Computers, Society, and Nature

Join a Virtual March! This message comes a day after the McCain-Lieberman bill was defeated, and the least-stringent (read: most-toothless) bill was the only one of the three passed. In an echo back to the Death of Environmentalism, Fred Krupp of Environmental Defence hailed the vote as a success, a “historic day on Capitol Hill”, shrugging off the McCain-Leiberman defeat like a good-natured little leage coach.

See undoit.org and Environmental Defense for more, and, at for time or effort, you can march on The Hill.

Offshore Wind: The Future Has Arrived. Are We Ready? As the Lone Ranger’s traveling companion used to say, “What do you mean ‘we’, kemosabe?”

In London, Shell has pushed forth a plan to greatly reduce the need for non-renewable energy by building an enourmous wind farm of the waterfront. For the most part, it would not even be visible from the London terrain. Yet the oppostion abounds. These projects are certainly expensive, but the market payoff is uncontested. The short-term is what keeps sinking proposal after proposal, in any number of countries.

Other problems have ‘hit the fan’. The environmental brigades have cited that turbine fans will slaughter birds by the flock-full. In London, just like in Martha’s Vineyard, they have been extremely vocal, and have some conservation-law ammunition behind them. There have been a slurry of articles restating their claims, espcially here.

Then, of course, are the property owners and beach folk in the coastal areas of Massachusetts who are appalled by the prospect of a marred vista. Such is the life of the rich and hypocritical.

However, back to Shell, one troupe of activists cycling cross-country to promot climate change awareness lanced them through and through for the most hypocracy of all. These cyclists were ofere $20,000 as an award, but at the ceremony, the representative biker girl revealed a t-shirt with a red circle-and-line through the Shell logo, rejecting an award from a company that’s giving them a cause to kick and scream and bike cross-country in the first place.

From an old NY Times article, a trend in defiance that has lost its place in the Public Eye: Mayors against George W. Bush. Make sure to click the graphic “Who Needs Kyoto”.

At the International Whaling Commission meeting in South Korea, Japan lost a crucial vote to expand its own whaling. For years, Japan has characterized its whaling, not as commercial activity, but as scientific research (“we’re not doing this to supply our markets and restaurants with whale meat but investigating whale physiology”). This year, Japan wanted to expand ‘research’ whaling as a way to “promote whale sustainability.” I don’t know whether this is the epitome of irony or merely outrageous. Apparently, most of the IWC members agreed with the latter.

A few months after the “Death of Environmentalism” was declared, one glimmer of somebody paying attention was caught: perhaps global warming is indeed causing hurricanes and tsunamis. Previously, scientists downplayed global warming as cause for surge in hurricanes, and Killer Tsunami’s ‘Global Warming’ Link Branded ‘Rubbish (note the quote marks on the so-called ‘global warming’). Some have gone so far as to chalk it up as morally reprehensible, being in “grave contravention of well-known facts”.

Now, some reversal are emerging, though they are being scrutinized and branded with all sorts of critiques.

Hurricanes will likely increase with global warming – as said by NCAR and Prof. Stewart in ENVR 200. Tsunami linkages are fairly well-argued. For more underlying causes, read some simple introductory material on chaos theory and pushing systems steadily.

Another jab back at the Death of Environmentalsim – it claimed Al Gore has lost his edge… well, he’s back, and better than ever. Al Gore ‘08!

Still, At MIT, everything is coming up roses, because they’ve deisgned ideal tsunami housing. This does not, I repeat, does not help fight the argument of environmentalism slipping into a stritly economic-engineering study trying to cut every corner, a “technical approach” that has dipped environmentalism into the workings of the regular global economy.

Apparently the US has been caught editing again with the G8 position on climate change.

Some would say that all of humanity can be encapsulated in two concepts: space (x, y, z coordinates do it all) and time (past, present, future).

The classic, Wester children’s story runs “once upon a time… and they lived happily ever after”, and a typical Torres Strait Islander runs “the man set out from [point A]… and reached [point E]”, with no ‘finally’, no ‘the end’, this narrative is about space. Perhaps, for clarity’s sake, I should say that time envelopes space, as space is subject to change over time (and for the time being, forget the vexing question of the static/flux state of a system duality). Some bold remarks about our obsession with time have been chronicled in “The Cronos complex I : an enquiry into the temporal origins of human culture and psychology“. (Is there anything Amazon.com doesn’t stock?)

The panic and anxiety that plague someone’s life can summarily be tied to time as well: smoking shortens your life, quite literally, and time travel may just be possible with some imagination.

That’s it, pack your bags and get going. Nanotechnology is the new saviour for, well, everything. Even Moore’s Law has been pieced back together, keeping computing power something to set your clock to. That is, 10GHz. Read all about it, but make sure to check out the latest Technology Review as well for a heart-warming reminder of Moore’s Law and it’s constant reliability, as per IBM’s new leaps. Also, terebyte storage may be possible for this vast computing power, as immodestly bragged about here.

For dessert? As per the atomic-scale precision involved in nanotech, here’s an article to stir up The Uncertainty Principle

For those of you interested in invasive species, the NYTimes has an excerpt of the first chapter of Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion. The book’s author, Alan Burdick, sums up the problem neatly: “The greatest threat to biological diversity is no longer just bulldozers or pesticides but, in a sense, nature itself.”

The NYTimes’s review illustrates the book’s engaging prose that epitomizes the best of science writing. However, the reviewer wonders if Burdick goes too far in trying to soften the blow of environmental disaster and ends up contradicting himself.

Burdick tries to make the case that nature is adaptable enough to handle the changes in our topsy-turvy world. When scientists figure out how to isolate the problem and interpret all the variables, it appears, for instance, that even having 500-pound feral pigs rooting through the forests of Hawaii may not do the permanent damage conservationists fear. Instead of causing local extinctions, he writes, “most successful invaders simply blend into the ecological woodwork. . . . To the local eye, biological diversity seems to have increased. Isn’t that a good thing?”

Maybe Burdick is simply trying to avoid the hazards of environmental alarmism, but surely this goes too far. It doesn’t square with the evidence he has diligently accumulated: What about the Australian tree spreading rapidly through the Everglades that ”draws in so much water through its roots that it essentially converts open marsh habitats . . . into . . . dry land”? What about the European green crab, which “single-leggedly crushed the soft-shell clam industry north of Cape Cod”? And how about, shortly after a cholera epidemic in South America in 1991, ships dumping ballast water that released the same strain of cholera bacteria into oyster beds at Mobile Bay in Alabama? The argument that many, or even most, invasive species cause no harm risks encouraging a “What, me worry?” attitude in a public already too complacent about environmental change.

In addition to worrying about complacency, this passage should cause us to question the use of increased biodiversity as a measure of environmental quality. Are more species in a habitat necessarily better? Of course not. Still, it’s easier to do counts than it is assess the more qualitative aspects of a habitat. This problem has been called the “meaning/measurement dilemma” by Warner (1967). That is, the value or meaning of the measure varies inversely with the objectivity of the measure. Both activists and policymakers attribute low meaning to objective—easily quantifiable—measures (e.g., the number of spotted owls); conversely, high-level meaning measures (for instance, biodiversity quality) are viewed as too subjective. So if we are to assess the long-term impacts of invasive species then we need good (and publicly digestible) measures of the effects.

An update to an earlier post: Editor of US government’s climate change report resigns.

Maybe it’s not something you ask yourself while you’re an undergraduate, but it’s an essential question that over time we forget to answer:

Why do you do what you do? It’s a quiet but amazing collection of photos that ask the simple question.

A sombering thought, one that might be good to take down: there are a lot of neat statistics that make environmentalists feel warm and fuzzy… such as this banner. Of course, there are countless types wonderful endeavors that somebody, somewhere is putting their all into. But all the neat statistics may blind some from the true ‘true cost’ of things. In example, it would be possible to power an overwhelming part of the US with a wind farm in North Dakota (they have lucky winds), but the power lines would dissipate too much energy. OK, so why not install superconductivity-enable power lines? Or nano-tube powerlines, both with close to zero resistance (and thus close to full transmission capacity)?

Because, these things costs something too. That is, energy, resources, capital, etc. etc. The moral of the story? Don’t get carried away, I wonder if it just might be more harm than good.

another bonafide environmental group is emerging at McGill. . . and you can be witness to its beautiful development at the new site for Gorilla Composting www.gorilla.mcgill.ca. As of 11am, GC was granted the coveted ‘independ student group’ status.

Undeniably, Climate Change is ‘in’, ‘hip’, and ‘with it’. If you’ve got an eye out for mention of greenhouse gases, the hydrogen economy, emission credit trading… you’ll start to see it everywhere. And the New York Times certainly has its finger on the pulse: nuclear waste casks are suddenly popular, squeezing more energy from the consumer-side (finally!), and an article + audio slideshow of the most commercially-inclined hydrogen car to date.

In a move that Democrats and Californians alike are no doubt grinning about, Gov. Schwarzenegger has broken ranks with the Republican majority in re: climate change. “I say the debate is over,” he says, and summarily convinced, Arnold put California leaps and bounds ahead of any other US state with its ambitious legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. A scant review of this program’s ‘teeth’ is covered in the NYTimes article.

Happily, many states are falling under the auspices of the Kyoto protocol by mechanisms of their own design – with (obviously) no support or backing from the federal government. Actions include letigation and lawsuits against power plants (most famously last summer’s suit), to bolstering renewable energy (see UCS factsheet), to good, old-fashioned muckracking against the President (see angry formal letter), to simply adopting the Kyoto protocol on some respectable level. 44 case studes are available from the Pew Center’s database.

As Pablo Picasso once said, “every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” This is important when you observe the debate over cloning. From an NY Times article: ‘”I never destroy any life during my process,” said Dr. Woo Suk Hwang, the laboratory director, his eyes flashing above his surgical mask as he gave a reporter a rare look at the controversial human-cell transfer process developed at this small lab on the sixth floor of Building No. 85 at Seoul National University.”

But he goes on to make a distinction, and stating that embryos are never formed… ‘”We have never attempted human cloning.”‘ Enough people from the opposite point of view state the opposite. If the process creates embryos, the process is cloning.

So what of Alma Matter? Embryos are being produce. . . thawed after being frozen at a rate of 20,000 degrees C, no less! Also, a baby was actually born of this embryo, as reported by McGill’s Newswire. It seems there is no forseeable end to reproductive innovation.

Existential questions from the drawing room seem to be left by the wayside. . . Can a genetic clone really fill the void left by a lost & gone pet? Or, is it nature or nuture? Now that legal barriers and technological shortcomings are subsiding, the real questions are: can cloning be profitable?

Many months ago, mention of Dolly et al would have been strictly science & technology, but the latest leap in closing is squarely a business article. The LA Times and NY Times both reported a price drop to the tune of $18,000.

You have to admire their style: “To display its work and perhaps to help demystify its science,” the laboratory at Genetic Savings and Clone is built within glass walls for the viewing pleasure of the public. The parlour talk has worn thin, and biomedical ethics has invited in ribald attitudes.

In a world where information is quickly commodified wherever it is uncovered, and genetics hold a bounty of information, perhaps it’s only a matter of time until price tags become affixed to every trait of someone’s child. . . or for the time being, someone’s pet cat.