Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   One must keep in mind that if our planet Earth had no means of losing heat from the Sun, but only absorbing it, like a perfect black body, the Earth would eventually, perhaps over millions of years or longer, become as hot as the Sun. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

Explorer I

It is a bit tiresome to see the horrible news coming out about the Gulf oil spill, only to be accentuated by the incessant emphasis on whether or not this event will be Obama’s Katrina or the defining moment of his Presidency. We hear this a lot, particularly on stations like CNN (I never go to Fox, but I assume they have already pinned the entire Gulf oil spill on Obama, since he toils daily as the Antichrist, or if not, then certainly he is working as one of his primary agents). Now, I don’t remember CNN ever suggesting that Katrina would be the defining moment of GW’s presidency, do you? It seems to me that, at best, that was an after thought. These charges against Obama are absurd of course unless they’re repeated 10,000 times in the news media, then, by the definitions given to us through modernity, the assertion automatically gets placed in the “truth file.” Let’s put this issue in a very fresh and simple way: we don’t have a government agency that drills for oil as we might if oil was a nationalized industry–which it is in some countries. Because of this, we are at the mercy of the international oil companies themselves–it’s part of our free market economy, and,  just as credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages brought down our economy, so too does the U.S. government give sway to the oil giants to do what they want in exploring for the black gold of our economy.  The government merely hands out permits to drill within U.S. territorial lands and waters and apparently has done a very sloppy if not corrupt job, giving the oil companies what they want, whenever they wanted it. Oil companies are currently allowed to write their own environmental impact studies, usually copied from a prior one, which is how seals and walruses got into the Gulf environmental studies application from BP, despite the fact there are no seals or walruses in the Gulf. This level of incompetence on the part of our government is clearly the result of the hollowing out of Federal functions and regulatory oversight over the years by Republicans from Reagan to GW Bush, with a few Democrat participants, acting like Republicans, thrown in for good measure: it is part of the “kill the beast” program of Republican cowboys.  GW Bush and Cheney (remember Cheney’s his famous meeting with oil and energy executives, where the energy future of the United States was laid out, but never made public. That was the official inauguration of “drill baby drill,” plus launching the idea to replace Middle East despots, such as Saddam Hussein, with regimes favorable to our ever-expanding demand for oil. That’s why it’s very unlikely that we will ever get out of Iraq, unless of course the Chinese manage to get all the oil contracts).

With the competency of the Federal government under daily challenge over the Gulf oil spill, I couldn’t help but think back to a day and a time when government agencies worked very effectively and how we all admired the skill and dedication of its workers, including technicians, engineers, scientists and even a few administrators. Take for example how this oil spill is being handled, with BP having virtually no fall-back technique once the most unlikely methods failed and now compare that to how we formed and executed our space program and successfully brought back the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, when it was announced: “Houston, we have a problem.”   NASA, the government agency that developed our space program (the comparative equivalent of having a nationalized oil system),  and sent men to the moon in 1969, was originally formed as a direct result of “Sputnik.” The year that Sputnik was launched by the Russians in 1957, the Army and Navy had separate missile development programs, each trying to develop their own space-orbiting vehicles (this was the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58). NASA was put together in 1958, through the National Aeronautics and Space Act in order to circumvent what was viewed as a failure by our military to match the ingenious Russian success (Sputnik I was followed a month later by Sputnik II). Never mind that when the Russians launched Sputnik I, which lacked an instrumentation recorder and could not record any scientific information (though it had scientific instrumentation aboard) and never mind too, that a few months after Sputnik, Americans launched Explorer I into space (January 1958, which did have recording instrumentation and discovered the first  Van Allen Radiation belt) and never mind as well that once Explorer I was launched, Americans never lost their lead in the science of space exploration, only in the public relations war that ensnared our space exploration policies and put scientific research on hold, in favor of the PR victory of putting a man on the moon before the Russians did. It was nevertheless  an admirable technological achievement, but in the process it led to the overly costly commitment of using manned space exploration, rather than robotic control which would emphasize science and minimize costs. But we all cheered at seeing an American flag put on the moon and undoubtedly, many Americans got drunk that night.

Apollo 13 was the third lunar mission, launched on April 11, 1970. During the flight to the moon, an electrical fault caused an explosion and loss of electrical power to the service module. The crew was successful in shutting down the command module and using the lunar module as a lifeboat to return safely to earth. This was achieved by acts of serial and parallel competence on the part of the well-trained astronauts and the ingenious group of engineers and scientists centered in Houston. A hit movie was made of this remarkable success story and Americans marveled at how well its new government agency worked and appreciated the competency of those who ran it. I was in the military (Navy) during the early development of the space program and got to see some of the first-hand, relevant issues related to the early days of NASA’s growth. In fact, my own electrophysiological setup in the Navy Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola Florida, that I embellished while doing research in the Navy, benefited indirectly from the space program which set super new standards for making electrical connections and wiring harnesses more reliable. The standards for everything from transistor heat tolerances and resistance to the vibration for wire and panel connections, were dramatically improved and almost everything had a backup. Special tools were designed to apply proper pressure when making electrical connections and unique panels were made to support quick changes in electrical connectivity. Astronauts trained in unique, environmentally constrained surrounds, including underwater space simulations. When one of those implementations failed, as it did on Apollo 13, sufficient ingenuity, and the reliably of the remaining circuits, brought the astronauts back to Earth with a safe landing. We don’t have anything comparable to NASA involved in oversight responsibility for deep sea oil drilling. We have placed our environment on the back burner, while oil exploration  consumes and dictates our policies, irrespective of the risks we are taking with the our fragile ocean ecosystems. No one knows the impact this will have on the ecosystem of the Gulf, but we can see already the economic devastation this is causing the tourism and the fishing industries in the region. Remember that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was going to be a target for oil drilling under GW Bush, until environmentalists successfully defeated the measure, all to the screaming outrage of Republicans like Tom Delay and President GW Bush.

The admiration we all felt about the performance of NASA after the first few Apollo trips to the moon, and the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew, did not last all that long. Major objections about the size of the NASA’s budget in the face of other, pressing national needs led to budgetary reductions and forced NASA to cancel the remaining Apollo missions to the moon. After Apollo, doubts about the future of NASA, the size of their budget and the nature of their mission began to erode and confuse the agency. Nevertheless, the unmanned flights made by Voyager  explored planets and gave us scientifically valuable information about space and our planetary surrounds. In contrast, manned space exploration was carried out with the Space Shuttle program and NASA experienced their own retrospective “Gulf oil disaster” when, in January 1986,  the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated within seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause of this accident reflected the refusal of NASA managers to listen to their field engineers who warned them that critical O-rings were not designed to tolerate the low temperatures encountered on the January launch date. In retrospect, the Challenger disaster represents a reversal of how NASA was put together. During the buildup of NASA, it was the engineers who made the critical decisions, but for the Challenger disaster, engineering input was disregarded by management. Another disaster occurred in February 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia“ disintegrated on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts on board. In this case, damage to the shuttle had been encountered during the launch, when a small piece of insulation tore loose from the shuttle and damaged the thermal protection system necessary to insure against excessive heat build-up during re-entry. If you want to read further about our space program, a book I recommend is “Vodoo Science: the Road From Foolishness to Fraud” by Robert L. Park

Without doubt, the greatest scientific achievement of NASA was when the Space Shuttle launched the Hubble telescope in 1990. Unfortunately the main mirror used for focusing was improperly ground and was not fixed until another Shuttle repaired the problem in 1993. Once properly running, the Hubble telescope provided many of the most remarkable photographs and scientific data ever achieved in space. Since then, the Hubble has been repaired by astronauts several times, the last one taking place in 2009. The Hubble is expected to function until 2014, at which time it is scheduled for replacement. Stunning images of space, taken by the Hubble telescope, can be viewed at a variety of sites, including that of NASA.

The meteoric rise and slow decline of NASA’s public image was punctuated by many significant achievements, including the recent repair of the Hubble telescope, which is now giving better images of space than we ever had before. But the problems that NASA has experienced began from its inception, when the political choice was made by President Kennedy in  choosing manned flight over unmanned space exploration. Inserting manned space exploration into the Cold War, as we did in response to Sputnik, put science on the back burner (as we do so often), and allowed political decisions to dominate NASA’s early mission objectives. We gained almost nothing of any scientific value by putting a man on the moon, though NASA did generate significant improvements in the technology of heat-tolerance, ceramics and we got Teflon out of the deal.  But in doing so, we distorted and confused the mission future of NASA, whose major scientific achievement was the launching and repair of the Hubble telescope. Nevertheless, if you contrast the successful rescue of the crew of Apollo 13 and compare that achievement with the crude strategies that BP is applying to the Gulf oil spill, one sees that executives are in charge of decision-making in the Gulf and they are already jockeying to reduce company liability and limit the public exposure of seeing oil impregnated birds and turtles. No, our government is not in charge of fixing this leak. We gave that option away from the get-go when we turned loose our free market economy and, in the Gulf oil spill, we are seeing just one example of the rewards for allowing this kind of unchecked freedom to generate huge profits, while doing nothing for improving our renewable energy future. The other night, I heard on the PBS Jim Lehrer report, a venture capitalist forewarn the future of America’s energy strategy. At a time when everyone agrees that we must develop sources and technology of renewable energy, as if we are in an emergency to save our planet and reduce our oil dependency, America has only four members of the top 30 companies in the business of renewable energy! That’s what the Gulf oil spill represents to me–the free market economy of oil exploration done at the expense of letting the rest of the world generate the new jobs that need to be created for renewable energy. Will we pay the Chinese to build solar panels (already they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and have hired American engineers and scientists to assist them in making better panels), or will be build them ourselves and will we continue to be the innovators of science related to energy production and planetary safety? Today, the future does not look bright for American emergence into world leadership for alternative energy.

RFM

With the new financial reform bill close to agreement, it has become clear that Obama intends to un-Reaganize the American economy and reshape how the government spends its money. In place of the GI bill at the end of WW II, which gave us a new vibrant middle class, Obama believes that increasing access to education, improving our public school system and putting more money into research and technology, can achieve the same objectives by reshaping government spending priorities.   David Leonhardt, a New York Times financial writer, has an excellent article in the Times today that briefly covers the major historical trends of the New Deal, the GI Bill, Civil Rights and Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson followed by the Reagan years, which really lasted from the time he was elected President in 1980 until 2009 when Obama took over. You could actually include the Jimmy Carter presidency in many ways, as a component of the Reagan era, since he began the march towards deregulation when he began the process with the airline industry, and by not recognizing the strength of the Democratic Party resting with workers and unions, both he and Clinton fractionated the very party that got them elected.
In retrospect, the last 16 months of the Obama Presidency have provided a new vision, one that has been partially obscured by the financial crisis and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, looking around the corner, if Obama can get elected again and continue with his policies of reshaping the way Federal expenditures get distributed, his visionary zeal might just change America to a country we can, once again, feel good about or at least feel better about our future as a livable country, one for which we don’t have to apologize.   This year’s election will surely be the most fascinating in many many years. The Teabaggers have taken some primary elections and unseated standard Republicans, like Bennett in Utah. If Democrats insert truly liberal and progressive candidates to oppose them (a big if), we may see, for the first time in our life time, political contests that will have the most dramatic impact on congressional composition and philosophy, because candidates will be promoting truly opposite views that can impact government in significant ways. Perhaps this will be the election year, when the nation decides whether they want to continue the cultural wars or whether such engagements are beneath a serious country with a set of serious problems.
During Obama’s first year as President, I was disappointed in his centrist, cautionary policies, including his cabinet selections. But, since the Scott Brown election, I see a different Obama, one who is trying to reverse Reaganism, but needs to be elected a second time before he can tackle the really big issues, like reducing the military budget and more wisely investing in education to reduce its cost. Remember, that until Ronald Reagan was governor of California, tuition at the University of California system was free and we didn’t concern ourselves about whether creationism should be taught in science classes (as governor, Reagan first proposed that as a test balloon to see if it resonated with the country). We could return to that long lost previous iteration of ourselves as a functional country, if we return to morphing our prior selves, when we had  a country committed  to education, science and technology as the driving engine for better jobs and a better economy. Then, in my opinion, the cultural wars of today will rapidly disappear and we could have a real culture again.

RFM

Peak Oil Production and Imports in U.S.

When Obama announced the release of new sites along the U.S. coastline that will be opened for oil exploration, it seemed like another slap against his own supporters, those environmentalists who are opposed to any new drilling. Obama’s point was that establishing additional sources of domestic oil will further reduce our dependence on foreign oil, a problem now recognized within the military as Middle East oil and our policies in the region continue to place a bright red bulls-eye on the homeland soil of America. The environmentalists believe that we should accelerate the development of alternative, renewable energy resources and that we have been too timid and reluctant to invest in these innovative energy alternatives, precisely because the giant oil companies control our energy policies.  While it is true that our high energy demands are still met largely by oil, gas and coal-burning power plants, Obama’s decision on new oil exploration had less to do with the Middle East and a lot more to do with China.

Author Michael Klare, writing in TomDispatch (whose most recent book is “Rising Powers Shrinking Planet“)  has pointed out that during the last two years of the recession, America’s oil demand dropped by 9%, from 20.7 million barrels per day in 2007 to 18.8 million in 2009. In contrast, China’s oil consumption has gown in this same period, from 7.6 to 8.5 million barrels per day. And while projections for oil demand in the U.S. continue to be flat during the rest of 2010 and well into 2011, China’s will continue to grow during the Great Recession. The advantage that China has over the U.S. in securing  new oil fields is that the government of China is willing to provide financial backing for new developments that, in the near future, will make China one of the giant competitors to Western oil interests. Of course you could argue, as I believe we should, that our extensive, worldwide  military deployment is rationalized in part to protect Western oil supplies, and if you added those costs to the price we pay for oil, it wouldn’t seem like such a cheap form of  energy. But, as opposed to our oil companies which are subsidized in many ways by our government,  Chinese oil companies are state-owned and in tough times, that’s probably an advantage, as it serves and controls a national energy imperative and can thus look much further down the road than an American oil company that thinks in terms of five years or less.  As the accompanying graph shows, our domestic production for oil reached the “peak oil” condition in the early 1970s and most accounts dismiss the possibility that we could ever be self-sufficient in oil again. So what solution do we really have for solving the oil shortages that may lie in our future? Well, we have to import more, right?

Two developments are of relevance for any attempts we have planned for expanding our future oil imports, though they hardly summarize the entire picture of the competition we are facing for oil with Chinese oil expansionism: whereas you might have expected our military intervention in Iraq to give us an edge for developing Iraq’s huge oil reserves, in October 2009, the Chinese National Petroleum Company (CNPC) led a consortium, including BP, to develop the Rumaila oil field in Iraq, keeping in mind that Iraq has perhaps the third largest oil reserves on the planet. If that developmental arrangement goes well, China could become the dominant player for access to the lions share of Iraq’s oil reserves. You might ask what went wrong with the neocons invasion plans, since oil was supposed to be such a big part of the motivation for going to war?

The second development that has taken place has been the new emerging relationship between Saudi Arabia and China. Until 9/11, the interdependence between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. has always been that of a  comfortable love affair, in which the Saudis were the major supplier of U.S. Middle East oil. But 9/11 changed that, since we learned that most of the terrorists who attacked the U.S. were from Saudi Arabia and we have been critical of the manner in which they fund radical Islamic schools or Madrassahs, fed by the primary Islamic religion of the country–Wahhabism. For the Saudis, a shift in customer preferences towards China has become a comfortable two-way street, acceptable to both parties. Saudi Arabia recently announced that it sold more oil to China last year than to the United States, as if to announce the end of the long period of oil romance. “We believe this is a long-term transition,” said Khalid A. al-Falih, president and chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant. “Demographic and economic trends are making it clear — the writing is on the wall. China is the growth market for petroleum” (From Micahel Klare’s article in TomDispatch).

China has been acquiring foreign energy assets in Angola, Iran, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. It is not just oil assets, but also metal mining operations for iron, copper and other resources essential for expansion of manufacturing.  So far, the collective Western Oil companies have more oil resources than those of the Chinese. But China has deep pockets and they have clearly decided to strike out for increased oil access at a time when the demands from the West are in a state of abeyance. China’s big stimulus package helped the country bounce back from the Great Recession and they are now aggressively seeking to insure an oil rich future for their expansion of manufacturing and national wealth.

Once our own recession is in the rear view mirror, perhaps after several years, and we wake up to take another look at the world around us, we will see that China has become the new epicenter of increased oil demand and the great rising customer for oil expansionism well into the future. That is one reason why Obama announced his intentions to expand domestic oil production in the United States, even though it is primarily for political purposes rather than a transition in oil policies.  Although the magnitude of the oil that might result from expansion through the new oil leases is unknown, at best, projections are that we might gain 5 to 10 years of additional oil at our current level of consumption. So, Obama’s commitment to energy independence and the rising influence of China in gaining access to oil resources which are in competition with the needs of the United States, places us on a collision course with China for one of the most critical resources we need to make our economy work. The second reason for Obama’s willingness to open more sites for oil exploration has to do with cooperation he is hoping to get from Republican Senators for his new energy policy, one that will include a cap and trade arrangement to begin the long slow retreat from the size of our current carbon footprint. Somehow, Obama needs to find a policy solution such that the country will see the trivial nature of the tea baggers, whose ideology is currently an obstacle for serious policy momentum on global climate change and resource conservation. However, oil conservation in the future will surely be spelled D-U-E  T-O   C-H-I-N-A! And, maybe that’s the kind of threatening stimulus that will spring us into action, just as long as our choice to resolve the conflict is not a military one. But, as the saying goes, if you have a set of tools, you are probably going to use them for any problem that seems soluble by the toolbox in your hand. The eight years of the Bush administration accomplished one major change in the perception of America among other countries: for the oil-rich, oil suppliers of the world, they view China as having eclipsed the U.S. for oil futures, and it’s better to deal with someone climbing up the ladder than someone going down.
RFM

Vision rules! We are overwhelmingly visual animals, with a visual brain that developed so much power, we eventually learned how to read and through that medium, we began to change the world we live in. Except for hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes and the coming global climate change and mass species extinction, we learned to rule the world and turn the tables on the remaining species that had previously hoped to dine on us. Vision controls our brain, even though it tells lies about the visible world around us, through mechanisms such color-constancy, Mach Bands for enhancing edges, contrast gain, chromatic adaption and movement distortion to name just a few deceptive tactics of our visual apparatus. The brain is a plastic organ, waiting to change and develop according to the experiences we present to it. The “lies” are actually generated by the retina’s commitment to improve our edge detection, recognizes boundaries and colors and detect the movement and project the estimated arrival times of moving objects. From stationary retinal inputs, the cortex begins to build larger regions of visual field receptivity. From small circular receptive fields, larger regions of light sensitivity are constructed that are made of lines of different orientation covering a larger retinal region and these respond preferentially to movement in one direction, as well as prefer information from one eye over the other in an organized set of repeated columns. All of the processing that takes place within the visual cortex, with multiple parallel streams of Lego block construction, still represents early coding for some of our most important visually related events.
Brain imaging studies have revealed that a “letterbox” region lies, on the left side of the brain, near the occipito-temporal border that is associated with the identification of letters of the alphabet and words we have learned. It’s estimated that the human word capacity is somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 words accomplished when we are adults, through the repetitive, daily act of reading and challenging our brain with new words and their meaning. Written language has fundamentally changed the world and contributed substantially to the growth in intellect and the recognition that reading and writing are fundamental to progress. In the hundred years between the 20th and the 21st century, the percentage of people who are literate has increased dramatically and will continue to grow, given the essential entree it provides into advanced cultures.
Outside of the visual cortex per se, in the medial temporal inferior  lobes, close to the hippocampus that plays a big role in laying down memories that are eventually stored in the cerebral cortex, memories of the declarative type, available to our verbal recall, researchers have determined the encoding properties of single brain cells which turn out to display surprisingly specialized and unique properties. In the less than 1% of epileptics that do not respond to the litany of antileptic medications, removing the localized offending tissue is the only way to reduce or eliminate seizure activity. But since the legendary patient H.M., neurosurgeons carefully explore an epileptic focus with recording electrodes to make sure they don’t remove essential structures committed to the patient’s memory. At the cellular level, no two brains are wired alike, so one has to be careful and record from the cells near the lesion and avoid removing brain tissue that has stored or can store part of the human engram. These studies, which often require hours with a patient’s brain exposed and recording electrodes inserted into brain structures to explore single cell properties near the epileptogenic site, have revealed surprising properties of human neurons that contain memory information about people. One such cell recently described (Quiroga et al., Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain, Nature, 435,1102-1107,2005) in a patient was the “Jennifer Aniston Cell.” This cell responded to images of Jennifer Aniston very distinctly; it did not require her face in any particular position or special clothing. An image of Jennifer Aniston in any position or posture fired the cell vigorously, whereas other similar images of famous people did not.  Interestingly, when the image of Jennifer Aniston was coupled with Brad Pitt, the cell was silent. Not only did the cell respond to an image of Jennifer Aniston, but it responded as well to the auditory or written form of her name. Was this then the long lost grandmother cell we had been searching for during the last 50 years? If you destroyed that single cell, would the patient lose all memory of Jennifer Aniston? Naturally, it was unethical to do something like that, but the authors did feel that their results, with included 993 units, with about 14% of cells committed to human identities (Halle Berry was also popular, as was Bill Clinton, the Beatles and cartoons from The Simpsons and Michael Jordan); to qualify as a human identity cell the cellular response to the picture had to equal to the mean plus five standard deviations of the baseline, with a least two spikes in the post-stimulus time interval.  Repetition is the means we have for forming strong, long-term memories. So perhaps all of us have Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry and Bill Clinton cells. Since the study was done in 2005, the experimenters did not have a chance to look for Obama cells, but by now they are probably there, perhaps in all of us, maybe even more strongly integrated into the brains of tea baggers. The authors argue that their findings favor the interpretation that the cells from which they recorded are in fact, the missing grandmother cells that were postulated to exist, but have never really been found until now.  The  obvious question that comes up is whether there is more than one representation of Jennifer Aniston? And if one Jennifer Aniston cell is knocked out, will another one quickly takes its place through the methods of laying down a new long-term memory from the background neural engram already active in the brain? One of the most riveting of all issues related to brain function involves the question about the grandmother cell, or in this case the Jennifer Aniston cell. The fact that such a cell exists, when the theory to which I ascribed for many years held that Jennifer Aniston was represented by an overlapping population of cells, so that her identity was determined by a network, not a single, cell has been seemingly shattered by this report. Thus we must now acknowledge the likely fact that we store images of people we know or have seen enough times and encode the representation of these individuals into the discharge properties of a single cell. That cell is so sophisticated that it responds to Jennifer Aniston independent of position, expression, hair style, clothing or facial expression. But, do we have one or many Jennifer Aniston cells in our brain and can those cells be recalled for updating to new folks, once we lose interest in Jennifer Aniston? Of greater relevance is the question about who or what is it that reads the Jennifer Aniston cell to report it to our consciousness? Is the Jennifer Aniston cell one cell removed from our conscious identity? Is consciousness the readout of our cortex, with specialized Jennifer Aniston cells making the task more simplified? Stay tuned! There’s a notable human issue residing in these discoveries. Recordings from awake humans during surgical exploration for epilepsy-related surgery is about the only way we can get at this question and the results of Quiroga et al., have come down pretty hard in favor of us having brains with grandmother cells! But what if we find the same cells in the Chimpanzee? Will that give us pause? Do Chimps care about Jennifer Aniston if they see her on TV enough times? Do we also need language, both written and verbal to even form a Jennifer Aniston cell? All these questions remain in the future, but we can no longer deny the grandmother cells of our present and future brain.

RFM

But in the Newt Gingrich revolution of 1994, and the Republican domination of Congress, the OTA went unfunded and closed its doors. This allowed the Gingrich Republicans to begin their assault on science, unfettered by OTA and led to such anomalies as author Michael Crichton who was elevated as the Republican’s expert on global climate change (since Crichton’s death, he has been replaced by George Will).  The Republicans did away with OTA precisely because they wanted to invent their own creationist science, distort global climate change, bring back DDT and allow the manipulation of scientific facts to support their emerging right wing political, born-again fundamentalist views. Without OTA, it was possible for a legislator to denounce the existence of the atom, without significant repercussion.

Until the demise of OTA, the organization was the envy of the world for readable technological reports.  Many other countries dispatched their government representatives to visit the OTA and emulate its efficient and thorough analysis with a new duplicate agency in their own government. When OTA was shut down,  many other countries were shocked that such a beacon of clarity would be extinguished at a time when access to reliable technical analysis was increasingly  critical for almost every government decision. The Republicans wanted to label OTA biased, but in reality the bias they were talking about was the bias OTA consistently committed to objective analysis. In fact,  OTA did not make legislative suggestions, but merely tried to point out the implications of going down one road or another on a specific legislative or technological  issue. The OTA oversight board (Technology Assessment Board; TAB) was populated by an even number of Republicans and Democrats, with board majority based on the majority party at the time. That board structure helped keep the OTA from being politicized and biased towards a narrow legislative view.

I have read many OTA reports over the years and have always found them to be excellent in detail, easy to read and non-biased in their approach to complex issues. The Federation of American Scientists has archived OTA reports at their website where you can read them by browsing through their archives, and use their handy  search engine.
The following is a note that I wrote at their website in trying to encourage the return of the OTA:

“The OTA proved to be a vital function for Congress and it served as a model for the world to emulate. As I recall, the OTA publications were very often one the few government publications that all got distributed rather than lying around in a large archived pile. The reports that came out of OTA were remarkable for their clarity and utility; they achieved their objective of being politically neutral and unbiased in their content. The trouble OTA had was the new Republican right didn’t want objective data, because their emergent constituency wanted to create their own science. So the Newt Gingrich Republicans did away with an office that was the envy of the world. Many countries who had tried to emulate OTA were shocked to see that the United States had gutted such a useful model. Bringing OTA back would go a long way to restoring our capacity to create objective reports at a time when Congress badly needs information that is reliable and accurate. It was tragic when OTA was cutoff, it would be wonderful to see it return.”

To give you some idea about the value of the OTA reports, when 9/11 hit, immediately followed by the anthrax letters, members of Congress (and many others) found that the most informative information on anthrax was contained in the 1993 OTA reports on “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Technology of WMD.“  Although dated well before 9/11, these reports provided a definitive level of background information on how easy it would be to fashion weapons grade anthrax and how powerful it could be as a terrorist weapon.

The Congress and the American Public badly need a return of the OTA, to restore a sense of objectivity about science and technology and some good practical advice that can help not only our legislators who must deal with these complex issues, but also the general public, as these reports are now more accessible than ever before, through the web. If you read a single OTA report, you will ask yourself  “how in God’s name did we let this organization go?” If you really want to know why, send Newt Gingrich a letter!
RFM