Heat Waves, Smog Warnings & No Man's Lands

In the evolutionary, historical sense, human beings really aren't that different from other animals. The human species emerged as a result of optimal environmental conditions. There are lots of places on Earth that human hands had never touched up until the last few hundred years, and although they've nearly all been explored save a few, at most of these hostile locales it just doesn't make any sense for people to stay.

The interior of Alaska comes to mind. The Rub' Al-Khali might be another. Maybe that god-forsaken Black Rock City. You won't find any permanent encampments or signs of civilization there, because the climate is just too forbidding, too harsh for humanity to exist in any substantial way.

With some exceptions, you can mostly trace the spread of human civilization as it developed, and along the way you can pick out the places people broke ground with some accuracy. Follow the water. Look where the climate is most palatable. Catal Huyuk didn't spring up from the empty quarter of the Arabian Desert, it emerged from a place where an agricultural life could be easy for people. As humanity transitioned from a pastoral lifestyle to a sedentary, urban one, it assembled into organized enclaves in places that were most conducive to life.

The oral traditions of humanity are rife with stories of cataclysmic change leaving cities unlivable. Plato describes an unrecorded, prehistoric civilization that is undone by all-too-human hubris and swallowed by the ocean. Western mythology, especially the mythology of the fertile crescent, all share the common thread of a great flood that covers the whole world. And in more recent times, fanciful Romantic authors and 19th century Spiritualists described the lost continents of Mu and Lemuria sinking and leaving a diaspora of people in their wakes.

But there's no need to look to sandaled philosophers of great antiquity or tarot-reading occult-book-store crystal-wavers for the truth about what it looks like when a place becomes unlivable. The truth is, it might happen so slowly and so imperceptibly that you wouldn't notice it, and you one day wake up and realize you can't leave your house.

This summer has been the hottest on record for the Pacific Northwest. It had a late start, and I recall often opining that if it stayed as mild as it had been, it might not get very hot at all this year. Then, in late July, the thermometers broke, and Seattle's previous record temperature was shattered by a 103°F afternoon. Lucky for us, Seattle's topography contribute to a weather pattern that keeps the air quality here pretty decent. It's almost always clear enough to see Mt. Rainier from the I5 bridge in the University District. We've got it pretty good here.

Not so for Vancouver BC. Wildfires in Lillooet, record breaking heat and an urban population that owns 2.3 cars per household despite a vast mass transit system, along with geographic features surrounding the city that trap smog in to boot, all coalesced as factors in a perfect storm to send the air quality index in the Metro Vancouver area hurtling to level 6, the highest in memory for the bourgeois business-class yuppies who make their living there. Asthmatics and people suffering from respiratory diseases were recommended to stay indoors, and though it would dissipate in a matter of days, the effect of the air quality warning was troubling. How could a place with such strict emissions controls and an incomparably responsible society, bent on being green, be so thick with pollution?

But Vancouver's air pollution problem pales in comparison to Beijing's. Following the failure of Mao's Great Leap Forward, Deng Xiaoping led the Communist Party of China to adopt what it termed "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", a pastiche of both ideological Marxism and, with a certain grudging acknowledgement to pragmatism, contrarian Capitalist concepts as well. With barely a sliver of an opening to the absurd vastness of the Chinese consumer markets, virtually overnight the country became solvent, and within a decade the poverty rate had been slashed from more than half of the country's 1 billion during the Mao era to a shrinking 12% in 1981 and single-digits more recently.

The Beijing of 2009 is just under 3 times as large as it was prior to the economic reforms, and duplicate success stories raise metropolises across the country at a rapid clip. With the new-found prosperity came all the trappings of modern first-world nations: cars, skyscrapers, airports, luxury apartments, corporate identities, advertisements and, at the heart of it all, manufacturing plants making the export goods that fuels China's economic breakthrough.

Beijing has arrived, and by 2009 China has become the reigning economic power in the world, but rapid modernization brought the unintended consequence of unchecked, unchallenged release of greenhouse gases the likes of which the world has never seen. Forbes Magazine estimates that the 10 most polluted cities in the world are all in China, and the Chinese government claims nearly one and a half million premature deaths occur as a result of poor air quality every year. Where Vancouver's air quality might be dangerous for people already at risk, Beijing is consistently shrouded in a dark grey porridge that chokes healthy people to death and reduces visibility to less than the length of a city block.

The point I'm trying to make here, is that humanity is turning the places it makes it's bed unlivable. The non-stop, uninterrupted release of not just the greenhouse gases that feed into self-perpetuating feedback loops and precipitate global climate change, but also the real nasty stuff that comes out of your exhaust pipe and your chimney and every coal power plant you use when you charge up your iPhone, is slowly but surely making those archetypal myths of cataclysmic change seem prophetic at best and at worst like observations that self-similarity in man's inhumanity to man scales up and will eventually kill us. There's no sense in this. We're committing suicide on a global scale, and we're doing it in a really weak, wimpy, cowardly way that betrays our imprinted consumerist apathy.

That's why offsetting your personal carbon footprint is so important. If everyone in Seattle, Vancouver and Beijing paid for their yearly carbon output, we would solve the global ecology crisis in less time than it took for China to awaken from it's ideologically-lullabied slumber. All it takes is pointing your browser at http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/. All the links are there, they'll help you calculate your carbon footprint and give you all the tools you need to decide how you'd like to offset your carbon. They make it easy! They'll accept all major payment methods and will even offer you a certified guarantee. All you've got to do is make the choice to take responsibility for your share of climate change.

Are you ready to do the right thing? Time is of the essence, so don't delay. Do it today.

Generating Electricity With Mixing Entropy: The Weird Science Of Salinity Cells

Physicists have long held that there's energy abounding in naturally occurring chemical reactions, and one of their most prime candidates from which to harness this energy has been the process known as salination, wherein freshwater rivers drain into the salty ocean. The notion of collecting the energy lost to entropy during salination has been only theoretical since the process came to light, however a paper by University of Milan-Bicocca physicist Doriano Brogioli is due to be published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters describing a power cell that converts this lost energy into electricity.

The strange physics of mixing entropy are intuitive to understand. Imagine you're at a bar, and there's dancing music playing. You're feeling very acutely the long day behind you, so you order a Red Bull and vodka, the perfect drink for dancing. The bartender pours half a can of Red Bull into a glass, then pours 3 ounces of vodka. You are now officially ready to party. But wait! The resulting solution is less than the sum of it's constituent parts! This loss of energy is called the entropy of mixing and is precisely the physical process that the salination cell aims to capture.

The device itself is more difficult to describe. It's functional core is comprised of two electrically-charged chunks of activated carbon that collect negative and positive ions from salt water. When fresh water is flushed in, the ions are released from the carbon chunks, increasing the voltage of the charge and generating electricity. Scientific abstracts and illustrated diagrams are out there, but the weird science of it places real understanding somewhat beyond the reach of layfolks. Suffice it to say, the lab models work, and the science suggests it can be scaled up to provide a new source of renewable clean energy.

As usual, there are skeptics. Many in the scientific community are quick to point out the logistical difficulty in scaling the lab models up from experimental devices to the megawatt-generating plants needed to make capturing the energy inherent in the process of salination worthwhile, noting that the relative scarcity of places where a great deal of fresh water hits the ocean makes the new technology potentially less than ubiquitous. Others such as Fred Schlachter, retired staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, go further to say that the figures cited by proponents of the technology don't account for the enormous upkeep and maintenance overhead necessary when dealing with the very corrosive properties of ocean water.

Still, those figures are impressive. Scientists who first described the physics underlying mixing entropy deduced that the potential energy inherent in the process worldwide is equivalent to every river in the world ending in a 223 meter waterfall. Those numbers, along with the presumed success of a large-scale salination plant, suggest that salination energy might one day comprise a significant chunk of the renewable, green energy that offset brokers resell.

(Source: http://www.physicscentral.com/buzz/blog/index.cfm?postid=8192106608311312838)

Global Stewardship

I'm thrilled to be using the library at http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/ to further educate myself about global warming. Overwhelmingly I appreciate all efforts toward sustainability and stewardship of this planet and our universe. The article about carbon friendly dining especially appeals to me regarding our food choices. Not just the choices we make at the restaurants we choose but what we bring home to cook as well.