Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

1,000 year drought in southwestern U.S.

From the Earth Institute, this drought in the Southwest U.S. is likely to be worse than the one that destroyed an entire advanced civilization in the same spot.

During the second half of the 21st century, the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains will face persistent drought worse than anything seen in times ancient or modern, with the drying conditions “driven primarily” by human-induced global warming, a new study predicts.

The research says the drying would surpass in severity any of the decades-long “megadroughts” that occurred much earlier during the past 1,000 years—one of which has been tied by some researchers to the decline of the Anasazi or Ancient Pueblo Peoples in the Colorado Plateau in the late 13th century. Many studies have already predicted that the Southwest could dry due to global warming, but this is the first to say that such drying could exceed the worst conditions of the distant past. The impacts today would be devastating, given the region’s much larger population and use of resources…

“The results … are extremely unfavorable for the continuation of agricultural and water resource management as they are currently practiced in the Great Plains and southwestern United States,” said David Stahle, professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas and director of the Tree-Ring Laboratory there.

Discarding the theories about alien abduction, the Anasazi most likely just walked away from their urban lifestyles, which the surrounding ecosystem could no longer support, spread out, and resumed earlier, lower-impact ways of life. Although there was probably significant suffering and loss of life, that entire group of people did not “vanish” – their descendants can still be found in the same general region. Drawing parallels to the modern world, the southwest U.S. is obviously part of an interconnected national and global system, and people, water, materials, and food can be moved around a lot easier than in the 13th century. On the other hand, the world is crowded and there isn’t much space left to spread out in. We can’t have billions of people just walking out of their cities, into the surrounding woods, and resuming a hunting and gathering lifestyle.

fiddling while Sao Paulo burns

Sao Paulo officials knew the city was running out of water, and did nothing, says Jeffry Sachs.

One year ago, I was in Brazil to launch the Brazilian chapter of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), an initiative of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The main message I heard that day was that São Paulo was suffering from a mega-drought, but that state and local politicians were keeping it quiet. This is a reality around the world: too many political leaders are ignoring a growing environmental crisis, imperiling their own countries and others.

In the case of Brazil, state and local officials had other things on their mind in 2014: hosting the World Cup soccer tournament in June and July and winning elections later in the year. So they relied on a time-tested political tactic: hide the bad news behind a “feel-good” message.

February 2015 in Review

This blog got 173 hits in February! Pretty cool, considering I really just meant it as a place to collect my own scattered thoughts and refer back to them later. If 173 out of the 6 billion people out there like it, I am flattered. Okay, I understand there may have been a few repeat visitors. Also, judging from the most popular posts, there is one thing I mention occasionally that people really like: robots!

Negative trends and predictions:

  • Fresh Air had an interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction. The idea here is that what humans are doing to other species is equivalent in scope to events that have killed off most life on Earth in the past.
  • The drought in the western U.S. continues to grind on.
  • There are some depressing new books out there about all the bad things that could happen to the world, from nuclear terrorism to pandemics. Also a “financial black hole”, a “major breakdown of the Internet”, “the underpopulation bomb”, the “death of death”, and more!
  • Government fragmentation explains at least part of suburban sprawl and urban decline in U.S. states, with Pennsylvania among the worst.

Positive trends and predictions:

  • Libraries are starting to go high-tech using warehouse robot technology.
  • I had a rambling post on technologies to watch: carbon fiber, the internet of things, self-driving cars and trucks, biotechnology for everything from carbon sequestration to cancer treatment to agriculture, and of course more automation, robots, and artificial intelligence. And yes, Clark W. Griswold’s cereal varnish is a real thing!
  • U.S. utility solar capacity is slowly ramping up.
  • A new study suggests a sudden, catastrophic climate tipping point may not be too likely.
  • Robots can independently develop new drugs.
  • According to Google, self-driving taxis are only 2-5 years away.
  • Complex ecosystems can be designed.
  • Compost toilets may save the world…if we can get over the ick factor and the sawdust problem.
  • There are lots of cheap new options for the aspiring high-tech handymen (and women and children) among us. Even better news, we may have reached the point where if you build a robot with your kid in the basement, and he then tells other kids about it, he might not get beat up on the playground.
  • New York City has some good examples of green stormwater infrastructure integrated in sidewalk and street design.

One thing that strikes me is that we keep hearing about biotechnology, but we haven’t seen big, obvious impacts in most of our daily lives yet. I suspect biotechnology is like computers and robots in the 70s, 80s, and 90s – slow but steady progress was being made in the background, the pressure was building, and then the wave suddenly broke onto the commercial and public consciousness. I suspect biotechnology is the next big wave that is going to break.

environmental regulations and profitability

If I understand this somewhat convoluted abstract from Ecological Economics correctly, empirical evidence shows that environmental regulation can actually increase corporate profitability by incentivizing innovation. The data also show that investors believe the exact opposite.

The Porter hypothesis asserts that properly designed environmental regulation motivates firms to innovate, which ultimately improves profitability. In this study, we test empirically the Porter hypothesis and the competing hypothesis that regulation undermines profitability (“costly regulation hypothesis”). In particular, we estimate the effect of clean water regulation, as reflected in the stringency of firm-specific effluent limits for two regulated pollutants, on the profitability of chemical manufacturing firms. As our primary contribution, we contrast the effect of clean water regulation on actual profitability outcomes and its effects on investors’ expectations of profitability. Our results for actual profitability are consistent with the Porter hypothesis, while our results for expected profitability are consistent with the costly regulation hypothesis. Thus, our empirical results demonstrate that investors do not appear to value the positive effect of tighter clean water regulation on actual profitability.

Death Star Discovered

These two views of Ceres were acquired by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) as the dwarf planet rotated. The images have been magnified from their original size. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Apparently the Death Star was not destroyed after all.

Cruising through the asteroid belt, NASA Dawn spacecraft is approaching dwarf planet Ceres, and some puzzling features are coming into focus.

“We expected to be surprised by Ceres,” says Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at UCLA. “We did not expect to be this puzzled.”

The camera on Dawn can now see Ceres more clearly than any previous image taken of the dwarf planet, revealing craters and mysterious bright spots.

Mysterious bright spots…I find it odd that this article doesn’t even speculate as to what they might be. Just an optical illusion of some sort? A mineral, radioactive or otherwise? Life, intelligent or otherwise? Aliens preparing to invade? Okay, probably not the latter, because if we got to them before they got to us, we are probably the more advanced species of space monkeys.

Incidentally, on the Death Star issue, the article says this thing has a diameter of 605 miles (974 km). According to the definitive source Wookiepedia, the second Death Star had a diameter of 900 km. So it’s about the right size, given that you don’t know how people come up with these things to begin with. For reference, the Moon has a diameter of about 2,100 miles (3,500 km).

new grocery delivery services

This article is about some new subscription-based grocery delivery services. This could make it even easier to live in car-free walkable communities for those who want to do that. You can shop for fresh food at a market when you want to do that, but have a steady stream of basic staples delivered on a reliable basis. Combine this with smart appliances – meaning your refrigerator and cabinets know what is in them – and you should never have to run out for an item in the middle of the night again. The only possible concern I have is whether this will push us even more towards processed, packaged food.

Sao Paulo Water Crisis

The New York Times has an article about an impending absolute water shortage in Sao Paulo, a metropolitan area of 20 million people.

As southeast Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving São Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cutoffs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week.

We know mega-cities in the poorest countries struggle to provide water and other basic services, particularly to the poorest people, and climate change is going to make that worse. But this might be the first example of drought and climate change moving up the income scale, affecting relatively affluent people in a relatively affluent (though certainly unequally distributed) city and country. You can say it is due to poor planning or an absence of planning, but that suggests long-term climate change planning is not something any city or country can afford to ignore, no matter how secure its water situation might seem now.

human head transplants

Human head transplants may be possible this century, neuroscientist says

Sometimes a headline says it all. The article says this technology is not far off, although it would be expensive.

The separation of head and body would have to occur on two humans simultaneously, Canavero writes… The procedure, Canavero writes, would have to take place within an hour… He adds that the surgery would take a team of 100 surgeons roughly 36 hours to complete, at an estimated cost of £8.5-million ($128-million).[*]

“The problem” of this surgery, Canavero told ABCNews.com, “is not really technical but is completely ethical.”

It’s hard to imagine any situation where this would be ethical. To have a donor, someone would have to die in a way that leaves their otherwise healthy body completely intact, except for the head. Grafting heads onto executed prisoners might solve the ethical problem for some, but not for me. All I can think of is if we could grow human bodies with no brain at all, or all but the most primitive part of the nervous system that keeps basic organs functioning. Even that sounds ethically dubious. But you figure, if there is a black market for individual organs now, some dying rich person somewhere will try this eventually whether it is ethical or not. I wonder, if we somehow solved all non-brain-related diseases like heart disease and cancer, and we perfected the technology of cloning brainless bodies in some ethical way, how long could we live? How long could the brain actually last, considering that we hear constantly that we start losing brain function as early as our 30s?

I can’t help thinking of the awful 1991 movie Body Parts, in which this sort of thing doesn’t turn out well, and that was just an arm!

* yes if the operation cost 8.5 million British pounds, it should be 12.8 million US dollars above, not 128 million. Either that, or they meant 85 million pounds. It doesn’t really change the point of the article.

designing fragmented ecosystems

This article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution is about purposely controlling spatial fragmentation in ecosystems in order to maximize ecosystem services. If I understand correctly, their hypothesis seems to be that a system that is fragmented in a carefully designed way could provide more ecosystem services than an unfragmented system.

Landscape structure and fragmentation have important effects on ecosystem services, with a common assumption being that fragmentation reduces service provision. This is based on fragmentation’s expected effects on ecosystem service supply, but ignores how fragmentation influences the flow of services to people. Here we develop a new conceptual framework that explicitly considers the links between landscape fragmentation, the supply of services, and the flow of services to people. We argue that fragmentation’s effects on ecosystem service flow can be positive or negative, and use our framework to construct testable hypotheses about the effects of fragmentation on final ecosystem service provision. Empirical efforts to apply and test this framework are critical to improving landscape management for multiple ecosystem services.

This idea is important to the idea that we could hypothetically design a civilization that is not only less bad than the one we have now, but one that is actually good for the planet and people.

birds, bees, bugs, plants

On the green infrastructure front, there are lots of resources out there on what plants support what kinds of wildlife.

“Bugs” have a PR problem as a group, but they have their charismatic members – bees, butterflies, and dragonflies to name a few. If you support these, you will probably support others by accident. There is plenty of information out there, for example:

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation has a ton of free publications on plants, pollinators, and design; including bee-friendly plant lists for all regions of the United States and several other countries.

The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center has a ton of free native plant information, including recommended mixes to attract various types of wildlife in all U.S. states and Canadian provinces.

Finally, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) has free fact sheets on about a thousand plants.

A lot of good can be done for wildlife and humanity on small scraps of land, and even more good could be done if we gave serious thought to how all those scraps of land fit together and connect to larger parks and preserves. So let’s get out and plant something this spring, even if it’s small. Or if you have a scrap of land but you don’t feel like planting anything, find a frustrated armchair gardener who doesn’t have their own scrap and let them plant something on yours.