Premature advice about gene tuning

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, health, diet, genetics, epigenetics, self help

The title concerns me a little: Dirty Genes: A Breakthrough Program to Treat the Root Cause of Illness and Optimize Your Health. The author is Dr. Ben Lynch, a naturopath who for about a decade has been studying the effects of genetics and epigenetics on chronic disease, and susceptibility to disease in general. He developed a "Clean Genes Protocol" people can use who want to improve their health.

So, what is a "dirty gene", and how can dirty genes be "cleaned"? The reason we are all different from one another is that there are very slight genetic variations in all genes. There are numerous variants of every gene. The variants for a particular gene are called alleles. The differences among alleles are mostly in the small numbers of SNPs that each gene contains. We'll look at SNPs later on.

We can use eye color as an example. When I was young I learned the Mendelian explanation of inheritance for brown eyes and blue eyes. Somewhere in the genome is a gene with a few common alleles (variants) that controls eye color; call it BrownEye. One allele makes eyes brown by coding for a protein that produces the brown pigment; call it BrownEye+. Another allele makes eyes blue because it codes for the same protein in a form that won't operate correctly, so the pigment is not made, and the natural blue iridescence of the iris is seen instead; call it BrownEye-. These two sentences explain why brown eyes are considered dominant: We all have two copies of each gene. If someone has two copies of the same allele, of course their eye color will be the expected color, brown if the two copies are BrownEye+ and blue if the two copies are BrownEye-. What happens when someone has one copy of each allele? The BrownEye- allele produces a "broken" protein that can't produce pigment, but the BrownEye+ allele produces a working protein, so the pigment is made anyway; thus, that person will have brown eyes. Caution: this is very simplified. More than one gene is involved, and there are several kinds of "brown", plus "green" and "hazel" eye colors.

I don't know what it is that is different between these two alleles of BrownEye. There are several kinds of mutations, changes in our DNA, and we each accumulate a few hundred new mutations in the DNA of every cell in our bodies in our lifetime. The average rate is about 65 "per generation", based on a statement in this Wikipedia article. I presume that a "generation" is the 20-40 (average 33) years between our birth and the age at which we typically reproduce. We continue to accumulate mutations after that, but none of those are going to be found in our descendants.

Remember, we have two copies of our entire genome in each cell. By far the most common mutation—which can be caused by cosmic rays, environmental toxins, and the "stumbling" that the DNA copying machinery does on occasion—is the SNP. This means that, at the age we usually reproduce, each egg or sperm cell in your gonads will differ in about 33 locations from the DNA you were born with, and 90% of those will be SNPs.

Dirty Genes is all about SNPs, considering those that cause our DNA to operate different from the "optimal genome" (my term) to be "dirty"; the author doesn't say what kind of SNP is "dirty", not in any useful way. I think he is really writing about alleles, but there can be many more than the two I posited above, even for something "simple" like eye color.

With this lead-up, we can get a bit more practical. Getting your whole genome sequenced now costs something over $1,000, compared to the few billion dollars spent to produce the first total sequence. If you were to get your whole genome sequenced, and that of one of your parents or siblings, you would find on average about 10 million SNP differences between the two of you, scattered somewhat clumpily throughout each genome.

A SNP is a "single nucleotide polymorphism". A nucleotide is a 3-codon (3-"letter") sequence such as AGC. If in a particular place you have AGC and your father has ACC, that "G" is the SNP. This may or may not cause trouble for one of you. The following diagram will help:

Each copy of your genome contains 3 billion codons. You have two copies, and each has its own SNPs. Divide 6 billion by 10 million to get 600: There is on average one SNP each 600 codons. However, they are a little more concentrated in the non-coding and non-regulatory regions of the DNA, but I have not been able to find out the quantitative difference. So we'll assume no concentration for the moment. (Illustration credit: MansiG123 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The coding DNA, the DNA that is used to make proteins, totals about 1.2% of the whole. So it contains at most 1.2% (probably somewhat less) of all the SNPs, or 120,000.

Regulatory DNA, that performs functions such as controlling the rate a particular gene produces protein, totals about 8% of the whole. So the number of SNPs found there adds up to another 800,000. The number of SNPs that can potentially "do something" is thus a little under one million. This squares with a statement by the author that we all have "a million" SNPs. But he doesn't explain it like I just did.

Now look at the diagram. We have to consider the section headed "coding region" to actually refer to coding DNA and regulatory DNA, or 9.2% of all our DNA. The "transfer table" used to convert DNA codons to amino acids in proteins has 64 codes. Three of these are used for start or stop (I think there are 2 "stop" codons). For the rest, 61/20 (there are 20 amino acids) is just over 3, and it means that the average amino acid has 3 codes that will request it in a pending protein synthesis.

A SNP that codes for the same amino acid as the DNA without that SNP is considered a "Synonymous" mutation. The protein isn't changed. So we can put 66% on the "Synonymous" box above, and 33% (or 34%) on the "Non-Synonymous" box. Below that, "Missense" means that the amino acid in the "different" protein will allow it to operate, but perhaps differently, while "Nonsense" means either that the "different" amino acid in that location will cause the protein to fold wrong and not work at all, or that the codon is a premature "stop" and the protein is cut short. "Nonsense" is more rare than "Missense", but I don't know by how much.

It comes down to this: About 300,000 of the SNPs in your DNA make it operate differently from whatever might be considered "optimal" or "standard". Since the actual distribution of SNPs is biased toward non-coding DNA, the number will be less. We have something over 20,000 coding "genes", maybe as many as 23,000. Each of them, then, contains a few SNPs; the average is about 14. So looking back at our BrownEye gene, the broken pigment that produces blue eyes is probably due to only one of the SNPs.

I infer that a "dirty gene" is one that has a Missense or Nonsense SNP, as compared to the "optimal" gene. Dr. Lynch is concerned with a combination of diet, exercise and other habits that support the proper operation of genes, as much as is possible based on the SNPs they contain.

The second genetic theme in the book is the methylation process that our cells use to actually accomplish gene regulation. Methylation is not yet well understood. It accounts for changes in gene expression; in particular, for example, the thousands of genes in a liver cell that are not needed for liver function are deactivated by being "coated" with methyl groups so they cannot be "reached" by the protein-producing machinery. Various levels of methyl "coating" are used for more fine regulation, such as the timing of certain proteins when they are needed or need to be temporarily slowed down or shut down. This is controlled by many of the "things" (we can't call them genes I suppose) that the regulatory 8% of your genome contains.

SIDEBAR: Hmm, I have seen the term "regulatory sequence" in a number of articles, and two abbreviations that may be synonyms: "regseq" and "refseq". These are both also used as software abbreviations, though, so I'll temporarily use "RS" for any of the "things" in the regulatory DNA.

The author's explanation of SNPs and "dirty genes" is directed quite differently from the above. I guess I expect more intelligence in those who read this, compared to his expectation for those who read his book.

Now I have to pan it. Ten years is a long time, and Dr. Lynch has given this a lot of effort, but he is up against a huge and hugely complex subject. What I think he has really done is to take the menu of recommendations that naturopaths have used for decades and give it a "new and improved" explanation with new buzz words. But certain fundamental knowledge is dramatically lacking. I'll pick one example that struck me early on.

No matter who you are, the Clean Genes Protocol begins with eliminating certain foods. Among them is gluten. This in spite that it is well known that only 1% of people suffer celiac disease, and thus cannot eat gluten. My former supervisor is one such, so I am familiar with it. Curiously, every time but one that gluten is mentioned in the book, it is a forbidden food. That one time, he throws a sop, telling us that one of his sons isn't bothered by gluten, but that he and the other son are very bothered by it. The term "celiac" is nowhere found in the book. That is shocking. Inexcusable.

A second example: The SNPs in a gene called the "methylation master gene", called MTHFR, are stated as a cause of Down Syndrome, along with a laundry list of lesser problems. Down Syndrome is caused by a very different kind of mutation, an extra Chromosome 21. I suppose you could call that 120 million SNPs. This is beyond belief!

I was only on page 24 when I saw that. I didn't read in detail much farther. I began to go through some of the recommendations—and found the gluten bungle—to see if it all might still make sense. It does not.

Compared to the recommendations of most naturopaths, the advice is actually a bit watered down. Though it is a fairly big book, he is trying to simplify the actual advice. But the reasons he gives for the recommendations do not make sense. "Dirty genes" is a catchy term. Maybe some day someone will define it more appropriately. But what is being "cleaned" from these "dirty genes"? Methyl groups. And you know, that is actually true, for the most part. The trouble is, this all has limited application. It is nowhere near as fine tuned as he claims.

The book is repackaged naturopathy with a shiny, new explanation for why things work or don't work, but the explanation doesn't explain enough. Our knowledge of the genome, the RS package (the "regulome"?), the proteome (all our proteins), and the saccharome (the different types of cellular sugars and simple carbohydrates, that outnumber proteins 20:1 or more), is very, very early and incomplete. Furthermore, instead of producing steps tuned to each individual's needs, the book's advice contains far too many broad brush recommendations will cause the majority of people to refrain from doing or eating things that don't matter, or that are perhaps better for them than not. In this case, a little knowledge can be quite a danger, indeed.

Dinos as you have never known them

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, paleontology, palaeontology, dinosaurs, mesozoic era

For at least a little while my hunger to know "everything" about dinosaurs has been satisfied! I just read The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte. What an amazing book, and it is not enormous as you might expect: a mere 404 pages, index included.

I used to think of the earliest dinosaurs as Dimetrodons or something similar, but they were not ancestral to dinosaurs. Note the splayed legs, like a lizard or crocodile. Dinosaurs had legs under the body like a mammal or bird. These were Synapsids, and one small branch of that order that survived the great Permian extinction went on to give rise to mammals, while a different order altogether became the proto-dinosaurs.

The drawing of a Coelophysis (pronounced "seal-off-a-sis") shown here, from the opening of Chapter 2 of Rise and Fall, represents an early dinosaur, but not the earliest. These critters lived somewhat late in the Triassic, and gave rise to birds, which are the survivors of dinosaurs. That robin, cardinal or jay out in the yard? Just your everyday dinosaur!

Note how the hind legs of Coelophysis are attached to the body similarly to the legs of a chicken. Of course, the forelegs do not have the range of motion of the wings that came along much later.

A note on geologic time. Three big Eras divide up the last 541 million years:

1. Paleozoic (Old Life) Era, from 541-252 million years ago
2. Mesozoic (Middle Life) Era, from 252-66 million years ago
3. Phanerozoic (Recent Life) Era, since 66 million years ago

Each era has a few Periods. The last period of the Paleozoic Era is called the Permian, and ended with a terrible ecological catastrophe, probably caused by enormous and long-lasting eruptions of lava in the middle of Asia. More than 90% of all species went extinct, and more than 99% of all living things died. Among those that survived were some synapsids (the mammal ancestors) and a few groups of "saurians" (lizardlike animals) two groups of which became the dinosaurs about 10 million years after the end-Permian extinction event.

The three periods after the Permian, that make up the Mesozoic Era, are the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous. Dinosaurs were present from early in the Triassic until another disaster caused by the crash of a mountain-size asteroid killed off at least 70% of all species (on land at least) and more than 90% of all land-based living things. Certain smaller dinosaurs, the birds, survived into the Phanerozoic and from them all the 10,000 or more species of bird we see around us today have evolved.

That isn't really a summary of the book, just an introduction to its landscape in time. I have read portions of the book over the past few years because they were published in briefer form as articles in Scientific American, to which I subscribe. Dr. Brusatte is one of the talented young scientists of a generation about half my age, that are discovering new dinosaurs at the rate of about one per week, describing not only the animals but the environments they lived in, and in books such as this, presenting them to the public.

As the author describes, he has been present to witness or participate in some of the scientific revolutions that produced this comprehensive view of the true "Age of Dinosaurs", which is still going on! The first ones evolved about 243 million years ago, and though they did not become dominant until the latest Triassic or very early Jurassic period, they then remained dominant until the asteroid came along to level the playing field.

So, although today we speak of the "Age of Mammals", and the largest creatures now living are indeed mammals, there are about 5,400 species of mammals now in existence, and slightly more than 10,000 species of birds. We cannot count our modern dinosaurs out; they outnumber mammals two-to-one. And, if you ever tangle with an Emu or Cassowary, you'll get a taste of what life was like for mammals when dinosaurs ruled the land. Though our son was nearly four when he met an Emu willing to be hand fed, I suspect he hasn't forgotten this "dinosaur encounter"!

The author devotes two chapters to the development and life of tyrannosaurs. They are the iconic theropods, and theropods are ancestral to birds. The ultra-famous Tyrannosaurus rex probably had feathers, although it may have had just a smattering of them, the way an elephant or rhino has a few tufts of hair. A large animal doesn't need much insulation from the cold. Interestingly, dynamic analysis of specimens of Tyrannosaurus that were of different ages shows that the younger ones were better runners, while their huge elders were not as fast, and operated more by stealth and ambush. It makes me wonder, though, how well stealth works when you're roughly twice the size of an elephant.

I cannot close without mentioning the many micro-biographies of the people—dinosaur hunters, paleo-ecologists, and others—that have over the past centuries pieced together the evidence for the amazing lives and living of the dinosaurs. The book has a larger "cast" than most novels, and introduces them to us in all their variety (and scientists come in all varieties!).

If you read only one book about dinosaurs this year, read this one.

Sometimes the tornado wins big

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, tornadoes, atmospheric science, meteorology, storm chasers, biographies

I've never chased tornadoes, but I have seen a few. The number is small enough to catalog:

• 1964, August, Cedar Point, Ohio: A squall line spit out seven waterspouts, one after another, that marched out of Sandusky Bay and crossed the Causeway and Chaussee between the amusement park and the city of Sandusky, then dissipated. Waterspouts are seldom stronger than EF0 or EF1.
• 1985, Summer (July?), Rapid City, South Dakota: 4 tornadoes, all probably EF1, touched down in and around the city. I saw two of them. Looking west out my back door, I saw a funnel forming, ran out to take a picture of it, then found it hard to open the door against the wind. My wife called me to the other side of the house. To the northeast, a tornado was on the ground right across the street, tearing up sorghum in my neighbor's field. It was moving east, and no houses were hit. Driving into town the next day, I saw three buildings. Two were untouched; the third, in between the others, had lost its roof, a metal roof which was curled up behind the building. The barbed-wire fence in front of the buildings was full of fiberglass insulation.
• 1990, Summer (August?), Stillwater, Oklahoma: I didn't actually see this one, it was wrapped in rain. I was visiting a friend when my wife phoned to say the tornado siren near our home had gone off—would I please come home? I kidded her, "It sounds like I am safer where I am, but I'll come right now." All the stop lights were not functioning, and nobody else was on the road. As I turned onto the main drag that runs north through town, it began to rain so hard there was soon surf in the middle of the street. When it began to hail, I turned into a parking lot up against a large store, to its south. I tuned to a Tulsa station (the local station was off the air), just in time to hear them say, "We have it on radar, it is crossing Perkins at McElroy." I said to myself, "That is where I am!" The store was on the southeast corner of that intersection. The tornado was actually half a block to my north, taking the top floor from a row of two-story apartment buildings and piling up their A/C units in land to the east. It also broke off a dozen or more power poles around ten feet above ground level, so it was a "skimmer", not quite on the ground yet. I saw all this after the sky cleared, about two minutes after the radio announcement. I made it home safely.
• 1994, June, near Colby, Kansas: We were on our way to Denver from Stillwater. Our son was 7 at the time. Highway I-70 had just hooked northwest, several miles west of Grinnell. Perhaps 10-15 miles ahead we saw a squall line dropping a tornado, which traveled across the road and then dissipated. Another soon followed, and then a third. Then the storm itself broke up. I had slowed down, expecting we might have to stop before getting near the storm. We got to that bit of highway about 15 minutes after the last tornado collapsed and the sky had cleared. There was about a half mile of wet highway, with some torn-up ground on both sides. These were probably EF1 tornadoes. Though that is "weak" compared to the monster EF4 and EF5 storms, an EF1 can still roll a car around until there is too little room left inside for you to stay alive.

What is the tornado scale? The "F" or Fujita Scale was developed by Theodore Fujita in 1971. It was originally a 13-level scale of wind speeds, derived by the formula (V = wind speed in mph):

V = 14.1(F+2)^1.5

Dr. Fujita didn't expect F numbers greater than 5 to ever be used. So far, none has. This formula produces this table of the minimum wind speed for each F number:

• F0 = 40 mph
• F1 = 73 mph
• F2 = 113 mph
• F3 = 158 mph
• F4 = 207 mph
• F5 = 261 mph
• F6 = 319 mph

The "EF" or Enhanced Fujita scale replaced the "F" scale in 2007, with the threshold velocities changed to account for improved research into the kinds of damage caused by various wind speeds. The six thresholds (there is no EF6 or higher) are 65, 85, 110, 135, 165, 200. There is no corresponding formula, but a geometrical analysis indicates to me that a theoretical EF6 region should begin at about 235 or 240 mph and EF7 at about 285-290. This is important for what follows. But let it be said, an EF5 tornado can rip the slab of a house right out of the ground, and even pull some basements up, so there is little point in assigning larger numbers without measurement. When a tornado leaves nothing behind but plowed ground, you're already off the charts!

The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras, by Brantley Hargrove, is a very exciting, fascinating, and ultimately rather sad, biography of Tim Samaras. The author is an excellent journalist, who dug into his subject to the point that he participated in several storm chases with friends of Tim, and witnessed some awesome tornadoes in the process.

Tim Samaras exemplifies the self-educated genius. Classroom study was not for him. With his parents' encouragement, he began taking apart various appliances and electronic devices from an early age. Sometimes he could get them back together. By the time he needed paying work, he was such a valuable instrument inventor and repairman that he was hired in spite of having no college. He cut his professional teeth designing and running instrument packages that could, for example, measure the blast force of two tons of ANFO, the explosive that Timothy McVeigh used to destroy the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 (an explosion I felt from 75 miles away).

Tim was also a weather fanatic, and took to storm chasing very early on, teaching himself the meteorological knowledge he needed to forecast where a storm would produce a tornado—or a row of them—and how powerful they were likely to be. From 1999-2001 he developed the HITPR, the first instrument package to survive a direct hit by a tornado core and record the central pressure and temperature profile. He called it "the turtle"; its shape was designed to hug the ground better and better as the wind grew stronger. Its first success came in 2003 in Manchester, SD.

Other successes followed, in spite that the funding he was able to attract was rather poor compared to some other "professional" groups. He continued to get measurements nobody else could get, right up until the end. This was in part due to his superior forecasting abilities, knowing which way a storm was likely to turn, so he could deploy one or more turtles (or successors thereof) and get out of there alive. In one case, the tornado core hit his device 15 seconds after he had turned it on!

His son Paul became a leading photographer and videographer for his work. Thus it was, that when his on-the-spot forecast was not spot-on, May 31, 2013, near El Reno, OK, he, his son, and a close friend, meteorologist Carl Young, were killed by an EF5 tornado. Its official wind speed, measured by others with radar near the time of his death, was 295 mph. The highest wind speed measured for the El Reno tornado was about 305 mph, the second tornado in history to exceed 300 mph. Here is where my estimates above are meaningful: if there is any meaning to the extrapolation I made, this was really an EF7 tornado, and by the older scale, nearly an F6. At the time Tim was killed, its "core" was 2.3 miles wide. The core is defined as the area within which wind speeds exceed 110 mph, at least for tornadoes EF2 and stronger. To people on the ground and comparatively nearby, who survived, it looked like an upside-down mountain, stuck in the Earth. To anyone closer than about a mile away from its outer edge, it seemed to fill from horizon to horizon, and hang overhead like a rippling cliff.

The following image, clipped from a YouTube video by Dan Robinson, shows the tornado from several miles away. Its visible funnel is "only" about a mile wide at this point, but the smaller funnel to the right is a suction vortex that shows the actual width of the whole storm. This vortex, if I read the book right, was itself moving around and around the core at around 100 mph, and had its own winds in the 150+ mph range. Thus the outer edge of that vortex—or one like it—would be the source of the extreme winds that approached and probably exceeded 300 mph.

Largely due to the work of self-educated engineer Tim Samaras, meteorologists and physicists are puzzling out the workings of these storms that produce most violent winds on Earth. RIP Tim Samaras and Paul Samaras and Carl Young. I am sorry you are gone. May your legacy continue. And much thanks to Brantley Hargrove for bringing their story to us, particularly folks who may never see a tornado for themselves.

2084

kw: book reviews, fiction, social experimentation

Suppose, having committed a minor crime, then a few more (not so minor), you are arrested, and you are presented with a choice: either a year or two of jail time, or a social program titled "Transition". You and your spouse (both must participate) will live in the home of a Mentor couple who will retrain your life skills, with full expectation that you and said spouse will emerge as contributing members of society, rather than a drain upon it.

That is the premise of The Transition by Luke Kennard. The protagonist, Karl, has sort of stumbled into a life of credit card fraud to make ends meet. When the personal Ponzi scheme falls apart, he takes the chance to avoid overt jail time by committing himself and his wife Genevieve to The Transition.

I could summarize the plot, but why try? The pendulum-swing of society has produced a generation some call the Millennials. A certain proportion of them are heedless, unambitious, and were "raised" to expect things to work out, even as society has swayed so as to stack the deck against them. Allow me to say that the majority of Millennials are quite a bit more savvy than either Karl or Genevieve (though Genevieve is portrayed as having more street smarts). But I can think of a number of young adults who might actually benefit from The Transition, were it to operate as advertised.

Of course, what is the point of writing a big novel if things work as advertised? There is a subversive element, graduates and non-graduates of Transition, and of course Karl gets involved. It seems he finds a streak of ambition hidden within, and his ambition is to bring the system down. Do you think it can work? Look at the title I chose for this post for your answer!

Poetry Postscript

kw: continuation reviews, nonfiction, poems, poetry, reading

Speak of a mental block! In yesterday's review I utterly forgot to mention a most valuable bit of the author's advice. First among several points he makes is one I was taught when a child: Read a poem the first time, aloud, as if it were not a poem. Do not sing-song the rhythm, but read it sentence by sentence. Indeed, the author of How to Read Poetry Like a Professor (Thomas C. Foster) says in a few places that the unit of thought and feeling in a poem is not the line, but the sentence. For some poems, it can be hard to determine where a sentence ends, but it is usually no problem. Try it out with this, presented not in poetic lines, but as though it were prose:

If you must love me, let it be for nought except for love's sake only. Do not say, "I love her for her smile—her look—her way of speaking gently; for a trick of thought that falls in well with mine, and doubtless brought a sense of pleasant ease on such a day." For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may be changed, or change for you; and love, so wrought, may be unwrought so. Neither love me for your own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry; a creature might forget to weep, who bore your comfort long, and lose your love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore you may love on, through love's eternity.

There you go, five sentences, though if you replace the semicolons with full stops it comes to seven. I took slight liberties with this, to update certain grammar elements and punctuation marks, for the poet preferred a comma-dash (,—) to a semicolon, for example. Doing so, I did not disturb the meter.

Perhaps you know enough of poetry to recognize the meter when read aloud, that it is iambic pentameter, the rhythm de rigueur for sonnets. Can you then tease out the fourteen lines? Yet there are not fourteen thoughts here, just five. The discipline of putting such emotions into sonnet form induce the poet to compress the expression. Here is a scan of the page I 'translated':

A very few people might recognize this as one of the Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is the 1902 edition. The 44 sonnets therein are among the great classics of English-language literature. I daresay, if you've never read them before, that reading this sonnet first in the sentence-by-sentence way, you will enjoy it more than you might have had you first read the scan, and you may find it enjoyable to get a copy of the book (it is still reprinted). Or, if you like lighter fare, perhaps you could instead get When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne, who is best known for Winnie-The-Pooh. Milne wrote some of the most recitable poems I know (also still in print; my copy is the 1945 edition, my very first book).

Making poetry accessible

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, poems, poetry, reading

While we lived in Oklahoma, from 1986 to 1995, we were members of the Stillwater Gem and Mineral Society. For part of 1994 I edited their monthly journal, The Rockhound Gazette. In the July 1994 issue I placed a little ditty I had written, shown here. About the end of the year, much to my surprise, the regular editor, Ruby Lingelbach, presented me with a plaque and award letter! She had entered the "poem" in some sort of contest at a conference of the Rocky Mountain Federation of Mineralogical Societies. It won first place.

So, can I call myself a "prize winning poet"? Just maybe!

For the aficionado, the meter is Trochaic Heptameter followed by an unaccented syllable, a 15-syllable line. That is rare for "ordinary" poetry, but is a meter useful in song. In fact, were I to add an appropriate chorus after the second and fourth verses, it could be sung to "O! Susanna".

You're not an aficionado? No worries. You can get a bit of grounding in such matters in How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse, by Thomas C. Foster.

Now, maybe you don't want to read poetry "like a professor". After all, when I read a poem, I don't really want it to be hanged, drawn and quartered and dragged to the four winds. I just want to enjoy it. I suspect most folks are the same.

Frequently, knowing a bit can help us enjoy a poem more. In this book, should it interest you, you can indeed learn a few things about drawing out more of the meaning the poet put in there. The author covers a lot of ground, from the way a poem strikes both eye and ear (much poetry is intended to be heard), to the various structures the poem or the lines might have – including whether there are rhymes; and the matters of symbols and symbolism. Although, on that latter point, it is well to remember what Sigmund Freud said about symbols in psychology, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

I am glad I had a few years of classical education before starting public school, even though the level of poetical understanding I got was rather basic. So I know that the word "iamb" is a trochee, and "trochee" is an iamb; that is, both are two-syllable "feet", but an iamb trips along with the emphasis on the second syllable while the trochee resembles a heartbeat, "LUB dub". The other two sorts of common poetic feet actually sound their meaning: "dactylic" is emphasized like "pówdery", while "anapest" is emphasized like "underfóot".

I have often said that a poem needs structure, and if it has "neither rhyme nor reason [rhythm]", it isn't poetry. The author shows how some "free verse" isn't as free as we might think, having structure just as rigid as a sonnet (with its 14 lines of 10 syllables in primarily iambic meter, in 8- and 6-line sections). However, he concedes that there is a huge amount of "bad" verse of any kind we might imagine, and for free verse in particular, it frequently differs from plain prose only in having the lines broken off short. So I continue in my belief that, if it can't be chanted or sung, it is probably not a poem.

However, read the book and judge for yourself. Perhaps if you tend to avoid poetry, you'll find it more enjoyable in the future. A fun read, this book!

Stories rocks tell

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geology, geologists

I was in college 14 years, educated mainly in geology. Funny thing: graduate school ruined geology for me as a profession. So I returned to rockhounding as a hobby, and earned my keep by writing software for geologists and other sciences; I had enough classwork in the "hard" sciences to get majors or minors in them all. But reading the writing of Professor Donald R. Prothero made me nostalgic for what might have been. However, I judge that Dr. Prothero is quite a bit more talented than I in big-picture geology, and the long shelf of his books on the subject attests to that. The oldest book of his currently on sale, a major textbook, Interpreting the Stratigraphic Record, published in 1990, still sells for about $128.

Today's book, however, is much more accessible (and less costly!) than the text: The Story of the Earth in 25 Rocks: Tales of Important Geological Puzzles and the People Who Solved Them. (That's not the longest title I've seen, but it is close.) We can take the word "Rocks" in the title rather loosely, since one chapter is on the San Andreas Fault, all 800 miles of it, and another is the first stratigraphic sequence and the first geologic map, produced by William Smith in England in the early 1800's. However, actual rocks aplenty are dealt with, from tiny zircons used to determine the ages of ancient rocks to meteorites, coal and the tin oxide mineral Cassiterite that led to the "tin can" and "tinfoil", before aluminum (aluminium to the English) became cheap enough to replace tin.

This is the story of the earth, after all. The stories of the rocks are secondary to the earth processes they reveal. The San Andreas fault, seen here where it crosses Carrizo Plain National Monument about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, is flanked by rocks that can be matched up across it. Except "across" is a flexible term: the rocks found on the left (SW) side in this photo from Wikipedia match up with rocks found on the right (NE) side about 200 miles further south, northeast of San Diego. The chapter on transform faults, near the end of the book, which uses the San Andreas as its poster child, reveals how such faults fit into the puzzle of large-scale tectonic movements that we now call Plate Tectonics. Other chapters use other rocks and rock phenomena (such as magnetism) to bring together other pieces of this biggest of earthly puzzles.

Going to the opposite end of the size spectrum, the tiny crystals in this photomicrograph, of a field of view just 2 mm wide, are zircon crystals, extracted by dissolving a piece of granite pegmatite (granite with large crystals) with hydrofluoric acid. The image is from this publication by Thomas E. Krogh et. al. on ResearchGate.

Zircons are very valuable geologically because they often contain most of the uranium found in granite and similar igneous rocks, and their robust structure keeps all the daughter elements from uranium's breakdown, so that measurements of the ratio of uranium to lead can tell you the age of the zircon, and thus of the rock it came from. Beware, though: zircon crystals are also found in sedimentary rocks, and do not tell you the age of those rocks, but the age of the rocks in which they first formed. As long as you know this, they are still useful. You just need to know what you are doing.

Just by-the-by, the oldest piece of rock found on Earth is a tiny zircon crystal with an age of 4.4 billion years. The half-lives of U-238 and U-235 are 4.5 and 0.7 billion years, respectively. The final product of U-238 is Pb-206, and that of U-235 is Pb-207. Thus, since the time that ancient crystal was formed, nearly half its U-238 turned to Pb-206, and all but 1.3% of the U-235 turned to Pb-207. A zircon that contains more atoms of lead than of uranium is going to be very old.

The overarching theme of the book is the gradual development of the foundational "sphere" of Earth System science (Geosphere, Hydrosphere, Atmosphere, Biosphere, in decreasing order of mass). When I was a child the development of mountain ranges was explained as the wrinkling of a thin "skin" (Earth's crust) as the planet shrank while it cooled. The analogy was made to an uneaten apple that gets wrinkly as it dries out. When I first took an Earth Science course in high school, there was talk of orogeny (mountain building) as being a side product of geosynclines, based primarily on vertical motions. I do recall someone remarking that the coastlines of Africa and South America seemed to match, and I first heard of "continental drift" at that time, maybe just before 1960. Only after I became a geology major (my third major) in 1970 did I learn of plate tectonics, in which the continents don't just "drift" but are moved along by a "conveyor belt" system, riding in the midst of enormous basaltic plates, driven by a combination of sea-floor spreading at diverging plate boundaries and subduction at converging plate boundaries. Now the analogy is a pot full of thick syrup with a sugary crust on top, heated from the bottom so it convects slowly, moving chunks of the crust about.

At one point or another, every chapter of this book ties back to the plate tectonic system. And why not? It is the whole-Earth process that literally creates geology. To see a planet without tectonic motions, look at Mars. The early loss of that planet's water and 99.4% of its atmosphere pretty much halted major erosion, so that we see a 3-4-billion-year-old landscape with two major kinds of features: one very big canyon (and a few smaller ones), formed as the last of the waters dried up, and a few enormous volcanoes, three times the height of Mount Everest. Oh, and there is a scattering of impact craters gathered over the past few billion years; though there are many, they are much less abundant than craters on the Moon, because Mars did have an eroding atmosphere and hydrosphere for its first billion years or so.

At present, back here on Earth, the Himalayas, the Sierras, the Andes and a few other ranges are growing, the Rockies and Urals are at a standstill, and other ranges such as the Appalachians are eroding away. New features replace old features. This will continue, though at a slightly decreased rate, until the Sun becomes a red giant, and perhaps longer. In another 4.5 billion years, half the present amount of uranium will be gone, and only 8% of the present amount of the radioactive isotope of potassium (K-40) will remain. Crank these figures backward, and we find that radiogenic heating was six times as great as it is now about 4 billion years ago (4Ga in geologist-speak). So plate tectonics rocked along quite a lot faster when Earth was young.

I was rather charmed to notice that most of the photos in the book are credited to Wikimedia Commons. It is now possible to write a book like this one without spending months writing letters to people who might have photos of things you want to illustrate, and permission to use them. However, there are a few other signs of rapid production that caused me a bit of concern. No author should be without a good copy editor, as these three examples (only a few of a dozen or so) attest:

• Page 80, first paragraph: discussing Lord Kelvin's estimate of 100 million years as "the time since the Cambrian", it is stated that this is off by "a factor of almost 50". The Cambrian era began a little more than 500 million years ago, so a factor of 5 would then be the correct one. However, looking up what Kelvin actually wrote, I find that he considered 100 million years to be the age since the Earth cooled from a molten state. Here, the actual factor should indeed be something like 45. So the mention of the Cambrian is the actual error. One's copy editor must know something about the science, not just English usage.
• Page 130, Figure 12.4, a photo of the 4.4 Ga zircon I mentioned above, called a "microphotograph." No, it is a photomicrograph. A microphotograph is what you find in microfilm, where a page of text is rendered to a size of about 1 cm, or even in a "spy dot", in which the page is reduced to 1 mm. A photograph of something through a microscope is a photomicrograph. The error is common, but should not be found in a book by a scientist of this stature.
• Page 221, last paragraph: discussing the news reporter's adage, "If it bleeds, it leads", except in this instance, the word is spelled "ledes". That's one of several dramatic misspellings I found.

OK, I just had to scratch that itch.

Of most importance is the content. This book is a must-read by anyone with the slightest curiosity about the "solid" Earth, about rocks, about how mountains are formed, or about earthquakes. Dr. Prothero is an engaging writer, thoroughly fun to read, who imparts a great lot of information quite painlessly. We need more such teachers among us.

A Spanish spider?

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Well, looky here! While I was writing the prior post, someone in Spain took a look at 116 pages in this blog, in just a few minutes:

The little one-page ticks—I see four—represent my "real" readership.

Time from some new angles

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, time, cultural history

I have thought and thought, and I just don't know how to approach Timekeepers by Simon Garfield. That is to say, I have no clever approach; no warm, fuzzy stories; no chuckle-inducing anecdotes.

The book is about the experience of time. Within, the author reacts to our steadily increasing overscheduling. He also journeys to some special places where time is perhaps a commodity, or contrariwise, something to be largely ignored.

The two chapters that most appealed to my inner geek were "Horology Part One: How to Make a Watch" and "Horology Part Two: How to Sell the Time". In the first, the author visited the one Swiss watch factory that allows you to do this: At IWC (formerly International Watch Company), for a (hefty) fee, you can remove a portion of an assembled watch, 17 parts, and then put them back in again. You are at a desk with an intimidating array of tools for handling the tiny parts such as screws about the size of a poppy seed. The portions you get to "play with" were originally assembled by a craftsman who routinely puts them in within a quarter of an hour or so. You are given about an hour. The author took longer.

In the second, back in his English home, the author ruminates on the rapturous language used to engage the interest of the sort of person who just might be in the market for a watch costing as much as a rather good auto. We are not talking about the TAG Heuer watches that are advertised in certain mens' magazines for a few thousand dollars (or pounds sterling). These are in the £20,000 and up class, topping out in the £200,000 range (in dollars, that's about $26,000 to $260,000). An example, from an email:

Franc Vila is pleased to present you the RV EVOS 18 Cobra Suspended Skeleton in texalium...

Yeah, I didn't know what texalium is either, so I had to look it up. It is a woven carbon fiber product, perhaps similar to the stuff they use to make high-end golf club shafts. The Franc Vila website is revealing…and contains lots of zeroes. Here is a picture of the watch in question. Would you pay $20,000+ for it?

But all this is just one aspect of time. There is a chapter on tempi (tempos for the non-musical). Beethoven had his own ideas about the meanings of words such as Lento, Adagio, Allegro and so forth. So, just how long "should" it take to perform the Ninth Symphony? Recent recordings, presumably being played at the speed they were recorded, mostly range from 62:30 to just under 70 minutes, and then there is the outlier: Leonard Bernstein conducting the Ninth at the Berlin Wall in 1989, in nearly 82 minutes. Would Beethoven have been happy with any of these? Possibly, but he was famously cantankerous and, given modern recording equipment (and a miraculous hearing aid), he just might insist on re-recording it "his" way.

Well, there are 15 chapters, including a long final one on a few time-involved sections of the British Museum. These days, museums, including the one I work at, tend to focus a lot on time sequences, particularly when geology is involved. After all, rocks range in age from almost-right-now, such as a recently crystallized mineral specimen from a briny lake, to just under 4.4 billion years ancient. Even an art museum will typically have the date a work was produce on a card nearby, and certain halls are arranged chronologically, particularly if a featured artist went through "periods".

Look at your wrist. Does time have a handcuff on you? The first wristwatch was produced in 1812. The first "affordable" watch came nearly 100 years later. Are we the better for it? Simon Garfield would say a definite "Maybe, maybe not." He did manage to find one culture, the Inuit, who have a language without "time" in it, and the people live by the skies and the seasons. Not bad work if you can get it.

Climate Change or Climate Forcing...redux

kw: musings, greenhouse effect, greenhouse warming, global warming, climate change, climatology, analysis

When I wrote a book review on the subject of climate change a few days ago, I had something in mind, but the review went in a different direction. The title actually didn't fit any more. Here are charts I made to illustrate my thinking on the terminology about "carbon pollution" and all the hype surrounding it, on both sides. Firstly, an nGram of the usage of three popular terms since 1970:

Although warming caused by the greenhouse effect, in particular that caused by carbon dioxide, was quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, only after about 1970 was it brought to public attention. The great promotion of this issue really took off after 1985. This nGram shows that, in print at least, "Greenhouse Effect" was soon superseded by "Climate Change" and "Global Warning". But let's focus on a different term and its scientific synonym:

You can see from the upper chart that the term "Climate Forcing" has been scarcely a blip on the radar. But on the scale of the lower chart we see that about the time "Greenhouse Effect" peaked, "Climate Forcing" began to surge (relatively speaking), and shortly after that, "Anthropogenic Climate Change", a more scientific synonym, came along, but it is quite a mouthful.

It is a pity that Google stopped scanning books in 2008. I'd like to see how these words have fared in these past ten years. Nonetheless, I did a Google search for all these terms and a few others I've thought of in the past day or two (put in quotes to force literal searching), setting the search time to the past year, here is how they score:

• 7 - Anthropogenic Climate (allows "change" or other following words): 488,000
• 8 - Anthropogenic Climate Change: 478,000
• 6 - Carbon Pollution: 523,000
• 1 - Climate Change: 147,000,000
• 9 - Climate Forcing: 366,000
• 4 - Climate Science: 2,310,000
• 5 - Climate Warming: 975,000
• 2 - Global Warming: 56,600,000
• 3 - Greenhouse Effect: 4,360,000
• 10 - Greenhouse Warming: 295,000

The number preceding each term is its rank in this alphabetized list.

Why do people use the words they use? Impact. "Climate Change" and "Global Warming" get the public's attention. But the actual debate is not really about whether climate is changing or the globe (i.e. its atmosphere) is warming. It is about the extent that human civilization contributes to the change or the warming. However, "Anthropo..whatever" is too much of a mouthful, and "Climate Forcing" doesn't have quite the ring of the more popular terms.

But: Climate Forcing is really the best term about which to have a policy debate. The atmospheric climate will change gradually over time, whether the human race is highly civilized or goes extinct. Prior to 1975, the big worry about "Climate Change" was about "Global Cooling". A cooling trend highlighted by the first 15-18 years of weather satellite measurements triggered fears of a new ice age. And we find that the recent Solar Maximum had lower sunspot activity than most prior cycles. Based on historical records, this could indicate a cooling trend because lower solar activity heats the Earth's atmosphere less than average. Sunspot numbers are an indicator (not a cause) of the number of flares and other phenomena that send extra energy our way.

So, how big a factor is Climate Forcing? Let's call the Climate Forcing Factor the CFF. The way the media report things, one group called "climate deniers" would say the CFF is close to zero. In the same media, a group called "established science" claims the CFF is "most" or "nearly all" of the difference, in the range 50%-90%. Putting aside my conviction that the media are rather incredibly biased, we can instead identify the poles of the debate as "Large CFF" and "Small CFF" factions. Who is right? Do we have a way to know?

We don't, actually! But we can dig out an indication or two.

This article in ScienceDirect states that variations in sunspot activity account for about 40% of long term temperature rise in Norway over the past century, with a probable range of 25-56%. For a different portion of the North Atlantic, the range is 63-72%. This ought to please the Large CFF folks.

Remember the ozone hole? Starting about 30 years ago colleagues of mine at DuPont determined the great amount of damage being caused to the ozone layer some 15 miles (~25 km) overhead, and this triggered research efforts at DuPont and other chemical companies to find new refrigerants for air conditioners and new propellants for aerosol cans. The ozone "hole" was a dramatic thinning of this layer mainly over Antarctica, but spreading halfway to the equator, and there was a similar, but smaller thinning over the Arctic. But we need to be clear: the "ozone layer" isn't pure ozone; it is where ozone is concentrated to a level of about one part in 100,000 (0.001%); it is still mostly nitrogen. Ozone at sea level is around 1/30th of this, about 1/3,000,000th. Chlorine from refrigerants and propellants in use before 1980 had reduced the level of ozone over the poles by about 2/3, and elsewhere by about 20%. "Ozone hole" is the dramatic term that refers to the reduction of ozone from 1/100,000 to 1/300,000 over Antarctica during the southern summer.

Ozone is funny stuff. It is created from oxygen by ultraviolet light (UV), and then it absorbs UV, which heats it up. So the more ozone, the more the atmosphere is heated from the top. Specifically, at subtropical latitudes, surface temperature averages about 300K (27°C or 81°F), while 15 km (9½ mi) above, air temperature has fallen to about 200K (-73°C or -100°F). Ozone and other stratospheric gases absorb UV and some IR to raise the temperature back to 300K by about 50 km (30 mi) altitude. This warm gas in the mid- to upper stratosphere emits thermal radiation (longwave infrared) both upwards and downwards, which heats the air below a little. The gradual increase in stratospheric ozone levels over the past 30 years have contributed a little heating, but I have not found a rigorous analysis of the matter. "About a degree" is a general statement I have read. This is a factor that tends to please the Small CFF folks.

These things indicate that the CFF is unlikely to be greater than 50%, and is probably closer to 25% or less. I would not say, "close to zero", so I am not in the extreme Small CFF crowd, but neither do I favor Large CFF. As I have stated elsewhere, I learned that if we were to raise carbon dioxide levels to, say, ten times their present level, the amount of greenhouse heating would not exceed 4°C or about 7°F. That is quite significant. Is it enough to end civilization? I don't think so, but it will definitely change it. We are unlikely to find out, though. If we were to burn all the fossil fuels that we currently know about, it would no more than double the amount of carbon dioxide that we have already emitted. That's another way of saying that we have already burned about half the global reserve of fossil fuels. In rough terms, it means we have so far doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide, from around 200 ppm to around 400 ppm. Once we run out of natural gas, oil and coal—should we continue freely burning them—the level could become around 600 ppm. I don't think we have enough fossil fuel available to push that to 1,000 ppm, where some people begin to feel the effects.

For all that, we must continue to find other sources of energy, on all fronts. No source of energy is perfect. Wind farms (currently 4% of global electricity generation) disturb wind patterns, heat the air that passes through the fan blades, and kill migrating birds; solar panels turn about 15-20% of sunlight into solar energy and the rest is turned into heat, and much of this would be in desert areas where the sand usually reflects 75% of the light right back out into space; geothermal energy is "clean" from a heat perspective, because the heat will emerge from the earth anyway, but using geothermal energy causes pollution of surface water and ground water, a whole lot of pollution; and so forth. The more we learn about all these things, the better we can select energy generation methods that cause the least harm. That, and that alone, will reduce the CFF. It will probably never be zero, until human population is zero.

Postscript: Do you know what the global average temperature is? I am a geophysicist. Including the whole planet, the average temperature is about 4,000K (over 7,000°F). We need a different term for "global average atmospheric temperature", and we need to always specify at what elevation; is it surface, or at the average elevation of continental plains (about half or 2/3 a kilometer), or some other "standard" height?

Climate change or climate forcing?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, astrobiology, exoplanets, climatology, climate change, global warming

Do we need to save the planet? It doesn't need it. Do we need to save the biosphere? We don't yet have the power to end it. Do we need to save civilization? Probably. This last is the question taken up by Adam Frank in Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. He takes a new approach, you could say a Galactic approach, even a Universal approach, to setting parameters around the future of human civilization.

Dr. Frank uses a quieter tone than the noisy polemicists in the toils of public debate. He is nonetheless speaking as a prophet, warning us all of the consequences of the greatest of human endeavors, "the project of civilization." I found it notable that he never mentions the IPCC Reports. This is not to say that he doesn't give them any credence, but he is preaching to the unconverted: I learned long ago, in Christian evangelism, it does no good to quote Bible verses to someone who doesn't believe the Bible. Similarly, the content and methods behind the IPCC's work are challenged at every point by "climate deniers", so it is no use appealing to those reports.

In this book the author begins with Carl Sagan's metaphor of Western civilization as a teenager, grown up in body but not in judgement. Here in the US at least, we give 15- or 16-year-olds licenses, and the keys, to drive automobiles, knowing full well that their minds won't mature, and they will have very poor impulse control, for at least ten more years. So, at the very least, we in the First World are like a teenager with the keys to the energy sources of Planet Earth, and we have shown an utterly insatiable appetite for more and more energy use. This chart is instructive:

This shows energy use per person (credit: Our Finite World). The technology to mine and use coal jump-started the nascent Industrial Revolution in about 1850. Petroleum and Natural Gas triggered a further jump beginning right after World War I, which was stalled by the Depression, and then re-invigorated by World War II. The "flat spot" from about 1970-2000 is the effect of the Arab Oil Embargo. I suspect the development of Fracking to rejuvenate oil production in non-Arab nations is responsible for the jump after 2000.

So now we use four times as much energy per person as someone in 1820. That is a global average. Per-person use in the First World is in the 250-300 GJ/yr range, or 3-4 times the global average. So that is our "car". It has a lot of horsepower.

The question Sagan asked, based on figures from the 1960's, is, "Can the Earth provide the needs of human civilization, forever?" To abolish poverty worldwide, we'd need to roughly triple global resource use, particularly energy use. But we are seeing "cracks in the wall" already. Someone once said, to raise the entire population to the American level would require four more Earths.

What is Adam Frank's line of analysis? He continues with the Drake Equation, formulated in 1961,
that uses several factors to estimate the number of alien civilizations we might find using efforts such as SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, which uses radio frequency reception, in hopes of overhearing the alien version of "I Love Lucy". He dissects this for us and then presents the uses of a method developed by Svante Arrhenius, 122 years ago, to determine how much the earth will warm based on how much extra carbon dioxide gets into the atmosphere. "Climate science" is not new stuff, folks!

The Arrhenius method doesn't just work on Earth. It was used to understand what happened to Venus, to raise its temperature to 600°F, and why Mars is a bit warmer than it would be without any atmosphere, though daytime highs in its "Tropics" range around -10°F. Mars and Venus both have an atmosphere containing 95% carbon dioxide. Venus has a very, very heavy atmosphere while the air on Mars is very thin, about 1% of Earth-normal. But our air contains, at present, 400 ppm CO₂, or 0.04%. Martian air with enough nitrogen added to have the density of Earthly air would still have 0.95% CO₂, nearly 24 times as much! So the temperature range on, for example, airless Phobos, compared to that on Mars, validates the Arrhenius analysis for a CO₂-induced greenhouse effect (yes, Phobos is colder).

After presenting the history of exoplanet discoveries—a few thousand are now known—the author turns the Drake Equation on its head, to determine the "Pessimism Line". That is his term for how pessimistic you need to be to say we are surely alone in the Universe: Knowing that the stars in all the galaxies range in age up to 10+ billion years, and that there are about 100 billion stars in each of 100 billion galaxies (or perhaps even more) in the visible Universe, how pessimistic do you have to be to strongly aver that our Human civilization is the first and (so far) only civilization to have arisen in the Universe?

In 1961 the only factor of 7 in the Drake Equation that was known was the rate of star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy, about one per year. All the other terms were speculative, and all possible values of, for example, the chance that a planet will be at a "just right" distance from its star (in the habitable zone), were strongly supported by various people. You could find someone who'd argue that the probability was close to zero; someone else who'd argue that any star that had planets probably had at least one in the habitable zone. Now, with a few thousand known exoplanets, we know that nearly every star has multiple planets, and about 40% of those have at least one planet in the habitable zone. So the unknown terms are:

• Can life form easily, or not?
• Once formed, can life develop "intelligent" species easily, or is it very hard?
• Is the likelihood that an intelligent species will form a global civilization large, or small? and 
• Once formed, how long will such a civilization continue?

By turning all this around backwards, the combination of these "biological" and "sociological" terms needed to make it very unlikely that more than one civilization has ever been formed, was found to be 10^-22. That is one in ten billion trillion. This is a quantitative estimate of how hostile the Universe must be to civilization, for us to be alone in all space and time (to date). Effectively, this analysis presents you with a pile of sand, a trillion tons of it, containing ten billion trillion grains, and asks, "Knowing that at least one sand grain represents a civilization in the Universe, how likely is it that no other grain of sand represents a planet with a civilization? Not one single one?"

For most of us, the thought that civilization arose only once in ten billion trillion attempts is rather ludicrous. Even Peter Ward with his Rare Earth analysis, is probably not that pessimistic!

Dr. Frank then goes further, asking, "What does it take for a civilization to be sustainable, very long-term?" Numerous isolated and semi-isolated civilizations on Earth have risen and fallen. It seems even Earth, so hospitable to life of many kinds, can he hostile to civilizations…or, at least, unforgiving of egregious errors. Further, civilizations that fell, did so quickly. The environmental disasters, caused by the Easter Islanders and the Mayans all doing what people do to have a thriving society, reduced populations to about one tenth of what had once been in just one or two generations. Even today, there are fewer Mayans than there were in 1200 AD. These are two examples of civilizations that fell not because of conquest by someone else, but at their own hand. Two cases of a teenager driving right off a cliff.

The book closes with an appeal to wake up and grow up. It would be well to heed it. To my understanding, no civilization yet produced on Earth has figured out the trick to sustaining itself without perpetual growth. In the US, a growing GDP is required for a "robust" economy. The US government recently announced a 4.1% annual growth rate (that really means 0.335% growth for that particular month). It is good in a way. But if it keeps up, we can project it into the future: In just 17 years, GDP would double, and it would keep doubling again every 17 years. By 2100 AD the US GDB would be 27 times what it is today. What chance is there of that happening? Hmmm??

Suppose we finally get the analysis right, and find out that, for human civilization on Earth to be sustainable for 100, or 1,000, or 10,000 years, we would have to reduce our population to at most two billion, and the general lifestyle and level of energy expenditure (both personal and corporate) would need to match that of Peru (about ¼ of what us Americans are used to)? Then what? I'll tell you what: whatever the actual level of lifestyle really is, in time the biosphere will enforce it.

We are not divorced from Earth. We cannot act as though we were not part of nature. Nature can get along without us. We cannot get along without nature. Civilization is an experiment. It may be one that eventually fails. The Pessimism Line only tells us how unlikely it is that we are on the only planet to develop civilizations. It doesn't tell us how long they last. That part of the Drake Equation is still entirely unknown.

I would put it this way: If there is any chance for a global civilization to develop and thrive, and properly care for all its members, without constant growth in both population and standard of living, we need to figure that out right away. Or we, too, will crash, just a bigger version of the Mayans or Easter Island.

Librarians with superpowers

kw: book reviews, fantasy, mysteries, librarians, dragons, fairies

Genevieve Cogman's fourth novel of the Invisible Library series, The Lost Plot, introduced me to her writing. She knows how to write a page-turner. I wasn't sure when I checked the book out whether it was SciFi or Fantasy—the local library doesn't differentiate; they tag both genres with a "fantasy" logo, which I consider a bit snobbish. It soon became clear; however, the author's worlds have consistent rules, making this a lot more satisfying to a logical mind than most fantasy.

The Invisible Library (IL) seems to be located in a realm between worlds, in a kind of multiverse. Worlds such as ours have little or no magic, others have more, and some are "too magical", being chaotic. The IL operates portals between worlds, or portals between the Library and all worlds. The portals have at least some time-shifting abilities also. A Librarian can traverse the portals, and indeed, create a portal when surrounded by a large enough number of books. I gather that the Librarians are in the business of gathering the best literature from all worlds, and cross-pollinating. They also act as a buffer between the Dragons and the Fae (presumably a less fraught word than "Fairy" in the current sociopolitical climate), powerful and opposed forces, that control numerous worlds of their own, and can move between them more freely than humans.

Both Dragons and Fae are shapeshifters. I am not sure why either a Dragon or a Fae would take human form. It makes writing about them easier, I suppose. Their rivalry is strong and bitter, yet they seem to "play fair", according to rules only dimly revealed in the book. Each player, Dragon, Fae, and Human, has powers they can wield. One Human power is the language called Librarian. It evokes magic in any world, and is most effective in worlds with little or none of their own, such as ours. Some of the thrill points of the book focus on efforts by one or another Dragon or Fae to keep Irene silent so she can't speak Librarian to do such things as escape capture or injure opponents.

The book's plot (not the "lost" one), revolves around two high-ranking Dragons who, faced with a quest that can make or break their clans, begin to flout the rules. This can damage whole worlds, and also imperils the IL, which alarms the ruling Dragons and Fae both…once they find out about it.

Making the transgressions known to a particular Dragon Queen becomes the onus of Irene Winters, the heroine of the story, and a Dragon named Kai, her apprentice (although no Dragon takes the Librarians' Oath to become a full Librarian).

The flow of the plot reminds me of the Perils of Pauline books and similar stories, with one cliff-hanger after another. It is basically a series of exercises in keeping unbearable forces in (or near) balance. The writing is so entertaining that I recognized the transparency only in hindsight. And, by the way, I never figured out what Plot had been Lost. Considering that both terms have multiple meanings, perhaps that's for the best. Now, if only I can figure out how to get superpowers from being surrounded by books, as I am at this desk!

Spiders on both sides

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Just a couple of days ago I noticed a new set of spidering hits. This stat summary taken shortly after 5:00 pm Eastern time shows it was just getting started. 588 hits in a single day (and today may be greater; it isn't over yet) is about 15x my usual traffic. This is a one week view, as the top image was on the prior post. (and see below)

This time I checked the specialty panes for the past week rather than the past day. Although the week's traffic is just slightly U.S. heavy, the prior day's traffic is perhaps 60% Russia. I'm showing the tech panes also. I haven't heard of "Headless Chrome" before. It seems to be a preferred mode for automated browsing, but clearly not the only one. Oh, well, on to the book review I came in here to write…

Sporadic spidering this time

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

In the past month or so, amidst ordinary days in which this most modest of blogs gets 30-50 hits daily, a spike in Russian interest pushes that to 100-150 on a particular day, in the space of a few minutes. Clearly a robot or spider at work. This time, there is a series of sporadic spikes over the past few days:

The lesser spikes on the 27th and 30th are mildly interesting, but the past 24 hours is what caught my eye. And as the lower left pane shows, the interest is spread out over posts from the past several years. Now, the "Audience" pane for the past week isn't quite as clear as the one for the past 24 hours:

I had hit the "More" button next to the map on the screen above, and changed the time to the past day. Now we see that, while the rest of the world slouches along as usual (even a hit from Fiji and one from Japan!), someone in the U.S. and someone in Russia each ran a spider that Hoovered up close to 200 pages in a matter of minutes. Probably one of the big spikes is the U.S. one, and the other is the Russian one.

My wife watched as I assembled this post, something she almost never does. She remarked, "Most of that is just people getting a random hit from a search for something else." My thoughts also. I have no idea why my blog, or any other, would periodically get heavy attention from any one entity...let alone two of them.

Finally! Food advice from someone who knows what he is talking about

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, nutrition, medical studies, advice

The apostle Paul wrote to the Colossians, "Why … do you subject yourselves to ordinances: Do not handle, nor taste, nor touch, (Regarding things which are all to perish when consumed) …?" He went on to say that "such things indeed have a reputation of wisdom", but were otherwise without value. He was writing about asceticism, which infected the early church within a matter of months after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and to some extent the infection remains to this day.

A similar infection is found in the secular world, with prohibitions about many, many things. In particular, food prohibitions are rampant. Food, as a necessity, comes right behind air and water. For most of us, the time spent obtaining food and groceries, cooking, eating, and cleaning up must add up to at least a couple hours a day. And, wouldn't you know it, everybody seems to have advice about food.

I have no idea how many "weight loss" diets there are, but health.com ranks 38 of them on this page! Then we also find multitudes of shrieking voices from all sides, "Meat is poison!", "Salt kills!", "Eggs are heart-attack pills!", and on and on and on. There must be at least 100 holier-than-thou stances on food that is healthy (or not), moral (or not!), or meets one or another standard of "sustainability".

Let's face it. Humans are omnivores. We can eat anything that was once alive, and a few things that never lived (like salt). Hmm…strike out "that was once alive": raw oysters live a little while in the stomach, as do swallowed goldfish. And come to think of it, when you eat a piece of fruit or other raw vegetable, it is still alive. We can eat anything living or recently dead.

But just to drive the point home: one of our closest evolutionary cousins, the Gorilla, is a strict herbivore. Gorillas are vegans. They eat leaves, and they have very long bowels for their size. They also ruminate, even though they don't have a rumen like a cow or deer or sheep does. I have watched a large male gorilla spend an hour or so eating leaves and stems. Then he brought up a mouthful of "stomach gunk", spat it in his hand and looked at it (I also looked; it looked like greenish feces), then put it back in his mouth and chewed it for a while. After swallowing, he brought up another mouthful and the performance continued, presumably all afternoon. I went on to observe other primates after watching a half hour of rumination. A gorilla has a huge pot belly. They are adapted to eating food with few usable calories, even after rumination, so they have to eat lots and lots of it. By contrast, a wolf or lion has a much shorter bowel. They eat only meat. Meat has many more calories per ounce than a diet of leaves, even leaves of delicious Romaine or Kale (eaten raw). A short gut is sufficient to get most of the caloric value from a meat diet.

Humans, bears, and other omnivores have bowels of middling length. The human small intestine is around 20 feet (6m) long, and the large intestine is about 5 feet (1.5m) long. Though a male gorilla weighs about twice as much as a man, its "small" intestine is 60-70 feet (18-20m) long and its large intestine is also longer than ours, plus larger in diameter. That's what it takes to eat leaves, even the tender, choice leaves the Gorilla selects.

OK, on to the book of the week: The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully, by Aaron Carroll, MD, a pediatrician who got into nutrition and education because so many parents asked him how to feed their children. He didn't just look up "received wisdom", but dug into the subject. The more he looked, the more surprised he found himself.

Let's cut to the chase, then backtrack a little. This is the bottom line:

Almost every "Don't eat that!" prohibition is wrong.

Y'got that? Sure, we all know not to eat rat poison, but you know what I really mean, right? At different times in the past, and up until today, we got all kinds of advice:

• Butter and the fat in red meat cause heart attacks
• Eating eggs and shrimp raise your cholesterol level
• Coffee is bad in a whole lot of ways
• Gluten free is the way to go
• Diet soda will give you diabetes
• Don't eat food full of chemicals
• Organic, ORGANIC, ORGANIC!!!

Do you know what, on that last point, with the exception of salt and traces of other minerals (like the lime in Calcium supplements), everything we eat is organic. We can't digest inorganic stuff. It doesn't have any calories! Of course, the Government has tried to define "organic", as in "organic farming" and "organic produce", etc. Their definitions are contradictory and overblown. Then, that next-to-last point, Chemicals: every material thing is composed entirely of chemicals. You are a bag of chemicals. Artfully arranged, no doubt, but still…chemicals. DNA is a chemical. Proteins are chemicals. Your digestive fluids are chemicals. The taste of an apple or grape is because of the chemicals in them. Glucose, or grape sugar, the only substance your brain can use for fuel, is a chemical.

Oh, you meant we should avoid "artificial" chemicals? Glucose has the chemical formula (CH₂O)₆. So do several other sugars; they differ from one another because of the way the "H" and "OH" groups hang off the 6-carbon ring that is the backbone of most simple sugars. It is possible (not too hard, really) to make glucose in a laboratory, with test tubes and stuff. Once you crystallize it a time or two to purify it, there is no difference from the stuff made by grapes, or apples, or many other sweet fruits. In your body, many other kinds of sugars and starches (polymerized glucose, mainly) are turned into glucose, and whatever you don't need immediately is converted first to glycogen and stored in the liver, and any excess beyond a certain amount of that, is converted to fat and stored all over the place. Also, excess protein can be turned into glucose or glycogen or fat, depending on the balance of nutrients in the body at the time. And, if you are really low on recent calories, such as after a fast, your digestive apparatus can convert any fat you eat into glucose (and some waste materials). But you have to eat protein to build protein; carbohydrates (including sugar) and fats do not contain nitrogen, which is a part of every link in every protein chain. It is all chemicals, from end to end.

So, is there such a thing as "bad food"? Only in the sense of spoilage! Yeah, if that hunk of leftover roast in the back of the refrigerator is now green and fuzzy, it is probably "bad". If you aren't squeamish, though, you could probably re-fry it and eat it with no ill effects. But what is the "bad food" in The Bad Food Bible? Think things you've been told are "bad for you." Dr. Carroll picked out 11 famously hated foods that turn out to be not all that bad after all.

Along the way, the author discusses at some length just what "medical evidence" truly is. When someone says or writes, "Studies show…", we need to ask, "What kind of study?" He discusses several kinds of things that are called "studies" when people are being sloppy. The story by your Aunt Millicent, about the liniment that a local cobbler makes up, and how "wonderful" it is for her "palpitations" is an anecdote. That's a 50-cent word for "story". If you gather 1,000 stories, is that research? No it is still stories. But someone with an agenda just might call it a "study". To what were the stories compared? How many people tried the cobbler's liniment and never finished the first jar because it just made them feel oily and smell bad?…and it didn't help anyway. Without knowing how often it didn't work, you don't know anything useful about that liniment. At the other end of the scale is the mighty RDBCT, the Randomized, Double-Blinded, Controlled Trial, frequently shortened to RCT. This is called the Gold Standard, for two reasons. Firstly, a properly conducted RCT is truly valuable; it is the only kind of "study" that can determine cause and effect. Every other kind of study can at best hint at, or maybe strongly indicate, an association. For example, it is known that a higher proportion of alcoholics get lung cancer. Does that mean that alcohol can cause lung cancer? No. It was hard enough getting proof that smoking causes lung cancer! Rather, there is a secondary association that provides the link: A high proportion of alcoholics are also smokers. So, the chain of evidence is

• Smoking → Cancer
• Factor X → both Smoking and Alcohol Abuse

Whatever "Factor X" is, it must be one of several things that, taken together, make a person more likely to either smoke, abuse alcohol, or both.

The other reason that RCT's are called a Gold Standard is that they are very expensive. Food is one of the biggest industries out there. Food is, quite literally, a trillion-dollar enterprise. So there must be lots of research that has been done on food, using high-quality RCT's, right? No, they are rather rare. Dr. Carroll has to do a lot of digging to find an RCT here or there, and then he must assess the quality. Many try, but few do it well. So most "studies" just don't have the oomph to tell us anything useful.

Where there is gold, there are gold seekers. Among the multitude of paid-for "studies" about food, if you can follow the money you can reason out the conclusion that the researchers were asked to find. That's right. Much "research" was done to "prove" one point or another. Here is the biggest smoking gun: We've heard for 50 (maybe 100?) years that eating too much fat makes us fat, and that saturated fat was the worst. But the early "solution" to saturated fats was margarine, which turned out to be about 40% trans fats, which are much worse for us than saturated fats! Where are the studies that prove that eating fat causes us to get fat? Those that exist are actually poor in quality and there are hardly any RCT's, …and those show little or no association! But a lot of lower-quality "studies" were published, and guess who paid for them? The sugar industry. Now that a few folks with the financial backing to do so have begun conducting RCT's about it, the real culprit is sugar.

Humans lived for tens of thousands of years on high-protein, high-fat, low-sugar diets. Our bodies are used to coping with that. I remember reading an archaeological report about a Roman colony that was abandoned 1,700 years ago or so. The author of that report wrote, "Their teeth were perfect, even the old people. Clearly, they didn't have sugar in their diet." They were also more physically fit than people in colonies of the same era that were closer to the trade routes and could get abundant sugar.

All this is background for Chapter 9: "Diet Soda". Diet soda is well-hated by some. Sugar substitutes (there are 3-4 found different ones in packets on the tables of most restaurants I visit) are all tarred with two brushes, "Causes cancer" and "Promotes diabetes". The fact is, neither is true. All the "studies" on these were done in rats. To speed things up in cancer studies, researchers use strains of rats that are prone to getting cancer. Let's say a study shows that, of rats fed regular stuff, 5% get cancer in one year; of those fed the same food with some sugar substitute added, 7% get cancer. Both these rates are incredibly high compared to human cancer risk for a typical year. But it "justifies" someone saying, "Sweetener X increases the chance of cancer 40%!" (7/5-1 = 0.4 = 40% increase). They never, ever mention that the amount of Sweetener X given to the rats was comparable to you drinking 400 cans of diet cola every day...for a year. I think the rats really died of disgust!

Dr. Carroll's conclusion, after discussing what is really known about sugar substitutes, from Stevia to Sucralose, is that too little is known as yet. However, if there are risks, either of cancer or diabetes, no human trial has been done to figure it out. None ever will be, because you can't pay someone enough to eat a heaping tablespoon of Sucralose (or whatever) every day for a year or more. In concentrated form, it is awful! There is probably an ethics question also. So the follow-on conclusion is that if there are risks they are small, while the risks of excess sugar are very real and much better known. So he lets his kids have a diet soda from time to time. The rest of the time they drink water, except prior to weaning, when they drink milk.

One bit of almost accidental wisdom came from the Federal Government in recent weeks. They proclaimed that it is OK to drink as much as four cups of coffee daily. Wow! I though it was a big deal, a few years ago, when they said, "up to a cup or to, not more." Before that, it was, "The less coffee, the better." But the studies have been done, with enough quality to convince the FDA folks, so they have this new statement.

A final note: Alcohol is a problematic substance. It turns out, a man who drinks 1-2 ounces of the stuff daily, in whatever form, is in the "sweet spot" for living just a tad longer than those who don't drink at all, or those who drink more than that. Women, being proportionately smaller, can have up to one ounce. But for some, that first ounce leads to a second, then a third. So if you are drinking, keep it moderate. If you are drinking less than that, don't increase it. If you aren't drinking at all, don't start. But if you are drinking more, a shorter life will be the price you pay. Of course, maybe that's the life you want, anyway. Just don't drive afterwards, OK? Alcohol and table salt share this characteristic: there is a "sweet spot". With salt it is more dramatic. For most of us, the sweet spot is 4-7 grams daily. Ingesting 3 grams or less is as bad as getting 10 or more. Your body needs the elements in salt (sodium and chlorine) to live. Without any, you die, and soon. So this final point is, as with salt, so with many foods. Too much is probably bad. Too little can also be bad. Find the sweet spot, and you'll be the best off.

Dr. Carroll also hosts the YouTube channel Healthcare Triage.

Living without plastics

kw: book reviews, science fiction, near-future, technology, sociology

Look around your house, your schoolroom, your workplace…can you find many objects that do not contain at least a little plastic? Maybe you won't always recognize it. Almost anything that isn't wood, stone, metal, silk or cotton is probably plastic or contains a lot of it. By "plastic" I mean manufactured polymers, from polyethylene to nylon, from Lucite to ABS (bullet proof windows in banks). Even printing ink contains polymers these days. The wires in your computer and phone have plastic insulation.

There are tens of thousands of polymerized materials that are entirely artificial. There are polymers in nature, including all fibrous materials: cotton, silk, linen, etc. Even protein and DNA are aperiodic polymers. But nearly all manufactured polymers have a periodic structure, and are simpler than the natural polymers.

Let us now assume that our plastics begin to disintegrate, turning to goo and then to liquid, one after another. Now what? This scenario is how Drop by Drop, by Morgan Llewelyn, begins.

The idea is a great one. Many SF stories surround troubles with computer equipment or electrical technology either failing or going rogue. But plastic? We are not fully aware how much of modern life depends on them. Actually, in the novel, I was wondering when the author would introduce widespread electrical failure as insulation melted off wires and the generating equipment shorted out. She doesn't go there, and I suppose there was just so much dystopia she was willing to handle.

There is a little tech discussed by characters in the book, but that isn't the author's point. This is her first SF novel, but not her first novel. She has many books in print. Her focus here is on people's reactions to a Change. In the face of overwhelming and irreversible change, some people persevere and even thrive, and some go off the rails. All sorts of reactions are explored as the people in a small town cope (or don't) with The Change, with losing contact with the rest of the world except via a network of ham radio operators who build crystal sets that use no plastics, for example; with the asphalt on roads turning to goo, and then the tires of the autos.

The book is well written, entertaining, and made me wonder, what could bring about such a change, and what would most of us do about it? What if the things that failed weren't made of plastics but of steel?

A plan to reverse global warming

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, climate change, compendia

The title of the book is Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. It is edited by Paul Hawken, who founded and Executive Director of Project Drawdown. The Project has a large number of affiliated scientists and others who are working on numerous efforts that are at least "carbon neutral" and, it is hoped, able to actually take CO₂ back out of the atmosphere. He admits in his introduction that the plan he proposes is the "most comprehensive" because it is the only one. Fair enough. All other plans to date focus on mitigation, on slowing the increase of CO₂, and so forth.

It will take some doing for anyone to come up with a "more comprehensive" set of proposals. The book discusses 100, the top 100 from a pool of a few hundred. The top 80 are ranked according to expected reduction in greenhouse gases as "CO₂ equivalent"; for instance, methane is something like 30-40 times as effective as CO₂ is at trapping heat near the Earth's surface. So reducing a ton of methane is counted as about 40 tons of CO₂ equivalent. The other 20 ideas are gathered in a chapter titled "Coming Attractions", rather more speculative possible solutions that haven't been as thoroughly researched.

I was impressed with the scholarship and ingenuity that went into the chapters, including a half dozen essays on related subjects (so there are more than 100 chapters). But I looked for, and didn't find, one critical element. In the discussion of the history of the theory of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the early insight on human impact on the atmosphere, in 1831 by Alexander von Humboldt, is dwelt upon, but Svante Arrhenius, who quantified the effect in 1896, is not mentioned. Considering that the discussions of greenhouse effect, climate change, global warming, and a few similar and increasingly politicized terms, are based on mathematical analyses, the utter lack of even a fillip toward math dismayed me.

I remember learning of Arrhenius's work before I was a teenager, nearly 60 years ago. With the mathematical tools available to a ninth grader of the time, it wasn't hard to follow his reasoning, nor to reproduce his results. The tedium comes in adding up the effective ultraviolet/visible-versus-infrared spectra to determine an effective emissivity-temperature relationship for any particular gas. The concept is thus:

• There are "windows" in the spectrum of a gas, ranges of light wavelength that are transmitted with little or no hindrance.
• Conversely, there are "doors" in the spectrum, ranges of light wavelength that are absorbed by the gas and heat it up. It then radiates this heat as longer-wavelength infrared (IR).
• Ultraviolet (UV), visible (V), and near-IR (the shorter IR wavelengths) emitted by the Sun are little hindered by the atmosphere, and strike the ground, heating it.
• The warmed ground radiates mid- and far-IR (long to very long wavelength IR) upwards.
• Some of the re-radiated IR passes through "windows" of the various gases in the atmosphere, and so outward into space.
• Some instead hits one "door" or another, such that it heats the gas, which heats the rest of the atmosphere. Interestingly, nitrogen and oxygen, which make up 96-99% of the atmosphere, depending mainly on humidity, have spectra with very little in the way of "doors".
• Light that hits a "door" causes heating of the air, which then emits longer-wavelength IR (mostly far-IR) that is radiated in all directions. Simply put, half of it goes back down to increase the heating of the ground, and the other half goes up and out into space.
• The atmospheric temperature rises until the radiation passing upward through the "windows", and half of that which hit "doors", balances the radiation coming inward from the Sun. At that balancing temperature, total emissivity upward equals total emissivity downward, across all wavelengths.

That is the greenhouse effect. What gases cause the most greenhouse warming, that is, which gases have the biggest and thickest "doors"? Number 1 is water vapor! If Earth had no water at all, being as dry as the Moon, it would be 33°C (59°F) colder than it is (as the Moon is), with an average temperature near -18°C or 0°F. But Earth's atmosphere contains between 1% and 3% water vapor, which causes all this heating.

Although CO₂ is much less effective as a greenhouse gas than methane or nitrous oxide, it is much more abundant: a few hundred parts per million (ppm) versus 1.5-2 ppm for methane. The critical thing about CO₂ is that we can influence its abundance. We do so by burning stuff. Almost everything we burn for heating and creating energy such as electricity contains carbon. Coal is almost pure carbon; methane has the least, but is still 75% carbon by weight (and 25% hydrogen). But the heating value you get from a ton of methane versus a ton of coal means, kilowatt for kilowatt, it produces only about half the CO₂.

Since the year 1800, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere has risen from about 280 ppm to about 400 ppm. That has caused an average heating of Earth by about half a degree C, or close to 1°F. Note that the same climate scientists who compiled the various IPCC reports on global warming over the past 30 years differ quite a lot over whether it is half a degree, or one degree, or perhaps less than half. "Half a degree" is a sort of average of their opinions.

Here is a point I haven't read anywhere since about 1990: If we go far out on a limb and calculate the effect of CO₂ going way, way up, to perhaps 1% (where it affects our breathing reflex), and which is 10,000 ppm, the average temperature of the Earth would rise no more than 4°C (~7°F) above what it was in 1800 AD.

Now, 4 degrees is a large change, and would cause a lot of trouble. But it would not end human life on Earth...just human comfort! Because the #1 issue discussed in Drawdown, the factor that can reduce the greenhouse effect the most, is to eliminate refrigerants containing carbon! No A/C, folks, unless you want to return to using ammonia or CO₂ as a refrigerant. Ammonia is actually a great refrigerant, but it is so toxic that even a tiny leak could be catastrophic were it to leak into your house. Effective A/C using ammonia would have to be totally redesigned, to operate outdoors only, in a very well-ventilated area, creating chilled water that would be pumped through the indoor cooling system. More complexity, more cost, and just how rapidly do you think the world's slightly-less-affluent nations are likely to embrace it? CO₂ is a less efficient refrigerant, but at least it isn't toxic, though it can cause suffocation, so it still would have to be used in outdoors-only water-loop systems.

Before closing I need to address a typo and an unfamiliar concept. On page xiv in an introductory section, the author is discussing just what a gigaton is. After showing that it is the amount of water in 14,400,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, it is stated, "thirty-six billion gigatons is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in 2016." The word "billion" needs to be omitted. It is either 36 GT or 36 billion tons, but not both! Secondly, the words "a billion acres" appear a few times, or various amounts such as half a billion or 1.5 billion acres, etc. To help us get our hands around it, one billion acres is about 2.7% of the land area of Earth. Since only a quarter of that land is arable, that comes to about 11% of land that can be farmed.

I like the ideas discussed in Drawdown; it's more practical and well-thought than most other writing I've seen on the subject. I hope the efforts of the Drawdown Project continue. These folks are more level-headed than most of the other loud voices in the climate arena.