Significant Sorcerers, But Still Apprentices: How Nature Can Dispel Our Ocean Dead Zones

In pursuit of covering significant science stories I was going to write something about the perennial problem of excess nitrogen on the land, which I shall mention briefly, but the story led me to a reminder of a deeper principle, that should encourage us to analyse as much as possible before taking actions at scale.

Some scientists have been conducting a research program for more than decade to see whether nitrogen fertiliser might be useful in the struggle against climate change by aiding carbon sequestration in forests. It's in an interesting and potential important story, but the scientists caution that the systems they are dealing with are very complex, and that they couldn't be sure that their experiment would be net positive in terms of atmospheric carbon reduction.

A wise caveat, since unintended consequences have been a rising and unfortunate fact for us and our world ever since we started trying to control our environment and food supply, which appears to be at least sixty thousand years ago. However, sometimes what we might view as a negative event in nature has a useful unintended consequence, which is something that our scientific and policy analysis should also be watching for.

One of the problems of using a lot of nitrogen to fertilise anything, be it for forests in the research mentioned above, or for crops for humans, is that much of the nitrogen won't stay on the land, but runs off into the water system. As far as I know, absolutely nobody wants this to happen, certainly not the farmers, who have to pay a lot of money for something which mostly ends up in coastal oceans or inland seas. Whereupon, it often forms algal blooms which in turn take all the oxygen at the bottom of the water and thus kill off all the other life forms that live there, which then causes all the creatures which depend on them to die off. Technically this oxygen shortage is called hypoxia (a 'low oxygen event'), but in common parlance it's a dead zone.

Worldwide, these dead zones have increased from 49 in the 1960s to 405 now. Scientific American gives one graphic example of why dead zones are bad news:

A single low-oxygen event off the coasts of New York State and New Jersey in 1976 covering a mere 385 square miles (1,000 square kilometers) of seabed ended up costing commercial and recreational fisheries in the region more than $500 million. As it stands, roughly 83,000 tons (75,000 metric tons) of fish and other ocean life are lost to the Chesapeake Bay dead zone each year—enough to feed half the commercial crab catch for a year.

Various schemes are being put forward to reduce the amount of nitrogen being applied to the land (though the forest experiment I mentioned first would ironically add to the problem), but the article continues:

[efforts at nitrogen reduction] still might not solve the dead zone problem. So much nitrogen is now reaching...coastal waters that much of it ends up buried in sediment [and] even when new nitrogen sources are removed those sediments release that nitrogen over time, perpetuating the cycle.

That inability to recover is driven not only by the nitrogen buried in the sediment but also by water layers that don't mix with one another, despite the massive flow of rivers like the Mississippi. Instead, warmer, fresher water on the surface sits on top of cooler, denser, saltier water...

So what does it take to make that mixing take place?

...it takes the energy of multiple powerful hurricanes to blend the two.

And there's the paradox and complexity. Very few humans want hurricanes, but it seems that because hurricanes exist, time and co-evolving ecosystems have found a way of using this natural force:

For example, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Louisiana coast with its powerful winds blowing faster than 130 miles (210 kilometers) per hour, the monstrous tropical storm delivered a benefit: it mixed the warm, oxygen-rich surface waters with the colder, almost oxygen-free waters beneath, dispelling the largest dead zone in the U.S. for a time. Hurricane Rita followed and finished the work, ending early the seasonal dead zone that forms each year at the mouth of the Mississippi [at the top of the Gulf of Mexico].

That dead zone—which last year stretched over roughly 8,500 square miles or 22,000 square kilometres, an area the size of New Jersey, and is predicted to grow even more extensive in 2008, thanks to the early summer floods—forms because of the rich load of nitrogen and phosphorus the Mississippi carries down from the farm fields of the U.S. Midwest.

The dead zone in question is more than twenty times bigger than the 1976 event which cost half a billion dollars. The Scientific American article was written before the busy 2008 hurricane season really got blowing, so maybe the dead zone was dispelled early again in 2008.

The main point is that despite the extraordinary advances we have made in scientific understanding we keep finding out that everything in nature is more complex than we thought - it's like an endless Russian doll. That doesn't mean we should not keep trying to understand more, far from it, but rather that we should try to remember that large natural events that we find very negative will very likely have positive features seen from a larger systems perspective and that when we start interfering with those systems at scale, we are bound to be interfering with many dynamic systems we don't understand very well.

Thus, even at this late stage, beset with ever more urgent problems - a bit like the Sorcerer's Apprentice - we need to mix caution with innovation. That is not an easy task, though in a sense, all living things in every ecosystem are doing this, albeit unconsciously. We have the advantage and disadvantage of being able to analyse and plan. What we almost certainly don't have is a master magician waiting to bail us out, as it were, so the more we can find out about how things work and work with nature rather than against it the better.

Getting To Paradise On A Low-Carbon Budget

Yesterday I went with my small son to visit the wreckage of the first model aeroplane I had flown in more than thirty years. It wasn't a pilgrimage and to be honest these days with most model planes being made out of polystyrene instead of balsa wood and tissue, unless you achieve a really first class prang, the bounce factor is quite extraordinary.

In reality, this little 40" electric-motor powered model is mostly intact, but I don't have a workshop, so I have left it with Dennis, who runs his busy hobby shop with love and vigour. He will patch the plane up (again) and then test fly it to try to determine whether the problem is battery failure or pilot failure. I suspect the latter personally, and that admission led me to discovering an excellent remedy not just for my cack-handed aeronautical efforts but something rather more significant.

I realised today that we (or maybe 'they') could create an extension of my model 'remedy' that would have an immense benefit not just for the bruised wings of my hobby plane but for the whole global climate. Quite a sweeping claim, if I say so myself.

What can this miraculous cure be? One word: simulation! The answer to my pilot woes is a simulator - I tried one out in the hobby shop and it was quite remarkably realistic, even making a good graunching noise and shattering the propeller when I inevitably ploughed into a nice grassy field upside down. I pressed the red reset button, and was magically made whole again, and shot off into the ether for another attempt at safe flight.

So just think about it for a minute. The idea of a flight simulator is to help someone learn to fly without killing themselves or anyone else. And without damaging an expensive machine. But it also uses no jet fuel or kerosene or aviation gas. No fossil fuel at all. Just a tiny amount of electricity to run the computer - which when compared to a full-size aircraft would be infinitesimal.

Imagine then if we could simulate not just a flight but a whole holiday? At first when I had the idea, several hours ago, I thought it was amusing, and would make a quick and easy blog after my long labours developing ideas about deception, deflation and trying to find the bright side of the economic crash. But there is more to this simulation idea than at first I had thought. Tourism and other discretionary flights make up about 70% of all passenger flights, and flying is one of the fastest growing contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

With the downturn threatening to become a Depression, people are going to want something to be cheerful about but both the planet and our pocketbooks are finding the burden of our continually jetting off to paradise less and less sustainable. However, business executives are reporting that some of the new video immersion systems are staggeringly realistic and are beginning to allow people to feel more genuinely as if they are in the same room as someone, even if they are on the other side of the planet.

I am not pretending that there can ever be a total substitute for 'being there', but as oil production goes into long-term decline and carbon taxes inevitably get imposed, like it or lump it, we are going to be travelling less. Many of us know this is a good thing, but like St Augustine, we'd like to put off being 'good' for just a little longer. With this little bit of technology we could welcome being good: simulated holidays could become virtual vacations with the added virtue of minimizing the damage to the environment and your wallet.

In fact, with these lightweight escapes, we could take short holidays of say two days or even two hours. Just imagine - no packing, no flight delays, and no security frisking. Unless of course you buy a masochist's virtual vacation that includes those things, perhaps along the lines of the famous Monty Python five-minute argument sessions. Anyway, in this new Alice-in-Cyberland you could go anywhere and do anything (as long as it was legal).

In the meantime, I plan to get an inexpensive model flight simulator and start learning how to stay in the air instead of digging furrows. And by the time I am ready to pilot a full-size virtual plane (as it were), the virtual vacation business should be in full swing and I can make flying myself and intrepid family to Pixel Paradise all part of the excursion. If anything goes wrong, I can just press the reset button, which, by the way, also refills your martini glass.

Is Obama The Green Wave's Last Chance To Count?

There seem to be all kinds of waves and cycles in life, everything from the watery ones that King Canute wanted to prove he couldn't control through Kondratieff economic waves to really important cycles like the rise and fall in fashionable hemlines.

Now that the wheels appear to be coming off the world economic wagon in quite a serious way, it is easier to ask whether some grand cycles and waves are coming to major inflexion points, in particular the ascendant new green business wave and the old, but undoubtedly, effective fossil-fuel wave that has been mainly rising for hundreds of years.

Economic waves, such as Kondratieff waves, are still being argued over after nearly a hundred years and they involve quite a lot of assumptions and some complex notions, which necessitate a fair amount of detailed study in order to gain some literacy in their operation.

However, I am not going to attempt a disquisition on economic cycles, a subject I am currently exquisitely poorly positioned to talk about in depth, but rather I want to pose the following simpler but possibly rather more significant questions.

Firstly, if we grant that the world economy is going through a major downward dislocation and further that green movements, both citizen and business, tend to lose steam when money is scarce or energy prices drop, does the current upswing in matters of sustainable living and renewable energy have enough momentum to keep going through what could be a prolonged contraction, or must it be helped somehow?

I admit that this is a rhetorical question, because based on the evidence, I don't think there is as yet anywhere near enough real green business momentum to ride out what may be a very difficult period. So that brings me to even more important question number two. Is there enough political momentum to carry through the kinds of changes we need?

Much of the environmentally aware and energy savvy world is waiting with baited breath to see what future US president Obama is going to do to try to revive the American - and perhaps the world - economy, while hoping that he does this in large part by unleashing a tidal wave of green-collar jobs and energy saving, green energy and clean tech initiatives.

If Obama does this, then we might not have to run the experiment of seeing whether fledgling new green business strategies can make it through very hard economic times - an experiment that Thomas Friedman would surely say will come to a sticky end (again). The question will then be how best to make a new green wave part of the answer given the current state of tight money, imperfect public knowledge, and notoriously fickle voter and political will.

Friedman's point is that now is the moment for bringing in fuel taxes and widespread carbon taxes - it has to be done when there is political capital in the bank. The trouble is there is not much else in the bank, though since the US government seems willing to engage in financing by the printing press and national debt, there could be money for just about everything that green strategists could wish for.

Climate activists have been saying for some time now that we have only a few years in which to act to save the climate (peak oil analysts perhaps put the figure in negative decades), but if Friedman and activist-analysts are collectively right, then America may genuinely have just a few months to get on the right course, because if Obama's political capital starts to wane, all hope of bold strategic and infrastructural moves may be foreclosed. If scientists are right, and this really is our last chance to avoid runaway climate change, then this will be our final opportunity for a green wave that can actually get us on track for a very different - and better - 21st century.