual event is caused by climate change”, rather than “observed unusual event is part of the natural variability”? At the same time, shouldn’t our understanding of causation permit an event to be caused by climate change AND to be a part of natural variability?

Extreme heat and drought throughout the US. Images by NOAA – see below for interactive maps and data visualization.

Sea water expands when you heat it, and roads do too. On Derecho Friday, in Raleigh, NC, the temperature hit 105, breaking the 1945 record by 4 degrees. Swelling concrete caused Interstate 440 to buckle, requiring the road be shut down and Friday’s rush hour traffic diverted. Infrastructure melted down across the country. Roads kept buckling; in Wisconsin, an unexpected speedbump caught an SUV driver unaware, sending the car flying and its passengers to the hospital. A week later, it was 98F at Reagan Airport in Washington D.C., so hot that the tarmac began to melt on the runways. An airplane sunk into the hot mess and got stuck; it took engine thrust and a dedicated tow truck to free the plane. The next day it hit 105. In Illinois, the Braidwood nuclear power plant had to seek special permission to keep running: the ponds of water it used as coolant had hit 102; the maximum the plant was rated for was 100. This is the second time this has happened: in 2000, the maximum allowable intake temperature was bumped up from 98. In Chicago, schools closed, pavement buckled, and a train went off its rails. “Authorities believe the steel rails may have expanded, contributing to the crash” Two people died. It wasn’t the only such incident.

A spokesman for the Braidwood nuclear power plant remarked: “I’m not a climatologist. But clearly the calculations when the plant was first operated in 1986 are not what is sufficient today, not all the time.” This underscores the importance of the speed of climate change, something I have emphasized when it comes to ecology, but is now starting to show up in our infrastructure. Motorways and tramlines are designed to function within a certain set of ambient conditions. When the environment changes faster than the expected lifetime of our infrastructure, things break. The same research article which highlighted the abrupt acceleration of greenhouse forcing began: “The rate of change of climate codetermines the global warming impacts on natural and socioeconomic systems and their capabilities to adapt.” [Joos & Spahni 2008] It’s not just the corals we have to worry about – its also the roads, the rails, and the reactors, and any other piece of civil engineering premised upon a stable climate.

Specious and I sit in a parking deck near Duke hospital, watching the storm. Lightning is crackling and arcing in the distance. Trees are bowing under the oncoming wind, but there’s little debris blowing around – anything that could blow off was scattered by the derecho the night before. Rain patters for a few minutes, but it’s light, and the hot pavement evaporates it all.

“What we’re seeing now is the future. … And we better prepare for it. … This is just the beginning.”

-Meteorologist Jeff Masters

I grew up in the Appalachian mountains, on a farm beside the New River. Until the early 2000′s, there was a stand of pine trees on the hill behind the house, the remains of the timber industry from a century before. If you looked closely, you could still see the grid they were planted on. Then one day I noticed that the trees were leaking. There were bore holes appearing in the bark, sap oozing out and crusting. We had pine bark beetles. We had to preemptively cut the trees down to prevent the sort of fire hazards that have been spilling through conifer forrests across the country. My dad would operate the chainsaw and I would work the comealong, a winch that would put tension on the tree and direct its fall towards where the operator had been standing: as soon as the trunk began crackling, I took off down hill, hopping over felled trees to get out of the way. We thought we’d sell them for the wood but we weren’t even able to recover the cost of logging. Can I really connect our beetle infestation to climate change? I don’t know – there’s research suggesting that bark beetles’ range will expand into ecologically unprepared regions, but this applies to the western forests where we now see wildfires [Logan & Powell 2001]. I’m unfamiliar with the situation in the Southeastern land of the pines, yet I can’t help but wonder…

Aside from quantitative record-breaking, there’s qualitative weirdness. Statistically, something weird is bound to be happening at some point on the earth’s surface. In a world with so many observers and increasingly interconnected telecommunications, is ‘global weirding’ a real phenomenon, or an artefact of reporting? Focussing on the noteworthy outliers might lead one to confirmation bias. Focusing on the continental US ignores 98% of the Earth’s surface, while expanding the area of interest gives more opportunity for the outliers to crop up. And then there’s the question of attribution. I’ve always adhered to the idea that individual events can’t be traced back to global warming, only statistical trends. I don’t know if I believe that any more. Once weather events become so unusual, outliers among outliers, shouldn’t our default assumption be that they are the product of a perturbation in progress, rather than background processes? If Moscow broiling and Tennessee drowning isn’t sufficient, what will it take? Will we still demand elaborate attribution studies when devesating tornado outbreaks strike once a decade? Twice a decade? Five times?

Locals can’t remember anything like the hailstorm that reset the counter to zero on these gardens. But that”s okay, because CO2 is plant food, right? Image from Mathomhouse Farm – click to see more pictures of the aftermath.

During the winter of 2009-2010, an enormous ice storm snapped trees and knocked out power all across Boone. In March 2011, a freak storm obliterated plant life on the Todd farm: “We had 1/2 hour of hail, some of it pea size, most was marble size, but some up to an inch in diameter; all the fruit trees, grapes and blueberries are stripped; the strawberries, onions and garlic flattened; the seedling in my driveway are just little stalks; and my goat barn flooded for the first time in 26 years: 12-14 inches of mud, manure and wet straw.” Hail on this scale is unheard of in decades of local memory. A year later, ‘apocalyptic’ hail was falling on Texas, forming drifts feet deep in places, and Todd was getting uncomfortably crispy as the heat wave continued and no rain fell. Yet Todd was still somehow outside of the massive drought that was settling on the country. Spring came early, but a longer growing season isn’t everything; prolonged dryness and heat have hit corn crops with exceptional ferocity. More than half the country is officially in a drought, and phrases like ‘natural disaster’ are starting to fly around. Even where the lakes and ponds aren’t drying out, the water is heating up and losing its ability to hold oxygen. Sports fish have bobbed to the surface by the thousands, suffocated.

A hive beetle infestation. Yuck. via Wikimedia Commons; click for sauce.

I don’t know if the beesuit is trapping moisture close to my face or if it’s really that humid, but burning sweat is trickling into my eyes and I can’t wipe them with my facemask on. My mom has cracked open a bee hive and the bees are crawling around, nonchalant for having their house being actively dismantled. Mom reaches down and picks out a small black dot from among the crawling orange fuzzballs. It’s a hive beetle. Unchecked, they’ll wreck utter havoc. Pictures of their infestations bring on an organic nausea I haven’t felt since I left the Rickenbacker playing System Shock II. The mountains didn’t used to see much of them, she tells me – but now as the weather warms, their distribution range is spreading uphill, much like the range of the bark beetles. Warming is problematic for bees in other ways as well: many don’t leave the hive when it’s exceptionally hot, while others may lose their food sources to shifting geography or altered seasonal timing. There are bees which can withstand high temperatures; some even survive in the Arizona Desert. But to do so they need water, and they are thus confined to scattered oases. The oases are so spread out that bees can’t really migrate from one to another as their environment dries; they’re trapped. The bees which are preadapted to a warmer world, whose genes are perhaps key to maintaining apiculture in a warming world, are uniquely threatened by global warming. [Le Conte & Navajas 2008]

“Welcome to the rest of our lives.”

- Journalist Eugene Robinson

It’s night but it hasn’t cooled; it’s too dark to see clearly but we’re digging the grave anyway. It’s 8 July and the air is soggy. So is my shirt. We’ve found a nice spot by the railroad tracks, next to a creek and not far from where I watched the trees swaying in the derecho. A train passes as Specious and I dig. We joke about it derailing and spilling into the valley where we work. Our payload is in the trunk of his car. It’s Wolf, Wikipedia celebrity and Durham personality. The white german shepherd is wrapped in a blanket, still warm. I am still absorbing the details as I scoop up silt and rocks: Specious and Wolf were visiting a church when they got stranded in Raleigh, as the temperature hit 105, breaking the 1977 record by two degrees and exceeding typical temperatures by fifteen. His phone battery died and no one would help him recharge, give him a ride, or let Wolf in their air conditioned business. On the way home, despite attempts to keep him cool and hydrated, Wolf collapsed from heat exhaustion; because they can only dissipate heat by panting, dogs are especially susceptible to hot, humid conditions. He died shortly afterwards. There were other factors involved in his death, certainly: the lack of compassion and charity amongst professing Christians, for example, or the perverse institution of ‘property rights’ which protects the locks on empty air conditioned skyscrapers while the vulnerable sweat outside. These are the contours along which we can adapt socially, but without major technical and economic reorganization, the hazards we face remain, and will only worsen with time.

Wolf, former canine. Pix by Specious demonstrate that it happened.

I pause to wipe my face. There’s supposed to be cold air blowing in from the north over the next few days; when it hits the humidity we’ve built up, we should expect some impressive downpours. Will the creek flood? Will it reach the cairn we’re piling on the grave? I don’t know. I pile on a few more rocks, just in case.

@_@

~_~

@_@

Derecho Facts from NOAA

Interactive Maps and Data Visualization from NOAA

John A. Church, & Neil J. White (2006). A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise Geophysical Research Letters, 33 DOI: 10.1029/2005GL024826

Fortunat Joos, & Renato Spahni (2008). Rates of change in natural and anthropogenic radiative forcing over the past 20,000 years PNAS, 105 (5) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707386105

Andrew C. Kemp, Benjamin P. Horton, Jeffrey P. Donnelly, Michael E. Mann, Martin Vermeer, & Stefan Rahmstorff (2011). Climate related sea-level variations over the past two millennia PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1015619108

Le Conte Y, & Navajas M (2008). Climate change: impact on honey bee populations and diseases. Revue scientifique et technique (International Office of Epizootics), 27 (2) PMID: 18819674

Jesse A. Logan, & James A. Powell (2001). Ghost Forests, Global Warming & the Mountain Pine Beetle AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGIST , 47 (3), 160-172

Asbury H. Sallenger Jr, Kara S. Doran, & Peter A. Howd (2012). Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1597

Benjamin H Strauss, Remik Ziemlinski, Jeremy L Weiss, & Jonathan T Overpeck (2012). Tidally adjusted estimates of topographic vulnerability to sea level rise and flooding for the

contiguous United States Environ. Res. Lett. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/7/1/014033

E. Zorita, T. F. Stocker, & H. von Storch1 (2008). How unusual is the recent series of warm years? Geophysical Research Letters, 35 DOI: 10.1029/2008GL036228