Greatest promise?

We got a circular around work last week asking for individual scientists to contact Channel 4 news to respond to a particular climate change question. Anyway, here's what I (ignorantly) sent them ...

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"Which idea, policy or technology do you think holds the greatest promise or could deliver the greatest benefit for addressing climate change?"

In the immediate future (~10 years), I believe that the greatest promise is offered by technologies related to carbon capture and storage (CCS). In principle, these will allow technological societies to retrofit existing infrastructure while continuing to use fossil fuel resources without exacerbating either climate change or ocean acidification. In an ideal world, these problems would be tackled by energy conservation and by expansion of renewable and nuclear fission energy provision, but these options are either limited in extent or are (irrationally) unpopular.

In the further future (~30 years), I believe that the greatest promise is offered by technologies related to nuclear fusion. There are a number of options being investigated on this front (of which the best-known is ITER under construction in France), but I expect that one or more will be successful and will allow us to meet longer-term energy requirements without the production of CO2. Assuming there are no further innovations in transportation technology, I would also expect nuclear fusion to provide a means for generating carbon-free hydrogen for use in land and (possibly) air travel.

Should climate change prove more rapid and deleterious than we currently believe it will be, I believe that some geoengineering technology may be helpful in temporarily offsetting climate change to allow us time to adjust our activities. Specifically, I believe that the deployment of stratospheric aerosol technology may allow us to decrease excessive global temperatures. However, since this particular technology does nothing to address the root cause of climate change, it categorically should not be viewed as anything other than a temporary "fix". Furthermore, as indicated by the recent Royal Society report, all geoengineering technologies have significant negative aspects (e.g. deleterious side-effects, prohibitive cost), and none should be viewed as preferable options.

My answers above have focused on purely technological angles to climate change, to which I would add a couple of policy / presentational points. Firstly, given that climate change measures are costly (at least in the short term), it should be recognised that there are strong financial incentives to avoid pursuing them, and policy relying on the better natures of individuals and governments is unhelpful. Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon must be the route forwards. Secondly, and this is more a presentational point, it cannot be stressed enough that, on climate justice grounds, emissions targets should always be expressed in per capita terms and should acknowledge not just present-day emissions but those historical emissions of technological societies that have gotten them to their present state. All too often public discussion is needlessly clouded by focusing on emissions on a country-by-country basis, which ignores (all too conveniently it usually transpires) relative size. Further, technological societies are overwhelming responsible for our current situation, but this fact is often overlooked, creating great injustice when the emissions of less developed societies are scrutinised.

Finally, a point that is only rarely heard in current environmental discussions is that climate change is not the only ecological cliff-edge to which modern societies are heading. The growth of human societies (both in terms of numbers of individuals and resource consumption) is creating ever greater strain on the ecosystem services on which these same societies unknowingly rely. Coupled to this is the related loss of biodiversity, which has both practical and moral angles to it. Solving climate change, which seems a forlorn hope at the best of times, does very little for other such invisible hurdles.

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Needless to say, as with other such requests for input, I've heard diddly-squat back. If I hear anything about this news item, I'll post it up.

Upgrade?

This ...


Has become this ...


I wonder what the difference will be?

To be honest, I was pretty happy with Vista. It got a bum rap in my view, but since it's clearly on the way out, I thought I'd get with the programme for once, and keep up with the new OS.

So far it seems to be fine. It installed with no problems and is running well (bar some teething problems with HL2DM). Not quite as resource un-hungry as I'd hoped, but there's maybe scope for tailoring that.

I'll have to just see how it works out. I can always go back ... I think.

Blurred

A bit of a break with traditional reading patterns this time: a biography - indeed, an autobiography. For reasons I can't entirely pin down, I've never been interested in reading anything beyond fiction or popular treatments of science, etc. Although I've enjoyed the occasional biographical asides in the latter, and the veiled hint that the former are partially biography, I've not felt the need to read formal biography. Unsurprisingly then, I'm only coming to it now because of a birthday present from C. Knowing of my great love for the UK band Blur, she bought me the autobiography of its bassist, Alex James.

That said, I suspect it's not the most typical of introductions to the literary genre for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's written (rather than ghostwritten) by someone with an atypical job relative to most public figures who come to my attention, namely one in popular music. Secondly, although the subject is an artist, the book contains practically nothing about his art. This came as something of a surprise, and I suspect some readers might feel a bit cheated to find the book's pages bereft of anything about their favourite music beyond vague, passing remarks.

This latter point certainly undercut my expectations for this book. I'd expected, probably hoped, to find out interesting points about particular songs and albums, but the book stays well away from this sort of dissection. To the extent that it's at times difficult to work out when the author is talking about since he doesn't even use his band's discography for temporal stratigraphy.

Instead, the book is a rambling overview of James' childhood and his life during the Blur years, that finishes up with him settling down with a wife (and, inexplicably, a pig farm). He skips the music to focus instead on the everyday, and increasingly less-everyday, aspects of his rock star life. Large quantities of drugs are consumed, wall-to-wall sexual adventures are passingly alluded to, but the book does find time to fill in some unexpected details.

These include a walk-on part for the artist Damien Hirst who, contrary to my expectations, comes off as a talented and entertaining friend to James. Also, James waxes lyrical about his infatuation with astronomy, which ultimately led to the (ultimately) unsuccessful Beagle 2 mission to Mars. And, along the way, James becomes a qualified pilot, and gets quite poetic about his flying around Europe and Africa.

So, though it has a near-total lack of any backstory or discussion of Blur's hits, the book does make for an interesting read. But it's safe to say that James is not the most natural or fluid of writers. His prose frequently reads like conversation, with a repetitive patter that works in speech but less in print. And he has something of a bad habit of being overenthusiastic about everything. The reader is breathlessly introduced to some arbitrary subject (flying, touring, cheese shops) that is then described as James' favourite and the best-ever. Although it would have distorted his style, I did often think that James' editor could have stepped in and earned their keep more (or perhaps they did!).

One uneasy aspect to the book is James' treatment of his long-term girlfriend, Justine. She never really features much in the book, despite playing an ostensibly significant part for a long stretch (although this could be said about most of James' friends and family). Furthermore, although constantly apologetic towards her in his writing, James really didn't treat her very well during his ride with Blur. As success kicks in, tours quickly become an opportunity for (multiple) infidelity, and though James appears regretful about this, he still strung her along for a considerable period of time. And while it's difficult to be sure given the book's rather fluid chronology, it reads like she left him because of his lack of commitment, only for him to commit to his current wife in pretty short order.

Anyway, overall it's an interesting peek into contemporary rock star life, one that does contain a few nice surprises, but I can't say that it's won me over to biography as a form. It's doubtless far from the best introduction, but I'm still not particularly convinced that I want to take such a specific interest in the detail of the lives of others. I'm going to stick to novels.

Wordle

Now this is pretty cool ...


It's a kind-of cloud generated from the content of Strange News using an online Java package called Wordle. I particularly like that it displays "Arse" prominently - didn't notice that I'd used it that much. Although I've fed it this blog, it can be fed any large block of text. Here's what happens when you give it the entire text of Moby-Dick (for APM, of course) ...


Marvellous. Given that it identifies major themes in the text it's fed (cf. "Whale" above), perhaps it's a quick way to generate a short-hand summary of a technical paper or long newspaper article? :-)

Return of the Wanderer

For someone as poorly observant as me, it's difficult to know for sure, but I'm pretty sure that this year's successful seagull (last blogged here and photographed here) is currently hopping around its birthplace on the roof opposite (I'm in work wrapping up a review for the NSF). The gull, which still has juvenile plumage, arrived with an adult, possibly its parent. I don't know how gull families work, but they're a veritable model of the nuclear family compared to the dysfunctional ducks. Anyway, wearing my anthropomorphic hat, I suspect that animals as big and seemingly clever as gulls are probably smart enough and interested enough to recognise and return to places that once were important to them. So, who knows? It could be them.

The naturalness of age

We caught an excellent exhibition at the Civic Centre yesterday. The BP Portrait Award 2009 is on tour, and is spending a month and a half in Southampton.

While the subjects range widely, taking in everyone from children to heavily tattooed Portsmouth supporters, painting the elderly was quite a popular choice. Some of the pictures were really striking, and the material accompanying such painting usually made vague references to the naturalness of the ageing process or the cycle of life or some such.

Seeing such commentary repeatedly made me reflect on, not so much how natural ageing is, but how natural our acceptance of it is. In part, this sometimes strikes me as being a reflexive dismissal of efforts to ward off ageing and a dislike of the denial of age by those of a more materialist (in the social sense) disposition. All well and good, but as a biologist I can't help but think that ageing, far from being something that we should relax into, is something that we really should resist.

Rather than seeing it as a necessary part of life, senescence should instead be seen for what it is: a predictable outcome for the throwaway machines that are built to service the unconscious and uncaring needs of immortal strands of digital information. If we value ourselves, that is our minds, above the ceaselessly shuffled genes that built the machines that we both are and occupy, then we should take a far less sanguine view of our fate.

In a way, ageing truly exposes our serf-like existence as mere temporary vessels for more permanent passengers. Once they have disembarked, off to newer, cleaner vessels for the next leg to eternity, the fate of the decaying hulks left behind is irrelevant, and the concomitant blindness of natural selection is to be expected. In this view, we should be more than a little annoyed by senescence, and a whole lot more questioning of the common wisdom that, just because something is natural, it should be uncritically accepted.

The shallow pursuit of youth should be viewed suspiciously, but it is wrong to view ageing as some benign part of some abstract "cycle of life". What ageing is really telling us, if we're prepared to listen, is "you're fired".

More drinking in Eastleigh

Further to last month's evening in Eastleigh, last night saw another, albeit more refined, quaffing-session in the town. This time it was a wine-tasting evening - at least that's the formal excuse. Last time's winner, Dan, was both defending the Golden Arse and co-hosting the evening with Rachel. Unfortunately, as has occurred time and time again, he was unable to retain the Arse, which went to repeat-winner June ...


While June won with an impressive score of 15/18, I trickled in way down the table with a paltry 7/18 points. And, even then, some of those I only got because I played the numbers game and guessed the same wine multiple times. Though I have won the Arse in the distant past (and on my first tasting evening to boot!), my performance in the last few evenings has left a lot to be desired. I think I'll be taking tips from June next time though (and/or copying off of her sheet).

Carbon cooperation

Another very interesting seminar today. This one, by David Beerling from Sheffield, dealt with the geological cycle of carbon (weathering; CaCO₃ burial; vulcanism) and the role that terrestrial vegetation plays on top of it.

Essentially, for a couple of decades it's been known that there's a neat feedback loop between CO₂ and climate, which is mediated through rock weathering on land. Vegetation on land is known to be associated with enhanced weathering, and the evolution of land plants (first in getting onto the land; later the advent of the angiosperms) is believed to be responsible for two significant decreases in atmospheric CO₂ in the Phanerozoic.

This was the background to the talk, but it went off in quite a different direction. Beerling then introduced the arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM) and the ectomycorrhiza (EM), two groups of fungi with strong mutual symbioses with land plants. While I knew that these played an important role in nutrient acquisition for some plants, I'd no idea quite how big a role this was. Apparently around 12% of photosynthate produced by a plant can be channelled to its symbiont.

The seminar then delved into some experimental work in which the strength of this relationship was examined (largely through ¹⁴C-labelling of plant photosynthate). This was augmented by some very elegant and clever growth experiments in which the potting medium was differentially composed of soils of different mineral value. These trials showed not only the strong link between the two species, but also how tenacious fungi are at locating and "mining" minerals for their plant partners. Some of the photographs showing the fungal growth were really impressive on this point.

Finally, the talk returned to the geological cycle of carbon, and armed with this new quantitative knowledge about the plant-fungus relationship, suggested instead that the underlying factor in the downward "jumps" in past atmospheric CO₂ was the evolution of the two groups of fungi. Fossil evidence points (as much as it can given large uncertainties) to the appearance of each group around the time that CO₂ drops.

Anyway, it was all quite a nice challenge to the "interesting-but-not-significant" view I'd formed of AM and EM during my biology degree. And intriguing to see cooperation, which I also typically view as "interesting-but-not-significant", put pole position in such key biogeochemical processes.

Evil corporates

Judging from this weekend's films, anti-corporatism is still in vogue, and still makes for enjoyable cinema (which may say more about me than Hollywood).

First up was State of Play, a remake of an excellent TV series we saw a couple of years ago. Somewhat surprisingly, the film largely mirrors the original, albeit with a few nips and tucks. The core story is retained, though some of the plotting is rather fast, and we don't get to know some of the characters quite so well. This does tend to move things along a little too quickly for the viewer to try to guess ahead, surely one of the pleasures of the genre, but it was still an enjoyable film. The story's central messages about the corrupting influence of the bottom line and the creeping corporatisation of military services are retained, and still timely, although as with the TV series, get overshadowed as the narrative twists its way to the finish line.

Much more interesting, and viscerally enjoyable, was District 9, an ostensibly science fiction film about alien visitors to Earth who have overstayed their welcome. Told as a mixture of conventional cinematic narrative and through interspersed documentary footage and interviews, the film follows Wikus, an administrator tasked by Multinational United (MNU) to evict the aliens from their Johannesburg (and eponymous) slum. However, while serving eviction notices to the brutalised aliens, Wikus is accidentally exposed to an alien technology and begins to undergo a genetic transformation that gradually turns him into an alien. This transformation is of great interest to MNU, who have long been searching for a means to successfully operate alien weaponry, and Wikus quickly becomes an expendable resource for the corporation's biotechnology department. Escaping from MNU, Wikus becomes a hunted fugative, and while desperate to return to normal life and his loving wife, he gradually becomes aware of the true plight of the aliens. Ultimately, he selflessly helps one alien and his son to escape to, and activate, the mothership that has hovered unresponsively over the city for 20 years.

While the film is solidly enjoyable as a science fiction romp, particularly when Wikus begins to use alien technology to fight back against MNU, its real themes run very close to the surface. In this respect, setting the film in post-Apartheid South Africa is something of a master-stroke, one that harmonises perfectly with the anti-racist subtext (practically the sur-text). The film did strike me as channelling the spirits of Robocop and Alien Nation, but by marrying the best themes from both (together with the rather enjoyable violence of the former) more than stands on its own two feet. And, as ever, it's hard not to like a film which ends hopefully.

Not so autotrophic now

We had an interesting inaugural seminar in yesterday's Friday Seminar Series. MVZ was in the barrel, as was I, since I was on introducing duty through my new membership of the Series' organising committee. He gave a quite revelatory (and impressively brief) overview of some work he's done on less-than-autotrophic behaviour of phytoplankton. After starting with an introduction that took in the evolutionary history of prokaryotes and the endosymbiosis that led them to eukaryotes, we jumped to a conundrum in the nutrient and carbon budgets in the modern North Atlantic. Basically, eukaryotic algae are doing a fair fraction of the carbon fixation, but are only responsible for a small fraction of phosphate uptake. Given that there should be parity between these, something is up. Bactivory, apparently, is what that "something" turns out to be. By carefully labelling prokaryotic cells by providing them with an isotope-labelled amino acid, MVZ was able to show that, within hours, this label wound up in some interesting places. Even card-carrying autotrophs like the coccolithophorids have a sideline in getting phosphate in a less-than-first-principles manner. The idea is that, in highly nutrient stressed environments like the oligotrophic gyres, bacteria provide an excellent source of phosphate, and other useful molecules to boot. That said, my favourite phytoplankton, the diatoms, are still hardcore-autotrophs, with no whiff of bactivory on their part (at least in the open ocean), but this probably stems from their adaptation to high nutrient environments (plus their frustules would probably impede dining). In the environments that MVZ studied, it turns out that eukaryotic phytoplankton are as important at grazing bacteria as bona fide protistan microzooplankton. Quite a turn up for the books [*], although pleasing to see that, despite billions of years of autotrophic life, the eukaryotes are hanging on to their phagotrophic machinery ... just in case.

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[*] Actually, as MVZ pointed out, people have known for a long time (probably for almost as long as they've known about microplankton) that eukaryotic phytoplankton engage in grazing activity. What's new here is that the scale of this has been established. I certainly wouldn't have expected algae to be such enthusiastic players in the grazing business. It's definitely something for future generations of ecosystem models ...