Archives for 2015

Okay, so the good news is that we still have seasons because we still orbit the sun and we’re not all going to die tonight.

Now the bad news.

Joe Fletcher reports that there are oil & tar sand pipelines under the Great Lakes that are aging rapidly and could cause the largest man-made disaster this side of Trump.

Beneath the Great Lakes, there is a ticking time bomb that threatens one-fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. That time bomb comes in the form of a pipeline owned by the Canadian company Enbridge.

The pipeline known as “Line 5” is the subject of a new documentary produced by Motherboard/Vice. The documentary uncovers what led to the creation of what could turn out to be one of the world’s worst man-made environmental disasters.

Motherboard reports:

Motherboard correspondent Spencer Chumbley went to Michigan to investigate the situation, and the research is alarming. If just one of the pipelines ruptured, it would result in a spill of 1.5 million gallons of oil—and that’s if Enbridge, the company that owns them, is able to fix the pipeline immediately. UMich research scientist Dave Schwab says, “I can’t imagine another place in the Great Lakes where it’d be more devastating to have an oil spill.”

Enbridge, the company that runs the pipelines, insists they are safe. But Enbridge does not have a particularly inspiring record, with more than 800 spills between 1999 and 2010, totalling 6.8 million gallons of spilled oil. In 2010, its pipeline 6B ruptured in the Kalamazoo River. The nation’s focus was pulled by Deepwater Horizon at the time, but the Kalamazoo River spill became the nation’s biggest inland oil spill.

Just in case you’re curious, the odds of Enbridge being able to get to the rupture and fix it immediately, as surmised above, are pretty near zero. Also, here’s a fun fact, the pipeline was originally predicted to be safe for a maximum of fifty years ….. back in 1953. You can do the arithmetic.

Keep in mind that there aren’t 24/7 repair crews hovering in the Great Lakes just in case something happens. Enbridge would have to learn about the leak, find it, get equipment sent to the location and then pray like hell that the problem is no worse than a leak. Something like a cascading rupture (it starts in one place and keeps growing) could increase the damage by an order of magnitude.

Here’s the thing, if that bad boy blows the entire Midwest, that includes you Chicago, could be without drinking water for an extended period of time. The local aqua-culture, things like the fish we eat, would certainly be damaged beyond any immediate way to repair. None of that considers the effects that the toxins will have on shores and plant life.

Of course, in some parts of the U.S. God is going to kill everyone first before humans get the chance. Yeah, I’m talking to you Seattle. Kathryn Shulz, at the New Yorker, shares the happy thought that both Starbucks and Microsoft could be wiped out on the same day.

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.

Okay fine, tremors happen all the time. What’s so special about this beast? Well, in 1700 it shot a six mile wide wave that crossed five thousand miles of ocean in one day and wiped out a chunk of Japan. It also exterminated an entire Native population, say goodbye to Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people. As in all of them. The island they lived on sunk in minutes killing every man, woman and child.

So what will happen when this beast does its thing again. Possibly this year? Read on.

The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.

Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.

Certain disasters stem from many small problems conspiring to cause one very large problem. For want of a nail, the war was lost; for fifteen independently insignificant errors, the jetliner was lost. Subduction-zone earthquakes operate on the opposite principle: one enormous problem causes many other enormous problems. The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region—up to thirty thousand of them in Seattle alone, the city’s emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. So is Oregon’s critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of Portland through which flows ninety per cent of the state’s liquid fuel and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas terminals. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

Well, doesn’t that sound like fun?

Some predictions have the water reaching the Rockies but most stop the destruction at Route 5. That would kill almost half the state’s population and wipe out a third of it’s land.

Maybe not as much fun as you thought.

Keep in mind that, as Kathryn noted above, Oregon has no early warning system for earthquakes unlike Asia and the Hawaiian Islands. For all the overpriced coffee and annoying tech they may as well be living in thatch huts.

Speaking of which, according to the fun folks at NASA, sea levels around the world are rising so fast that we might want to think about moving entire populations.

Goodbye Miami.

A new NASA model is showing just how fast sea levels are rising around the world as a result of climate change, NBC News reported.

At a news conference Wednesday, NASA officials described a new computer visualization of sea level change incorporating data collected by satellites since 1992. The data reveals sea levels overall are rising faster than they were 50 years ago — more quickly than expected — and that the speed will likely increase in the future, primarily because of melting ice sheets.

“Sea level rise is one of the most visible signatures of our changing climate, and rising seas have profound impacts on our nation, our economy and all of humanity,” said Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division.

See, we don’t need Mars to lose its orbit to kill us all. We’re doing that just fine on our own.

Please keep in mind that Mr. Freilich isn’t talking about melting ice bergs or stuff like that. The theory of displacement would prevent anything from happening to us were that the case. But when the ice previously on land melts into the water then the water will rise, and that is exactly what is happening.

And if you don’t believe that just do what Trump did and load up on beachfront properties.

Before we get started here today I thought I’d take a moment to point out how important communication is. The people who create The Flash comic book were so impressed by the success of the TV series that, as an homage, they changed the character’s costume to reflect the one on the show. Simultaneously, as it turns out, the creators of the TV show were so impressed with the direction the comic book was taking that they changed the costume of their character to match the comic book. Since both are well into production that state of affairs is going to remain for a bit. I’m sure that, sooner rather than later, someone will buy someone else a beer and they’ll pick one. But, for now, that’s kind of funny.

Since we’re on the subject of communication and since books provide an oasis in a desert of ignorance and conformity, let’s talk about a book you can drink.

No, I’m not drunk.

Thomas Mukoya has the story.

Teri Dankovich, from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, who has been leading the research on what she calls “the drinkable book” said in one trial, they tested a ditch contaminated with sewage that contained millions of bacteria. “Even with highly contaminated water sources like that one, we can achieve 99.9% purity with our silver-and copper-nanoparticle paper, bringing bacteria levels comparable to those of US drinking water,” she said.

Each page is embedded with silver and copper nano-particles. The pages contain instructions in English and the local language; water is poured and filtered through the pages themselves. One page can purify up to 100 liters (about 26 gallons) of water and one book can supply one person’s drinking water needs for about four years, the researchers said.

That is also good news for drought ravaged areas (HI CALIFORNIA!) and for areas where infrastructure is a rumor (HI MISSISSIPPI!). You may think I’m kidding but I’m not. There are growing sections of the United States which, for a variety of intertwined religious and political reasons, are drifting back into the Middle Ages. In Kentucky, for example, roads and access to medical care are so scant that supplies have to be regularly airlifted in to some villages or people will die.

Ironically, the reasons cited by the residents of these blighted areas for refusing to accept access to modern conveniences are EXACTLY the same as the ones spouted by ISIS and their ilk. Well, it’s ironic to us. I’m not sure they know what the word means.

And part of that growing ignorance is a return to hex signs and herbalists. Emma Smith, over at I Fucking Love Science, takes a look at the proven risks.

Many treatments for cancer and other diseases were originally derived from naturally-occurring substances. The chemotherapy drug Taxol, created from a compound found in yew leaves, is a prime example.

Conversely, some of the most poisonous substances in the world – ricin, cyanide, arsenic, hemlock, snake venoms and mercury to name but a few – are all entirely natural.

Furthermore, alternative ‘natural’ therapies are not guaranteed to be safe. Examples include a serious risk of cyanide poisoning from laetrile, permanent scarring or disfigurement from cancer salves, and bowel damage, blood salt imbalances or even life-threatening septicaemia caused by coffee enemas.

– A N D –

Cancer is a complex disease, and without access to detailed medical records – which are confidential – it is impossible to paint a fully accurate picture of an individual’s cancer journey and whether alternative therapies played any role in their recovery.

More worryingly, there are some cases where evidence points towards a murkier interpretation of ‘truth’ and fact.

For example, Australian blogger Belle Gibson built a large media profile and business around the story of having apparently ‘healed herself’ of a brain tumour through diet and lifestyle changes, but has now admitted that she never actually had cancer at all.

People pushing alternative therapies frequently wheel out stories from ‘survivors’ who are apparently alive due to their treatments, yet without providing solid evidence to prove it is true. This raises false hope and unrealistic expectations that there is a hidden miracle cure that can be unlocked for the right price, or by eating exactly the right foods.

Steve Jobs believed cancer could be cured using the methods above. Had he simply gotten traditional treatments the odds are greatly in favor of him still being alive. Instead he’s very dead and never going to get better.

This is not to say that all natural remedies are bad. They most certainly are not. This is to say they need to be rigorously tested before being foisted on the general public. One such wonderful example is a mixture of cow puke and garlic that can cure styes and severe skin infections.

Clare Wilson, over at New Scientist, fills us in.

The project was born when Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham, UK, got talking to Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon scholar. They decided to test a recipe from an Old English medical compendium called Bald’s Leechbook, housed in the British Library.

Some of the ingredients, such as copper from the brass vessel, kill bacteria grown in a dish – but it was unknown if they would work on a real infection or how they would combine.

Sourcing authentic ingredients was a major challenge, says Harrison. They had to hope for the best with the leeks and garlic because modern crop varieties are likely to be quite different to ancient ones – even those branded as heritage. For the wine they used an organic vintage from a historic English vineyard.

As “brass vessels” would be hard to sterilise – and expensive – they used glass bottles with squares of brass sheet immersed in the mixture. Bullocks gall was easy, though, as cow’s bile salts are sold as a supplement for people who have had their gall bladders removed.

After nine days of stewing, the potion had killed all the soil bacteria introduced by the leek and garlic. “It was self-sterilising,” says Harrison. “That was the first inkling that this crazy idea just might have some use.”

A side effect was that it made the lab smell of garlic. “It was not unpleasant,” says Harrison. “It’s all edible stuff. Everyone thought we were making lunch.”

The potion was tested on scraps of skin taken from mice infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This is an antibiotic-resistant version of the bacteria that causes styes, more commonly known as the hospital superbug MRSA. The potion killed 90 per cent of the bacteria. Vancomycin, the antibiotic generally used for MRSA, killed about the same proportion when it was added to the skin scraps.

You’ll note that she mentions “sourcing the ingredients.” That’s because foods that existed 100 or 200 years ago are now almost all gone forever. As Megan Kelly reported, a variety of economic and aesthetic reasons have led to the demise of thousands of fruits and vegetables.

Some were too big or small for commercial sale so farmers stopped growing them.

Still, back in May of this year, I wrote about a tree that can grow 40 or more types of fruit at once. And it can do so with just a single sapling from a forgotten plant. There are many people who keep one form or another on their home properties (actual heirloom fruits) and scientists have been hunting them down. It’s not Frankenfood, it’s organic splicing and it’s saving many fruits you otherwise would have never been allowed to taste.

And because it’s organic – really, all you need is a sharp knife, tape, access to a variety of saplings and a lot of patience – this technique can be used to diversify the fruit supply in blighted regions. Also, as a bonus, different fruits bloom at different times so the tree produces year round. Extra bonus? One tree uses far less water than an orchard and can still feed quite a few people.

Okay, I’m boring you. You need your share of excitement or you’ll wander off to the midget porn carnival on Vimeo. Okay, I understand.

So here’s an article from Caroline Reid about a robot drone that shoots trees into the ground.

BioCarbon Engineering, the brainchild of former NASA engineer Lauren Fletcher, has proposed a solution: Industrial reforestation with robot drones. Could reforestation get any more awesome?

The drones would plant an estimated 1 billion trees a year, saving people from having to do it by hand. This would make reforestation quicker and cheaper. However, Fletcher doesn’t say that this new method of reforestation is necessarily better than planting trees by hand, just cheaper. If put into full effect, the drone method of planting trees could cut the price of traditional practices down to 15% of the original cost.

The drones won’t indiscriminately fire seeds anywhere they happen to fly over. Instead, the machines will first gather terrain data and information on the local fauna, reporting back on the region’s “restoration potential.”

When the restoration potential is approved, and the region is ready to support new seeds, a planting route is mapped for the drones to follow. The drones then fire the ground with germinated seed pellets at a rate of 10 seeds per minute.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that deforestation is so bad on our planet that we need a method to plant a billion trees a year quickly. Another problem is that old growth trees, like Oak and Redwood, take too long to grow so they are being eliminated in favor of faster growing trees like birch and pine.

Another problem facing us, as noted above, is drought. One solution – that works but creates mountains fo dry salt which pollutes the ground – is desalination. Tony Perry, from the LA Times, says those worries may be a thing of the past.

Thousands of desalination and water recycling plants have been built around the world, with some of the biggest in the Middle East, North Africa and the Caribbean. The Carlsbad plant, set to begin operation by Thanksgiving, is making its debut just as drought has become a crisis across California and the West.

For Poseidon Water, the Boston company building the plant — and for the international desalination industry — it presents an opportunity to try to disprove the criticism that dogs such projects: that they are exorbitantly expensive, hog energy and damage the environment.

“Carlsbad is going to change the way we see water in California for decades,” said Peter MacLaggan, a Poseidon Water vice president. “It’s not a silver bullet to solve all our water problems, but it’s going to be another tool in the toolbox.”

Though it might be lost on some of this summer’s convention-goers, San Diego has a long history with desalination.

The region took it as a clarion call when, in 1961, President Kennedy declared: “If we could ever, competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from saltwater that would be in the long-range interests of humanity [and] really dwarf any other scientific accomplishments.”

The federal government built a plant for the Navy on Point Loma. (It was dismantled in 1964 and taken to the Guantanamo Bay naval base when Fidel Castro threatened to cut off its water supply. It operated well into the 1980s.)

General Atomics in La Jolla did pioneering work on developing the membrane technology that cleans salt and other impurities from seawater through a process called reverse osmosis. One of the pioneers, Don Bray, spun off his own company.

It was the beginning of making San Diego County what industry veteran Doug Eisberg calls “the Silicon Valley of desalination.” Dozens of companies employ 3,000 workers to provide the delicate, complex membranes needed for the world’s plants that specialize in desalination and water reuse.

Of course if the water’s too polluted in the first place none of this matters. Which is why Renee Lewis over at Al Jazeera is so excited to tell about a new way to clean up, literally, oceans’ worth of trash.

The world’s first system designed to rid the oceans of plastic pollution will be deployed near Japan in 2016, with the aim of eventually capturing half of the plastic found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a large concentration of marine debris located between Hawaii and California.

Boyan Slat, the 20-year-old Dutch CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, an organization dedicated to cleaning the world’s oceans, designed the system dubbed The Ocean Cleanup Array.

“I’ve always been interested in technology, and I was launching rockets at 12 years old,” Slat said. “Eventually I started studying aerospace engineering, but I dropped out to try to develop this ocean clean up idea.”

He said his inspiration for the organization came after a diving holiday in Greece where he realized he was coming across more plastic bags than fish.

“I wondered, ‘Why can’t we clean this up?’” Slat said.

Plastic debris, most of it in the form of tiny beads known as microplastics, can be found on up to 88 percent of the surface of all five oceans, according to a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Because of swirling ocean currents, known as gyres, this plastic pollution has become concentrated in certain areas.

In other cases, ocean currents send plastic pollution toward certain islands or coastal areas in greater concentration than others. One such area is the Japanese island of Tsushima.

“The reason we picked that location is because the current and wave conditions are very favorable for our tests, and there really is a lot of plastic,” Slat said. “The island where we performed the test sees 30,000 cubic meters of trash wash ashore per year.”

30,000 cubic meters is over 1,000,000 cubic feet. Or, to simplify, over 333,333 feet wide (i.e., 3,333 or so football fields) and the same amount long and high.

That’s a lot of fucking trash and that’s just one island. Where does all that shit come from? Cruise ships, airliners, and you.

All is not lost. 3D printers are being modified to use natural materials like dirt and trash to create modern living facilities. I mean the kind wherein you can have electric and plumbing, not just some glorified Adobe structure. Wind farms are moving to using turbine styled systems instead of blades so they take up less space, can create more power, and don’t kill birds. Several wind collectors also can collect water from the air and save it into cisterns which people can easily access. In impoverished parts of South America these are already in use. Maglev (Magnetic Levitation) trains and vehicles are now faster, safer, and cheaper to operate than the traditional rail system we have here. That means that commerce and travel are both cheaper in areas where infrastructure has been updated.

In other words it can be done, it can be beneficial and it doesn’t require hex signs.

If you want to help take a moment to talk quietly, and without recrimination, to those who eschew progress and explain to them that the world is progressing anyway. And it is doing so for the better. All of this means that people can be healthier, live longer and more productive lives and not be a drain on others. Those are all good things.

It all starts with roads and doctors but it does have to get started soon or this country will be no better than a third world country of 20 years ago. I specify since there are now countries in Africa and Asia that are surpassing us in many ways.