Tag: Science

Freedom of Crappy Information

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The Wikipedia/Reddit/BoingBoing protest today, stemming from the SOPA “Stop On-line Piracy Act” and PIPA “Protect Intellectual Property Act” legislation pending in the Excited States was an interesting event. The issues are huge: freedom of information versus ownership of intellectual property, or at least how it is being cast.

So I am now going to do a long rant, almost as dull as looking at Wiki’s black page today.

I think this is a fight between an existing paradigm for information and the opening of a whole new world. This is nothing less than the first strike in WWW 3.0 with the old media (print, music, motion pictures) finally understanding that their business model is dead, but they will not go down without a fight.

More importantly, this is definitely NOT a battle between the “little guy” every day internet users and file sharers and the “Big Business” people who make movies, run record labels and produce printed materials. The antagonists here are one type of Big Business (record labels, movie studios, TV networks) and another type of Big Business (Google, YouTube, Wikipedia). To one group, the “little guy” is a customer, to the other, he is the product.

The Business Model of the old media was to sell you content. You bought books, you bought movie tickets, you bought records. Pretty simple. The improvement on this was the business model where you get the print or the music or the movie for free, but they sell your attention to a third party advertiser – Newspapers, Radio, Network TV. The internet has completed that transition, as the only real product Google has is your attention. “Free” websites like those taking part in the blackout today make a lot of money selling your attention to advertisers. Wikipedia is amazing, as they get the users to generate the content – as I guess Google does with things like Blogger, the “free” host of this blog. I’m sure they are tracking your use, after all, I can go to Google Analytics and download the stats for my Blog, including stats about the people who visit it.

There is a market for websurfing info. I met a woman a few weeks ago who worked for a marketing research firm, they had 200,000 “volunteers” who shared their surfing habits with her firm, who stats-massaged them, then packaged them into marketing plans for clients. She was reluctant to mention it, but admitted most of the “volunteers” had no idea they were volunteers, because they didn’t read the small print of their terms and conditions of some free “App” they downloaded for their iPhones.

So the SOPA and PIPA Act battle seems to be between old media, who want to make you pay for content, and new media, who want to make it easy for you to share content you may or may not have created, as long as they can track how you do it.

Frankly, I don’t give a damn. Because the internet is, in my opinion, too big to stop. The whole purpose of it is to be distributed, and the Old Media types can whack-a-mole with sites trying to “steal” their intellectual property, but they will never win. I’m not saying it is right, I’m saying it is reality. Old Media would be better served trying to update their business models before they join the buggy whip and quill pen industries in the dustbin of old ideas.

Still, isn’t this about freedom of information, you say? I guess it is, but primarily, it is about the freedom of bad information. If I am going to fight a freedom of information battle, it will be against Elsevier and the Research Works Act. This Act will ensure that the private sector will be rewarded by having the exclusive distribution rights to academic research papers.

For those of you not in science, let me explain. When Patrick Johnstone, researcher, does a bit of science, he tries to publish it in a peer reviewed journal. You do this for several reasons: it provides legitimacy to the research you do, to is the easiest way to share your data and results with other researchers – they an vet it, they can prove it wrong, they can build on it. That is how science works. We also do it because our worth as a researcher is often measured by out ability to publish original work in academic journals. In a sen se, these journals are the currency of science

In the good old days, these journals were produced by academic organizations, say, the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences is produced by the Geological Association of Canada. If you were a member of the GAC, you got a copy of the CJES every month, and Academic institutions would get copies for their libraries. Students and other researchers would go to the library and (illegally – but that’s the grey area) photocopy papers from the Journal and cite them, learn from them, etc.

However, publishing and producing these journals, distributing them to libraries and – this is more important – creating on-line access to papers and searchable databases of their content – soon became the interest of a few Multi-national Corporations. Elsevier being probably the biggest. This is a Dutch company that also does great business running arms shows, but that’s another story.

As a result, for scientific researchers to share data over this great technology designed originally to allow scientific researchers to share data – the internet – they gotta pay Elsevier or the like. If you search for the paper I wrote in 2006 while doing my Masters, you can find it mentioned in library search engines, but if you try to read it on line you get this. Ingenta Corporation owns it. You can read it for $40. Trust me, I will see none of that money. I have no right to that intellectual property.

Or you can do what this instructor has done, and put it on line illegally. Which I, as the author, might be OK with (no money out of my pocket), but the Research Works Act wants to make sure is very illegal.

I can hear you now – Who cares? A couple of tweedy-sleeved academics can’t own their vanity projects. But the problem isn’t my little paper about some obscure rock outcrops in the Gulf Islands (talk about Crappy Information!), it is about how academic data will be kept more separate from the public at a time when the entire world is shifting towards freer exchange of information.

So when the topic of Anthropogenic Climate Change comes up, a crank like “Lord” Monkton can make a bunch of bald assertions about how CO2 is good for plants, and therefore climate change isn’t a problem, then back it up with an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph and a blog post put out by the Heartland Institute. It’s all bullshit, but it looks legit to the average reader. How is a curious person to know? A well-intentioned scientist could refute the points made by Monkton with a ream of scientific data to the contrary. She could even give you links to 20 or 30 peer reviewed scientific articles that clearly demonstrate the falsehood of Monkton’s statements. But you won’t be able to read them unless you pay $100 or more to get past Elsevier’s paywall.

So the freedom of information question to me is this: What is the fate of our discourse in the WalMart world if bullshit is free, but factual scientific data costs large?

With Enbridge, or Against Us?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.

The Environmental Assessment for the Northern Gateway pipeline project has started its public consultation stage. As is typical, the Harper Government has used this potentially-divisive event not to demonstrate leadership, but instead to draw sharp the divisions, and to demonstrate it doesn’t respect due process or the laws of the nation.

It started a few days ago when Steve declared that he was going to make sure radical groups with foreign funding don’t “hijack” the process. Now Steve may have his faults, but using language loosely is not one of them. Every message sent out by the PMO is carefully crafted to frame the discussion. Therefore, his choice to use the language of the War on Terror (“radical”,”foreign”,”hijack”) is designed to intentionally draw anyone who values environmental sustainability over the profits of Multi-national Oil Companies as non-Canadian, and not to be trusted. You are with Enbridge or you are against us.

Then he sent one of his less familiar minions, Joe Oliver, to sign a highly inappropriate and inflammatory “open letter”. The inflammatory part is obvious (read “radical ideological agenda”,”foreign special interest groups”, “radical groups”), but the inappropriate part comes from what he does for a living. As the Minister of Natural Resources and a member of the Conservative Cabinet, he is one of the people who will need to review and eventually approve or reject, this project: a job best done, in my humble opinion, after the data-gathering and the public hearings, and after the Joint Review Panel makes a recommendation. Actually it’s not just my opinion, it is the Law.

Given the nature of the open letter, how could anyone conclude the Joint Review Panel is anything but a sham process, when it is clear that the Federal Government as already made up its mind. You are with them, or you are against Enbridge.

Once again, Elizabeth May is the only one in Parliament standing up and speaking truth to power.

I keep on jumping on and off the Elizabeth May bandwagon, but with this open letter and her frighteningly frank comments coming out of Durban, I can see myself enjoying my current bandwagon seat for quite some time. I know many members of our Loyal Opposition feel the same way on this topic as May, but the realities of a large party system probably limit their ability to speak as clearly and truthfully as She does in response to John Oliver. Why, oh suffering Canadian Media, do we give Kevin O’Leary more air time than Elizabeth May? looking for inspiration in the vacuum left by Jack Layton? Read her blog. I digress…

Since he raised the spectre of “foreign special interest groups”, I might just agree with the concern expressed by Minister Oliver, except that all of those pejorative terms are so poorly defined. What is a “special interest group?”

Looking at the Joint Review Panel documents, one can actually see who is planning to hijack this process.

“Interveners” are interested stakeholders who are able to present written or oral evidence to the Panel, and to ask questions of other Interveners when they are presenting evidence. In essence, if you want to “hijack” the process, being an Intervener is the way to do it.

The Joint Review Panel lists 216 registered Interveners. Of those, 91 are private citizens, almost all from the northwest of British Columbia, or those most directly affected by both the positive and negative impacts of the proposed pipeline. There is really no way to know which of those are “for” and which are “against”, or which are just kind of curious. I suspect this group also includes small business owners who may have a vested interest one way or the other, or even journalists, bloggers, and local politico types who just want to take part in the conversation.

The Interveners list includes one labour union that has already expressed opposition to he project, and two academic institutes associated with Universities, who may be presenting evidence, or may just be interested in collecting data for research purposes.

Twelve of the Interveners are governments: BC, Saskatchewan, and a whole bunch of Municipalities. Except that, as Elizabeth May was quick to point out, the First Nations are also effectively governments, and there are no less than 48 First Nations groups listed as Interveners. I wonder if Minister Oliver suspects these as the source of “Foreign interference”?

If not, that leaves us with two more groups: Non-Profits (34) and Corporations and businesses (28). The first group is pretty diverse, including everyone from the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation and the Douglas Channel Watch (whom I think we can safely say are opposed to the project) to oil-industry funded lobby groups like the Oil Sands Developers Group Association, the In Site Oil Sands Alliance, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, whom we can be equally assured are in favour of the project. I will leave it to you to determine which Non-Profits are more likely to be well funded from abroad, and which are more likely to have the local community’s interests in mind.

Which leaves us with 28 Corporations and businesses. I am not going to presume that all of them are in favour of the pipeline, but seeing as they fall into two main categories: Oil Companies, and companies that contract to Oil Companies, I think the vast majority see oil pipelines as a good thing. Since Minister Oliver seemed specifically incensed by the untoward influence of foreign money, I am going to pass on calling out any Canadian companies (hey, they are Canadian, and Corporations are People too… give ‘em the voice!), and instead call attention to a few of the standouts:

ExxonMobil (Irving, Texas, annual revenue $383 Billion), and their subsidiary Imperial Oil, are listed as two separate Interveners.
BritishPetroleum (London, UK, annual revenue $309 Billion);
Total E&P (Courbevois, France, annual revenue $203 Billion);
ConocoPhillips (Houston, Texas, annual revenue $198 Billion);
Sinopec (China, annual revenue $197 Billion) as “SinoCanada Petroleum”;
Koch Industries (Wichita, Kansas, annual revenue $100 Billion) as “Flint Hills Resources”;
Inpex (Tokyo, Japan, annual revenue $16 Billion);
Daewoo International (Seoul, South Korea, annual revenue $13 Billion);
Kinder Morgan (Houston, Texas, annual revenues $12 Billion)
Japex (Tokyo, Japan, annual revenue $2.6 Billion) as “Japan Canada Oil Sands”;

So Severn Cullis-Suzuki and the Fort St. James Sustainability Group are going up against an organized group of foreign-owned companies with $1.4 Trillion (with a ”T”) in combined revenue, and our Prime Minister is more concerned about where the Environmental Groups money is coming from? Surely, this is parody.

As an aside, this morning on the radio business news, I hear Chris Carter stating that the high gasoline prices we are seeing now are only partially caused by high crude prices. The biggest reason for high and fluctuating prices is a chronic lack of refining capacity in North America leading to difficult-to-manage inventories.

This is something to talk about. Why are we spending billions setting up systems to export raw crude, when we could use the money to build the needed refining capacity? This would provide way more jobs, would increase the “value added” we receive from the Bituminous Sands, and could potentially lead to more stable fuel prices for Canadian businesses.

The question is, of course, rhetorical. Lower and more stable fuel prices, producing jobs in a relatively expensive labour market, increasing domestic value form Canada’s natural resources: none of these serve the purposes of the real decision makers in Ottawa, the Multi-national Oil Companies with offices in Calgary.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – Part 5. On the topic of B.S.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.
As previously noted, Dr. Patrick “Sensible Environmentalist” Moore is a big fan of the Alberta Bituminous Sands. I call them that, because as Dr. Moore points out in his book, “Tar Sands” is a misnomer, as they don’t actually contain “tar” in the technical sense of the word. If we follow his footnote reference (I kid you not, Wikipedia is the actual reference he uses), we discover that they don’t contain oil either, in the technical sense of the word, so “Oil Sands” is an equal misnomer. Therefore I will call them what they are: Bituminous Sands, or B.S. for short. 
You see, “tar” is a highly viscous liquid hydrocarbon mixture originally extracted from coal, but more typically now extracted from petroleum. “Oil” is a less viscous liquid hydrocarbon mixture originally extracted from whales, and now more commonly extracted from petroleum. Since we are in a definition mood, bitumen is a naturally-occurring amalgam of numerous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, with high sulfur content and relatively high concentrations of various metals (such as chromium, lead, nickel, mercury) and some non-metals (such as arsenic and selenium), in reduced (and therefore more bioavailable and toxic) states due to the anoxic conditions in the bitumen, but maybe that is too much detail. Dr. Moore’s fandom of B.S. is no secret, but in his book, he really lays out his best argument for B.S. development. Even in a book full of muddled thinking and logical fallacies, this argument may stand above all for it’s sheer absurdity:

“To put things in perspective, consider when a gas station spills oil or gasoline from a leaky underground tank. The site is declared “toxic real estate ” and must be cleaned up, often at the cost of millions of dollars. The oil sands [sic] in Albetra are a massive area of toxic soils, and the companies that operate in the oil sands [sic] are removing oil [sic] from the soil, on a very grand scale, making a profit selling the oil [sic] as a transportation fuel” Page 256

Now, I am no expert. I only took post-graduate courses in sedimentology from SFU and Petroleum Geology from the University of Illinois, and spend a few years working in the remediation of hydrocarbon-impacted soils and groundwater throughout BC, so by all means defer to Dr. Moore’s Ph.D in Ecology when it comes to these matters, but I contend B.S. extraction has almost exactly nothing to do with the remediation of fuels and oils spilled from underground fuel tanks.

The reason we clean up after fuel tanks spill or leak into the ground is because automobile fuels (gasoline and diesel) contain a variety of monocyclic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, along with a variety of halogenated hydrocarbon compounds. Many of these compounds are soluable in water (meaning they enter groundwater and flow towards drinking water sources or fisheries habitat) and/or volatile (meaning they evaporate at common surface temperatures, and can therefore move through the soil into basements, buildings, or confined spaces). These are generally bad things, because many of these substances are either carcinogenic or toxic to people, plants, or animals. They also cause reactions in soil and groundwater than can result in the reduction of metals found in the soil, ruining groundwater quality, or potentially increasing the toxicity of the metals in groundwater. Add to this waste oils and antifreeze, octane boosters, anti-microbial preservatives, fuel system solvents that “keep your engine running clean!”, and your average gas station has a lot of nasty things that can accumulate in the soil and groundwater. 
It is important to note that the gasoline (and, to a lesser extent, diesel) you put in your car is not a natural substance that is extracted from B.S. like one might extract moonshine from a pile of sopping grain mash. Instead, the B.S. is subject to chemical washes, solvents, thermal and/or catalytic cracking and distillation. Various substances are then added to stabilize the resultant fuel, to stop it from freezing, pre-ignition, gelling, separating, or rotting when exposed to oxygen and/or water. Very few of these things would you want collecting as vapor in you basement, or entering your drinking water supply, or corroding the water or gas pipes in your front yard. Therefore, it is often a good idea to “clean up” after a leaky gasoline tank. More than a good idea, if you are in an urban area and/or the leak migrates to your neighbours property, it is the Law.
Even then, Dr. Moore might be interested to learn that, increasingly, the most logical and efficient way to deal with gas station contaminated sites is not to physically clean them up, but to use a “risk-based” approach. Here, all or some of the actual contamination is left in the ground, because the Investigator has determined that the contamination is stable, and there is no practical pathway to human or ecological harm. If (for example) the hydrocarbons are 15 metres down below relatively impermeable soils, are slow moving, and are 2 km from the nearest surface water or drinking water source, then they may not constitute a risk to anyone or anything if left in the ground to naturally decompose. Sometimes systems are installed to pump air down to the contaminants, to hasten that natural decomposition, and in pretty much every case, the person responsible for the contamination has to monitor it to make sure this “no risk” condition doesn’t change. The point is that it is safer to just leave that stuff down there than to dig it up, truck it around, and find a facility to either treat or dispose of it. 
Which brings us to B.S. extraction.
Contrary to popular belief, most of the B.S. is not sitting there on the ground waiting to be scooped up. If it was, then it is unlikely that there would be much to extract, as natural processes such as rainwater dilution and organic and non-organic decomposition would have caused it all to go away over the millions of years since the bitumen migrated into the Mesozoic and Cenozoic sediments in which it is trapped from the Paleozoic rocks which are it’s original source. The reason it is preserved in that younger “host rock” is that there is an overlying “cap” of impermeable sediments covering it. Except for a few small, local “seeps” where the bitumen actually comes to the surface, you either have to dig for it, or process it in the ground with heat or steam, and pump it to the surface. 
Since this impermeable surface cap is generally more than 50m thick, and since there is, therefore, no reasonable pathway to human health impacts or ecological health impacts if the B.S. we’re left where it was, most competent Contaminated Sites Professionals, when presented with an Athabaskan Bituminous Sands type scenario, would recommend leaving the contaminated soils in place, a limited annual monitoring program, and perhaps minor risk-mitigation measures such as burying the “seeps” under impermeable caps, or trap-and-treat at the seeps, and restricting the extraction of impacted groundwater as a drinking water source. It would be the most responsible, cost-effective, and lowest-impact approach.
Compare this to what is happening today at the B.S. This safely-tucked-away bitumen is being either scooped up (after removing and setting aside the protective overlying cap) and then treated with solvents and/or having hot water run through it, and is being sifted and sorted in extremely energy-intensive ways. The sand is then returned to the hole, but it is not “clean”. At a contaminated site, the sand used to fill an excavation must be tested to not itself contain contamination. As the extraction methods used at the B.S. are far from perfect, there is no way the sand byproduct would meet Contmainated Sites Regulations standards. 
The other wastes – mostly water, fine sediments, and residual solvents – are dumped into vast open-air settling ponds, where volatiles evaporate off, heavy metals collect on the sediments, and leakage into the surrounding ecosystem is a certainty. There is currently no long-range plan to manage these ponds.
Alternately, “in-situ” methods are used when the B.S. is too deep to economically dig out – if the protective impermeable cap keeping the B.S. from harming people and the environment is too thick to feasibly strip off. In this case, solvents, steam, hot water or even hot oil are pumped down to liquefy and volatalize the B.S., then pressure used to pump them through the ground to extraction wells. The same settling ponds for waste water and sediments are used, but this adds the bonus of mucking up the groundwater systems for large areas around the extraction zones. 
You can argue B.S. extraction is better or worse than conventional oil extraction, or risky deep sea drilling, but you cannot truthfully argue that it is the same thing as cleaning up a contaminated gas station site. 
I wish this terrible argument was anomaly in this book, but it isn’t. Dr. Moore’s Confession is so chock-full of bad thinking, logical fallacy, post-hoc rationalization, and straight-up bullshit, that it is hard to read without verbally responding to it while reading. My better half has asked me to stop reading it in her presence as my guffaws and invocations disturb our quiet time together. The best feature I have found about this book so far I that it is soft-covered and printed on pulpy paper, so it causes very little damage to anything more valuable than it when tossed in rage across the room.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Part 4: Moore and Nukes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I opened up my analogue version of the Walrus and on page 28, there is “Patrick Moore, Ph.D, Environmentalist and Greenpeace Co-Founder” staring back at me from a glossy full-page ad extolling the environmental responsibility of the Alberta tar sands. His most recent shill for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers got me thinking it has been a while since I picked up his book. My seemingly endless review continues.

After much of the history and basic philosophy is dispatched, Moore’s book becomes a rather disjointed discussion of various environmental topics, and his “sensible environmentalist” approach to these issues.

His discussion of Energy starts with a rather nonsensical statement:

Motion requires energy, so without energy, time would stand still. (pg. 204)

Which reminds me of the Calvin & Hobbes comic where Calvin thought time had stopped, but it turned out his watch battery had died, but I digress.

His rather lengthy dismissal of most sustainable energy sources can be summarized into a few points: they are untested, unreliable and would require huge government subsidies to compete with what we have.

In many ways these very expensive technologies [wind and solar energy] are destroying wealth as they drain public and private investment away from more affordable and reliable energy-generating systems. (pg. 221)

I’m not sure how putting money into sustainable infrastructure constitutes “destroying wealth”, in fact I’m not even sure what “destroying wealth” means. He mixes this with even sillier arguments: solar panels are made of aluminum, and that takes energy to produce! How sustainable is that?

This is mostly preamble to his long argument about the wonders of Nuclear Power. Before I get too deep into it, I need to point out that I am not a reflexively “anti-nuclear” environmentalist. I think nuclear energy probably has a role in responsible energy policy, if it can be done safely with appropriate accounting for its waste streams. Those are, admittedly, very big “if”s.

I remember my first experiences writing reports and proposals in my life as a Consultant working for a major engineering firm. After interpreting some data, I wrote something along the lines of “the source of pollutant X cannot be determined”. My boss chuckled when reviewing it, and said “in Engineering, we never tell the client something cannot be done. It can always be done. We just need to outline for them the costs related to doing it, and they can decide if it should be done.” I asked what we do if the request really is impossible, and he remarked something along the lines of “impossible just means the technology isn’t there yet. So we budget the cost of developing the required technology”. I came to learn this is how engineers think. Bless them, the sorry bastards they are.

But along those lines, I do believe nuclear energy can be made safe (it is already way safer than getting energy from oil or coal), it is a question of costs and developing the appropriate technology. At this point, we have to decide whether that is a good investment in our money, or if the alternatives make more sense for our investment dollars.

However, this is where Dr. Moore’s argument falls apart. There hasn’t been a new nuclear plant built in the United States in decades, but it isn’t due to no-nukes fear mongering or radiation risks or a lack of political desire as Dr. Moore suggests, but due to something much more banal: economics.

Simply put, Nuclear Plants are too expensive to buildand too expensive to maintain. Currently, there is no business model to produce nuclear power capacity. Without significant government subsidies, like the ones Moore decries for truly sustainable energy alternatives like wind, geothermal and solar, there would be no nuclear industry at all. The people holding nuclear plants back are not environmentalists, they are accountants.

You wouldn’t know this from reading Moore’s book. On page 217, he decries Germany for subsidizing solar energy production to the order of $3 Billion, then, 33 pages later and seemingly unaware of the irony, Moore is extolling President Obama for providing more than $50 Billion in subsidies to Nuclear power industries. I guess you can’t “destroy wealth” by nuking it.

This pales in comparison to his silly arguments around radiation risk. I have written extensively on the poor understanding in the popular media of radiation risk, mostly around the unfounded local concern about impacts of Fukushima. Moore did not have the benefit of writing after Fukushima, but his argument around radiation risk is so Homer Simpsonian in it’s idiocy (and remember, I basically agree with him on Nuclear energy), all I can do is quote it verbatim from page 240:

…fire can be used to Burn down a City and kill Thousands of people. Should we ban fire for cooking and heating? Car bombs are made with fertilizer, diesel oil, and a car. Should we ban those three rather useful things? Guns can be used for hunting and for defending one’s country or for committing genocide?

Unfortunately, his argument for salmon farming is no more nuanced.

Sievert and Becquerel, Oh Dear!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

So the Georgia Straight sort of tries to clarify things in this article, and not surprisingly, fail miserably.

The article starts out pointing out how confusing all the data is, then does nothing but muddify the fuzzification (as Dr. Foth used to say) by throwing out more random numbers and units lacking context, and never once mentioning what the units mean. They complain that Environment Canada’s data is confusing, but do nothing to provide more clarity. The impression they leave is that Health Canada, by releasing the radiation data from Fukushima, is actually involved in a conspiracy to cover it up.

I already talked about Becquerel, so you should realize that the exposure listed in the following quote is one millionth of the exposure you receive from your own bones:

” The level of iodine-131 in Sidney, B.C., rose to a high of 3.63 milliBecquerel per cubic metre in the air on March 20. That’s over 300 times higher than the background level of 0.01 milliBecquerel per cubic metre or less.”

Oh, and that “background” value? There is no natural background value for Iodine 131, it is not a naturally occurring element in any quantity (it is a product of uranium fission), and has a short half-life (8 days) in real-world terms, so any of it that is created naturally goes away really quick. What they are falsely calling “background” is actually the Method Detection Limit (“MDL”), or the smallest concentration that can be detected using the equipment available. Note that Cesium-137, later in the article, has the same “background” concentration.

It is interesting to note that the acceptable level of Radon in your home is 200 Becquerel per cubic metre. So your daily exposure in your home, where you breathe 8 hours a day 365 a year is not significant health concern at 50,000 times the level of that one-day spike in Sidney.

But what about Sievert? According to the article:

“It’s a shell game. MicroSieverts are quite a distance removed from the raw data. They’re blending in stuff from nature to make the data look innocuous,”

. This is one of the most ignorant anti-science statements I have read in printed media in a long time. Sieverts confuse this poor idiot, so he assumes someone is pulling the wool over his eyes. We are not too sure who, and what their nefarious plan is, but this writer is finding conspiracy every time someone uses a term he does not understand. Instead of trying to understand it, he assumes the worst. That is the difference between skepticism and cynicism.

It really isn’t that complicated, and if he did a little research, he would discover that the calculation of “effective dose” does the exact opposite of what he says: it combines together the cumulative impacts onto a single unit, allowing us to compare radiation apples to radiation oranges.

Not all radioactive substances are the same. When they decompose, they release various different types of radiation and/or particles. So in that sense, a counting of Becquerel (like I have been doing for the last two posts) tells us about the amount of atom decay, but does not tell us about the harm each decay may cause.

When an atom of Potassium-40 in your bones decays, it (most often) releases an electron at very high energy (<1.3meV), and a neutrino. The neutrino is harmless (or at least it is drowned out by the 60+ billion of them that pass through every square centimetre of your body every second you are alive on earth) but the electron at that energy level is called a beta particle, and is a form of ionizing radiation that can cause cellular damage. When Iodine-137 decays, it does a little two-step decay that results in a beta particle followed very shortly by a gamma ray. Uranium-238, in contrast, releases an entire helium nucleus, otherwise known as an alpha particle. Each of these particles pack a different “punch”, a they carry different abilities to interact with other materials.

The unit “Grey” is used to convert the varying doses delivered by a unit of each of these types of radiation into one convertible unit. It is a little more complicated than this, but essentially, because an alpha particle is bigger and interacts more strongly with other materials, it packs 20x the “dose” of a gamma ray or a beta particle (which pack about equal doses). So one unit of alpha radiation packs the punch of 20 units of gamma or 20 units of beta. It also stands to reason that these three types of radiation (alpha, beta and gamma) are differently harmful to health. Alpha particles are big and heavy, so they cannot penetrate your skin very far (only a few micrometres), and actually can only travel a few metres through the air before being absorbed by the atmosphere. Therefore, direct exposure to alpha radiation tends to cause things like radiation burns. Beta particles are smaller, with more energy, and can travel through the air pretty freely, but only penetrate several centimetres into your skin, causing deeper damage. Gamma rays can pass through most materials (although lead does diffuse them quite a bit) and since they can pass right through your body, tend to cause systemic “radiation sickness” if you are exposed to a lot of them.

To further complicate matters, some tissues in your body (especially your bone marrow and lymph nodes) are more severely impacted by radiation than other tissues (like the skin or the liver). A single Grey of exposure will impact your lymph nodes more than your skin, so factors that account for these differences need to also be calculated if we want to understand the health effects of radiation. As the ultimate impact on your body are cumulative from all of the tissues affected, these tissue-specific factors are added together, and the sum value used to calculate the “effective dose” a person receives from any given amount (Grey) of radiation.

Since we are comparing three different types of radiation and dozens of different tissues, the unit must be standardized. The “effective dose” is measured in the Si unit “Sievert”, which is defined as the amount of radiation that has the equivalent biological impact as one joule of gamma rays adsorbed by one kilogram of tissue. You can look at this data table to put that number into perspective. The average North American is exposed to about 3 milliSievert (mSv) every day from natural sources (or 0.003 Sv), and can receive from 0.004 to 0.83 mSv from a medical or dental x-ray.

A microSievert is 0.001 milliSievert. So the radiation “spikes” mentioned in the Georgia Straight article, from 0.43 to 0.48 microSievert, or 0.23 to 0.25 microSievert, or even 0.36 to 0.96 microSievert, are much less than a thousandth of our daily exposure from things like the uranium in our granite countertops to the radium adsorbed in our rain to the potassium in our bananas (and notably, not the radio waves from our cell phones). And less than a hundredth of the exposure we would receive from a single dental x-ray.

The article does sum up with one of those great meaningless quotes: “There is no safe level of radiation.” I would suggest anyone in BC concerned about their increased exposure to radiation caused by Fukushima should probably eat one less banana this year, and you will more than offset any impacts

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – Part 2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Still not through this book. What can I say, a lot has been happening in my life. There is lots of cool stuff about his campaigning in the 70s, with significant amounts of daring do and hijinks on the high seas, but first I would like to make one more point about Chapter 1.

For a guy with a Ph.D. in science, Dr. Moore has a pretty poor understanding of the scientific process. He seems to gloss over why it took him so long to get his dissertation done, although he alludes to corporate conspiracy. I wonder if he ever took a philosophy of science course? To be fair, he might be a victim of an overzealous editor’s ham-fisted attempt to dumb it down for the masses, but it comes across as a Grade 8 Science class outline of what science is, and how it works.

It starts with describing science as

“the accumulation of knowledge that could be passed down through generations” (p. 25).

Science is not a cumulative body of knowledge; it is a process to evaluate ideas, explore and describe the processes behind observable phenomenon, and make predictions based on a body of observational evidence. Accumulated knowledge is a product of science, but it is not what science is. That may sound like semantics, but it isn’t. Fundamentally, “science” is not a pile of books on a library shelf; it is a method to understand reality.

Then it gets worse:

“[an example of] a hypothesis is ‘If I drop a rock from a height, it will fall to the ground’. After thousands of replications the statement proves true in every case. The hypothesis is proved and soon becomes a theory, and ultimately a law, in this case a law of physics. A law is something that has never been disproven.”[p.25]

This is embarrassingly wrong, built on a meme that is repeatedly dragged out by the very pseudo-scientists he is wont to criticize (Flat-Earthers, Creationists, Wi-fi cancer-link scare mongers, etc.): that of a mythical scientific hierarchy-of-truth made up like this:

Facts < Hypotheses < Theories < Laws.

A better explanation of the relationship between those four terms is: Facts exist and can be determined with careful and systematic measurement of observable phenomenon , hypotheses are simple ideas that can be tested and verified using the measurement of facts, but only upon a framework of existing theories and laws.

A significant point: facts can exist without precision; they do not have to be exactly right to be correct. I love the story of the Richardson Problem. He was the mathematician who described the length of a border or a coastline varying based on the length of the tool used to measure it. As Mandlebrot put it: the length of Britain’s coastline increases to infinity as the ruler shrinks to infinity. But I digress…

A theory is not just a really, really good hypothesis. It is a functional model describing observed phenomena. A theory is something you test hypotheses against. Often theories describe a large number of observed phenomena in a single, elegant model. Plate Tectonics, Evolution through Natural Selection, General and Special Relativity, Germ Theory, Atomic Theory. These are the ideas upon which science is borne. Two things are certain: 1) none of them will ever be “proven”, because no-one will ever seek to prove them. The purpose of them is not to be proven, but to be accepted as useful models, upon which other ideas can be hung; and 2) They do not evolve into “Laws” by being proven. Neither of these points mean they are not “true”, or incredibly useful.

In science, a Law is usually a mathematical construct, an analytical relationship that can be used to measure, characterize, or evaluate phenomenon. Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation says that all objects are attracted to all other objects by a force that varies relative to their mass and to the inverse square of the distances between their masses (multiplied by some factor). Laws also do not exist to be “proven” or “disproved”, they exist to allow us to make sense of phenomenon in a numerical sense, and to make predictions, within their acknowledged limits.

Since gravity is relatively non-controversial, and since Dr. Moore started with an example from gravity, let’s see how these terms are used by physical scientists when discussing gravity, starting with his example.

Rocks fall; that is an observable phenomenon. We can develop numerous theories as to why, and we can create and test various hypotheses and test them to see if they fit our theory. There are lots of observable facts: all objects fall at about the same rate regardless of weight; magnets fall at the same rate as insulators; falling objects are constantly accelerating, etc. A good theory to explain these observations (facts) is that of gravitation: that all objects with a mass are attracted to all other objects with a mass through some force. This was the theory developed by Galileo in the early 17th Century. By the end of the 17th Century, Newton had developed the math around it: the Law of Universal Gravitation: F= G *(m1*m2)/(r)^2. Through this he could predict the motions of pendulums before building them, and the motions of planets that had not yet been discovered. This Law is not the Theory “proven”; it is a mathematical formula that allows us to calculate the force described in the theory based on some measured variables.

Universal Gravitation works pretty well if you are building pendulum clocks or lobbing artillery shells, but if you try to really accurately measure the precession of the orbit of Mercury, it doesn’t work: in essence the Law was shown not to have predictive power (note, not disproven) in some special cases by Einstein’s General Relativity.

But that doesn’t mean Newton’s Universal Gravitation isn’t a perfectly valid Law, within its confines, useful for making predictions and describing an aspect of our universe. And (this is a really important part) it doesn’t even matter that neither Galileo, Newton, or Einstein really knew how gravity “worked”. Even lacking that, what would seem a fundamental fact, we could not live in the modern world without the benefit of the theory and the laws built around this force a century before the first direct observation of gravity waves.

Unfortunately, this book is full of either lazy or sloppy science. It would be pedantic to quote them all, but let me pick one paragraph that hits close to home for me, being a geologist. On Page 62, Dr. Moore describes whale evolution:

“They evolved after the great dinosaur extinction, caused by a large meteor that crashed near the Yucatan Peninsula, ending the Jurassic age. Among the dinosaurs exterminated were the large marine plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs.”

Perhaps an ecologist can be forgiven for not knowing the Jurassic from the Cretaceous (it is only an 80 million year difference), but anyone involved in animal ecology should know the marine reptiles he named were not “dinosaurs”. Oh, and the ichthyosaurs died out at least 25 million years before the Yucatan impact. That is a lot of bad science in two short sentences.

Finally, Dr. Moore leaves the ignominious Page 25 stating that

“Science… has weaknesses. One of these is that you cannot prove a negative” (pg. 25)

To that I say: Bullshit. Science has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Moon is not made of green cheese.

QED.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – part 1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.
About a month ago, fellow New Westminster Blogger David Brett provided an intriguing review of Dr. Patrick Moore’s book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout”. Part autobiography of one of the founders of Greenpeace, and part manifesto for a new, “sensible” environmentalism, this book is a first-person account of how Dr. Moore helped found Greenpeace, became disillusioned by it, and forged his own path towards a more pragmatic form of environmentalism. Moving away from protest, he worked to engage government, business and industry to help them become more sustainable.

As I commented to Dave at the time, being a “sensible” (and by that, I mean skeptical and science-based) environmentalist, and engagement with stakeholders (as opposed to protest) has been my goal, so Dr. Moore’s story is interesting to me. Since I reviewed the autobiography-manifesto-vanity project movie on David Suzuki last year, I will do the same with this book.

The advantage of the book is that I have it in front of me and can discuss it at length. I am currently about 4 chapters in, and have very little time to read these days, so the review may take some time and several posts.

I promised Dave that I would read with an open mind, and I have not read any other reviews than his (and the blurbs on the back of the book!), but my openness was challenged in the first chapter of the book. It just doesn’t start well.

In Chapter 1, Dr. Moore starts off by defining “sustainable development”. This is a good idea, as it is a term bandied about too much by people with little understanding of what it means. It is currently a sexy buzz phrase used by a lot of people who have never understood (or cared about) the definition.

The problem is, Dr. Moore immediately dismisses the definition used by people who work in sustainability: the standard-model definition and, unfortunately, the one most commonly ignored by people who are misusing the term. That being the definition from Brundtland Report. Dr. Moore immediately tosses it aside and replaces it with a definition that fits his needs.

Compare this:

Brundtland Report: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”

To this:

Dr. Moore: “Sustainable development requires that we continue to obtain the food, energy, and materials necessary for our civilization, and perhaps even increase these resources in developing countries, while at the same time working to reduce our negative impacts on the environment through changes in behaviour and changes in our technologies” (Pg. 14)

The second definition is fine, full of great ideas and feelings, but it is, unfortunately, not a definition of sustainability.

It is like I start my book about American actresses by describing Uma Thurman as the greatest actress of our generation. Then I decide the definition of Uma Thurman as “the star of the Kill Bill Films” is not a very good definition. Instead, I like to define Uma Thurman as “That woman from Kramer vs. Kramer and the Bridges of Madison County who has 2 Academy Awards from 16 nominations”. That definition makes my argument that Uma is the greatest actress of our time much more compelling, doesn’t it?

Although Dr. Moore’s definition contains many soft environmental ideals that we should probably strive towards (as loaded with weasel words as it is), it does not define “sustainable development” the way it is used by anyone other than Dr. Moore. At best, it is one small aspect of “sustainable development”; at worst, it is a dodge of the real issues raised by limited resources on a consumption-growth based economy. It also completely misses the point that sustainability is not an “environmental” concept any more than it is a social and economic one.

I don’t think the problem with “sustainable” is its overuse, but rather its common use in a way that does not relate to the actual definition of the word. As such, it is indistinguishable from “green” or “environmentally friendly” or “clean” or other popular marketing words. I am a believer (as are most scientists) that strict definition of terms is as important to political discussion as it is to technical discussion. Dr. Moore makes the problem of fuzzy definition worse in Chapter 1 when he invents a new definition for the term.

Hiring an Environmentalist

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

It happened again today at my work.

I am in a meeting with a guy who wants to do some land improvements on his property that will impact riparian areas. There are Provincial laws around this, and to be complaint with those laws, he needs to get some advice from a Qualified Environmental Professional.

It is kind of like if you want to build a bridge, you need someone trained as a bridge engineer, licensed to practice, and carrying professional liability insurance to sign off that the bridge will not, in her professional opinion, fall down. Similarly, if you need to build something in fisheries habitat, you need someone trained in ecology, licensed to practice, and carrying professional liability insurance to sign off that the works won’t, in his professional opinion, kill fish.

This guy understood this, he assured me. “I hired an environmentalist to check everything out”.

There is a definition problem here.

I’m not even sure where you would hire an environmentalist. “Environmentalist” is not a job description, it is a political philosophy. It is like I asked him to verify his business plan and he replied “I hired a Libertarian!” It doesn’t make sense. But surprisingly often I am at a drilling site, or in a meeting with developers, or talking to my mom about work, and I am called the “environmentalist”.

This is OK, as I happen to be an environmentalist (in that my political philosophy includes considerations for protecting the natural environment, for a variety of reasons). However, in these settings, it is rather more important that concomitant to my philosophical positions, I am an “Environmental Scientist” by training, and an “Environmental Coordinator” by trade. That means I have a lot of specific training and experience in environmental protection, the administration of Environmental Law, environmental engineering, and other subjects that can be loosely bundled together under the subject of “Environmental Science” (to be specific in my case, “Environmental Geoscience”, since I am a geologist, not a biologist or ecologist or chemist, etc.).

This is not semantic. Environmental Scientists (and especially “Qualified Environmental Professionals”) are not all environmentalists, and the vast majority of environmentalists have no training whatsoever in Environmental Science.

? ?

This is not an Environmental Science conference

So when this fellow said he hired an “environmentalist”, I picture Paul Watson standing in his driveway yelling about whales, then I politely correct him and say “Environmental Professional”.  If in a professional setting I am introduced as “the environmentalist”, I often make a joke about “how do you know how I vote?”, then again politely say “I’m the Environmental Coordinator who is working on this file.

So Mom, you can stop calling me the Environmentalist in the Family. At least when talking about my work.

Grand Canyon Part 2: The Kaibab Limestone

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The top of the Grand Canyon, and much of the rubbly plain surrounding it, are made up of rocks of the Kaibab Formation. The Kaibab is a limestone unit, somewhere around 270 million years old, which puts it in the middle of the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era.

The world was a different place in the Permian. This is a time before there were birds or mammals, even the dinosaurs had yet to develop. The dominant land animals were synapsids, which look rather like modern lizards but were more mammal-like than reptilian (with differentiated teeth and quite possibly fur). They were almost completely wiped out in the Great Permian Extinction (lucky for you they weren’t, as one of your ancestors was a Permian synapsid).

There were no flowering plants in the Permian, but cycads, ginkgoes, and ferns were common. In the sea, 300 million years of Trilobite domination was about to come to an end, and echinoderms and mollusks were rising, especially a new-fangled cephalopod mollusk, the Ammonite, which was starting it’s impressive 200 million-year reign as king of the Sea.

The Permian was also the last time that all major continental land masses were collected together through Plate Tectonics into one “supercontinent”- Pangaea, leading to bad T-shirt ideas ever since (people calling for Pangaea’s reunion rarely consider that the supercontinents correlate very well with massive declines in biodiversity, but I digress). In the part of Pangaea that is now northern Arizona, there was a shallow sea facing to the west, with the shoreline shifting around somewhat, as they are apt to do on million-year time spans, which brings us to the limestone.

Limestone is generally deposited in shallow ocean water as a result of biological precipitation of carbon dioxide and calcium out of the water column – which is a fancy way of saying: it is all shells. Not just shells of bivalves like clams and oysters, but structural parts of corals, echinoderms, sponges, and perhaps most importantly, microscopic plankton. As this pile of dead and discarded shell material is compressed, heated and dewatered, it cements together into a very hard rock: limestone. Well, it is actually kind of soft by rock standards, and it is easily dissolved (on a geologic timescale) when exposed to meteoric water. However, it often forms large, homogeneous blocks that can be very resistant to erosion in arid place, like the Colorado Plateau into which the Grand Canyon has incised.

In places west of the Grand Canyon, younger rocks are piled on top of the Kaibab, but around the canyon, these younger rocks have been eroded away at some point in between the 270 Million years since it’s deposition in the shallow ocean and it’s current exposure more than two Kilometres above sea level.

Did I mention my fear of respect for heights?

The Kaibab is hard enough to form vertical walls at the Canyon rim, some more than 300 feet high. It is also distinctly grey in colour, making a visible band around the canyon rim, and is easy to differentiate from the reddish sandstones and shales below. The underlying Toroweap formation is not as resistant, and forms rubbly slopes below the Kaibab cliffs.

Kaibab – you can recognize it from 10 miles away.

Close up, the Kaibab is grey in colour, and is variously massive (showing little internal structure) or mottled with chert nodules and fossils. It is also variously mixed with relatively thin shale or sandstones beds, just enough to give a sense of bedding.

This poor, suffering bastard could use a bed. Fortunately, there is
beautifully expressed bedding in the Kaibab Limestone outcrops behind him!
Chert nodules weathering out of Kaibab limestone. Note pointing doofus for scale.

“Chert” is a micro-crystalline form of quartz (more or less pure silica) that is much harder and less soluble than the limestone so it really stands out from the limestone surface. These nodules formed in the limestone when it was buried and hot groundwater with silica dissolved in it percolated through the limestone depositing crystals. These look like fossils, and indeed some of them do form around incongruities in the limestone caused by fossil structures, or in tunnels bored through the sediments on the ocean floor by various animals who might be grazing through the sediment looking for food (like worms do in soil) or making tunnels or tubes to live in (like some types of shrimp or clams might do). These are “trace fossils”, and I will go on at length about them in later posts.

I like trace fossils.

What I did this summer – Grand Canyon.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

Ok, I am very late starting this blogs topic, because I actually took my summer vacation way back in early June, when my tomatoes in tonight’s salsa were mere seedlings on my window sill and the Canucks were looking good for their first championships. So much time has past.

I still wanted to blog about my trip, however, because blogging about travel was my first introduction to the medium, and because I like to talk about geology. This trip was all geology. I walked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a buddy of mine who shall remain anonymous, but happens to be a Professor of Geology. The purpose was to enjoy the majesty, a once-in-a-lifetime hiking trip, and a chance to get away from spring doldrums, but mostly to look at and enjoy the geology of the Colorado Plateau.

The author with some Coconino Sandstone

For those lucky enough to have avoided travelling with a geologist, it is hard to explain what “enjoying the geology” means. It is startlingly close to what you would do if you were working in geology. We first review the available literature, then look at the rocks, try to identify the rock types, look for recognizable structures, fossils or traces, try to make sense of the structural relationships, or figure out the paleo-envrionmental conditions where they were deposited. Try to point at all of the changes from one “formation” of rock to another, be that a sharp unconformity or a gradual transition. And we take lots of pictures, and talk a lot of rocks.

Geologists generally have more pictures of their scale card
than they do of thir kids.

How many pictures? I took about 250 photos below the canyon rim. The Prof took more like 500.

How much talking? We walked down the South Kaibab Trail to the Colorado River, about 12km, and all downhill. Even with the heat and rough trail, most people complete the hike in 4 or at most 5 hours. It took us about 9. After a day hanging at the bottom of the Canyon enjoying the charms of Phantom Ranch, we managed to come back up the Bright Angel Trail in a much more reasonable 8 hours. We were carrying less whiskey this way.

I am going to blog the trip in pieces, in the order of rock formations encountered on the way down (therefore, some pictures form the way up will be mixed in with those from the way-down). That way, the narrative will be a journey backwards through geologic time, more than a tour through our three-day trip. Remember, Law of Superposition: the rocks at the top are the youngest, the rocks at the bottom oldest.

Simple section of the canyon, modified from wikipedia.

This section shows the names of the major rock formations one encounters walking down the canyon, from the Early Permian Kaibab Limestone (about 275 million years old) at the top to the Precambrian Vishnu Schist (probably 1.7 billion years old). Add to this the Laramide Orogeny, resultant uplift, and 2 million years of melted snow runoff from the Colorado Rockies, and you get yourself a canyon drawn grand.

Click to make grander and more panoramic.

Details to follow…

It wasn’t all fun and games.
Happy 50th, Prof!