Science and the media: 24 - 30 December
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0742
Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:
- James Fallows’s long argument in the Atlantic that the world will inevitably rely on coal for many more decades—and that the US must therefore match China’s seriousness about making the phrase clean coal more than an oxymoron.
- Another “Radiation Boom” medical physics feature article from the front page of the New York Times.
- A Wall Street Journal editorial accusing the secretary of agriculture of politicizing science.
- A Times op-ed about global warming and recent cold winters in northern cities.
- A Times Sunday magazine remembrance of Benoît Mandelbrot, the path-breaking mathematician.
“Clean coal": oxymoron? Let’s ask China
George F. Will’s 30 December Washington Post column in part discusses—and thereby raises the visibility of—James Fallows’s recent Atlantic article “Dirty Coal, Clean Future.”
The Atlantic offers this summary of Fallows’s long piece:
To environmentalists, “clean coal” is an insulting oxymoron. But for now, the only way to meet the world’s energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal—dirty, sooty, toxic coal—in more-sustainable ways. The good news is that new technologies are making this possible. China is now the leader in this area, the Google and Intel of the energy world. If we are serious about global warming, America needs to work with China to build a greener future on a foundation of coal. Otherwise, the clean-energy revolution will leave us behind, with grave costs for the world’s climate and our economy.
Scientists at RealClimate? classify Will as notorious for disputing the consensus about human-caused climate disruption. And indeed Will’s column’s point is that, as the online-version headline announces, “China has seen the future, and it is coal.” Will echoes Fallows in pointing out that “about half of America’s and the world’s electricity is generated by coal” and that over “the past eight years, [coal] has been the world’s fastest-growing source of fuel.” Will adds:
Fallows reports that 15 years from now China expects that 350 million people will be living in cities that do not exist yet. This will require adding to China’s electrical system a capacity almost as large as America’s current capacity. The United States, China, Russia and India have 40 percent of the world’s population and 60 percent of its coal.
However, the climate-change denier Will concedes that the climate-change believer Fallows’s article is not only about “China’s appetite for coal” but is also about China’s “possible aptitude for using the old fuel in new, cleaner ways.”
“Possible”? What Will calls possible, Fallows seems to see as not just probable, but inevitable.
Fallows writes, “I have been learning about an area of Chinese achievement that is objectively good for the world as a whole, including the United States . . . the shared global effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.” He continues concerning the term clean coal:
[T]wo ideas that underlie the term are taken with complete seriousness by businesses, scientists, and government officials in China and America, and are the basis of the most extensive cooperation now under way between the countries on climate issues. One is that coal can be used in less damaging, more sustainable ways than it is now. The other is that it must be used in those ways, because there is no plausible other way to meet what will be, absent an economic or social cataclysm, the world’s unavoidable energy demands.
Fallows stipulates that his article “is not an argument against all-out effort on all other fronts, from conservation and efficiency to improved battery technology to wind- and solar-power systems to improved nuclear facilities.” Instead, it’s “an argument for recognizing that China has faced reality, in launching an all-out effort to ‘decarbonize” coal—and for recognizing America’s difficulty in doing the same.”
Next he reviews the contextual “big picture,” as he puts it. He reports the views of Michael Mann about the consequences of 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide that human activity generates annually for the atmosphere, and about the 50 tons that could well be seen twenty years from now.
Then Fallows engages “the inevitability of coal,” emphasizing that in the big picture, “the only real salvation must involve coal.” He asserts that “because coal already plays such a major role in world power supplies, basic math means that it will inescapably do so for a very long time.” Here’s some of the math:Overall, coal-burning power plants provide nearly half (about 46 percent this year) of the electricity consumed in the United States. For the record: natural gas supplies another 23 percent, nuclear power about 20 percent, hydroelectric power about 7 percent, and everything else the remaining 4 or 5 percent. The small size of the “everything else” total is worth noting; even if it doubles or triples, the solutions we often hear the most about won’t come close to meeting total demand. In China, coal-fired plants supply an even larger share of much faster-growing total electric demand: at least 70 percent, with the Three Gorges Dam and similar hydroelectric projects providing about 20 percent, and (in order) natural gas, nuclear power, wind, and solar energy making up the small remainder. For the world as a whole, coal-fired plants provide about half the total electric supply. On average, every American uses the electricity produced by 7,500 pounds of coal each year.
For another bit of illustrative math, Fallows cites an expert who “calculates that if the windiest 10 percent of the entire British landmass were completely covered with wind turbines, they would produce power roughly equivalent to half of what Britons expend merely by driving each day.”
“Coal will be with us because it is abundant,” Fallows declares, and “because of where it’s located,” with “the top four coal-reserve countries [being] the United States, Russia, China, and India, which together have about 40 percent of the world’s population and more than 60 percent of its coal.” Coal will be with us because “its direct costs are in most circumstances far lower than those of the alternatives,” and “because its indirect costs, in miner deaths, environmental destruction, and carbon burden on the atmosphere are unregulated and ‘externalized.’”
He continues:
And it will be with us because of a surprising constraint: after a century in which medical diagnosis and treatment, computer and communications systems, aerospace and nanotech industries, and nearly every other form of technology have routinely achieved the magical, energy production is essentially what it was in the time of James Watt. With the main exception of nuclear-power plants and the hoped-for future exception of practical nuclear-fusion systems, we mostly create electricity by burning something that was once underground—coal, oil, natural gas—to boil water and turn turbines with the steam.
“A breakthrough,” Fallows declares, “is what it would take to move beyond reliance on coal.”
So what, then, constitutes the technical challenge? What would progress entail? Fallows not only reports no big breakthroughs, he can cite no large-scale, economy-revolutionizing, planetary-atmosphere-improving progress. But he can report on China’s efforts.
The proposals, he says, “are variations on two approaches: ways to capture carbon dioxide before it can escape into the air and ways to reduce the carbon dioxide that coal produces when burned.” He discusses sequestration, reporting that all “larger-scale, longer-term proposals for storing carbon involve injecting it deep underground, into porous rock that will trap it indefinitely.” He says, optimistically, that carbon dioxide “has a surprisingly large number of small-scale commercial uses.”
But maybe somewhat pessimistically concerning the overall challenge for clean coal, he worries that scientists and entrepreneurs “do not seem to count on, or even hope for, the large breakthroughs we have come to assume in biological sciences and info-tech. Consistent with two centuries of incremental improvement in power systems since the time of James Watt, practical refinements and ever-improving efficiency are the goal.” He adds that in “the search for ‘progress on coal,’ like other forms of energy research and development, China is now the Google, the Intel, the General Motors and Ford of their heyday—the place where the doing occurs, and thus the learning by doing as well.”
To sum up, it’s important simply to quote how Fallows himself sums up:
China’s cooperation with the United States on coal is good news for the world. If the two countries had decided to make this another arena for demonstrating their respective toughness—if, as at the failed Copenhagen talks last winter, they had mainly exchanged accusations about who was more to blame for emissions problems—they would have guaranteed that the problems could not be solved. . . . Both sides seem to have looked for ways to keep the cooperation going. They have not been in the newspapers, but they deserve recognition for attempting to do the world’s work.
But China’s very effectiveness and dynamism, beneficial as they may be in this case, highlight an American failure—a failure that seems not transient or incidental but deep and hard to correct.
The manifestation of the failure is that China is where the world’s “doing” now goes on, in this industry and many others. If you want to learn how the power plants of the future will work, you must go to Tianjin—or Shanghai, or Chengdu—to find out. Power companies from America, Europe, and Japan are fortunate to have a place to learn. Young engineers and managers and entrepreneurs in China are fortunate that the companies teaching the rest of the world will be Chinese.
The deeper problem is the revealed difference in national capacity, in seriousness and ability to deliver. The Chinese government can decide to transform the country’s energy system in 10 years, and no one doubts that it will. An incoming U.S. administration can promise to create a clean-energy revolution, but only naãfs believe that it will.
“The most impressive aspect of the Chinese performance is their determination to do what is needed,” Julio Friedmann told me. “To be the first, to be the biggest, to have the best export technology for cleaning up coal.” America obviously is not displaying comparable determination—and the saddest aspect of the U.S. performance, he said, is that it seems not deliberate but passive and accidental, the product of modern America’s inability to focus public effort on public problems.
“No one in the U.S. government could ever imagine a 10-year plan to ensure U.S. leadership in solar power or batteries or anything else,” Joseph Romm, a former Department of Energy official who now writes the blog Climate Progress, told me. “It’s just not possible, so nobody even bothers to propose it.”
The Chinese system as a whole has great weaknesses as well as great strengths. Its challenges, as I have reported so often in these pages, make the threats facing America look trivial by comparison. But its response to the energy challenge—including its commitment to dealing with the dirty, unavoidable reality of coal—reveals a seriousness about facing big problems that America now appears to lack.
Yet again: bad medical physics news on New York Times front page
The 29 December New York Times continues that paper’s “Radiation Boom” medical physics series with a front-page article headlined “A Pinpoint Beam Strays Invisibly, Harming Instead of Healing.” In the online version, the headline says, “Stray Beam in Radiation Tool Causes Harm in Scores of Cases.” The Times features the piece prominently below the fold, and gives it all of page A12 after the jump.
The article follows the usual “Radiation Boom” formula. It
- relates particularly compelling cases of medical radiation gone wrong,
- dwells on the harrowing consequences for patients and families,
- offers at least some quantification of the problem’s extent,
- explains in some detail how the equipment in question works,
- explains how technological complexity multiplies human error,
- quotes medical physicists and other experts,
- calls for more methodical and timely sharing of safety information, and
- demands more government regulation.
In this case the equipment in question is linear accelerators fitted out for highly precise stereotactic radiosurgery. The journalists—Walt Bogdanich, as before in the Radiation Boom series, and Kristina Rebelo—say that “scores of errors and overdoses” have occurred. They portray the human consequences of a few of the saddest and most alarming cases. They report that radiation safety experts identify “retrofitted devices made up of different companies’ products” as presenting “a special challenge.” And they quote Dr. Howard I. Amols, chief of clinical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who sees in some cases “a combination of user error, coupled with neither the manufacturers nor the F.D.A. being able to anticipate a potential safety flaw in a ‘mix and match’ treatment delivery system.”
The reporters note that earlier this year, “the American Society for Radiation Oncology called for the establishment of the nation’s first central database for the reporting of errors involving linear accelerators.” They omit any mention of any Radiation Boom contribution to motivation for that call, but they observe: “So far that hasn’t happened.”
In the line that delivers what is obviously the Times‘s own summary view, the reporters also declare that the “accidents highlight shortcomings in the regulation of medical radiation.”
“War on science” by Democrats at USDA?
Remember allegations of a “Republican war on science”? A 27 December Wall Street Journal editorial alleges something similar from Democrats at the US Department of Agriculture.
Under the headline “Ag Department Uproots Science,” the editorial criticizes what it calls an anti-science and anti-business “shakedown” at the Department of Agriculture. It charges that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack “seeks out politically congenial scientific opinion” concerning a controversial biotech crop, and warns that if “nonscience criteria are introduced as considerations for allowing the sale of biotech crops, the effect would be disastrous for the USDA’s regulatory reputation.”
The controversial biotech crop is the Monsanto alfalfa variety Roundup Ready, thought by its opponents to threaten nearby organic varieties, wherever it might be used, by accidental cross-pollination. Following a court case, it’s been under review for three years. The editorial charges that although the alfalfa has now been “judged substantially equivalent to other varieties without red flags for regulators,” officials have failed to take the news “as a green light to let the alfalfa on the market,” and instead “are calling in biotech critics to suggest ways the product might be deregulated ‘with conditions.’” The editorial says, “Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has invited activists and biotech critics to shape the agency’s regulatory decision on a biotech product. If the precedent stands, it could permanently politicize a system that is supposed to be based on science.”
But that’s not all. The editorial also claims, and criticizes, something about Secretary Vilsack’s very outlook on science itself:
It gets worse. Mr. Vilsack’s authority in the regulatory decision-making process is based on the assumption of sound scientific data. But according to people who attended the meeting last Monday, the USDA Secretary told the assembled groups that science itself is subjective, and that he could have three different groups bring him three different supposedly scientific opinions.
“We hope,” the editorial says at the end, that “Secretary Vilsack makes his decision based on science, not politics.”
On seeing climate change in weather incidents
When a Wall Street Journal opinion writer mocks former vice president Al Gore for giving a global-warming speech on a notably cold day, he’s obviously asking to be mocked back: “Oh, c’mon—you’re conflating weather and climate.”
Do contributors to the New York Times opinion page ever conflate weather and climate? Might the question apply to the ironically headlined 26 December Times op-ed “Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming”? In any case, the piece amounts to an explicit claim that sometimes a collection of weather incidents that seem notably unusual really do combine to reflect change in the planet’s climate.
The Times identifies the op-ed’s author, Judah Cohen, as “director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.” Google supplements that information: he holds a Columbia PhD in atmospheric sciences and belongs to both the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, where he serves as associate editor of the Journal of Climate.
Cohen begins by listing cold-weather incidents in Poland, Seattle, Minnesota, London and Frankfurt. Moreover, the “Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia,” he observes, “have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century.” But he also cites what he calls the “perfect comic timing” of the release of a World Meteorological Organization report “showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.”
Cohen asks, “How can we reconcile this?” His short answer: “the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes.” His longer answer: eight paragraphs of technical explanation involving Siberian snow, the jet stream, Arctic sea ice and mountain ranges.
Cohen ends by asserting that the “reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.”
Gleick on Mandelbrot, Euclid, and heedless financiers and investors
The late Benoît Mandelbrot “created nothing less than a new geometry, to stand side by side with Euclid’s,” writes James Gleick in a New York Times Sunday magazine year’s-end remembrance . Mandelbrot created
a geometry to mirror not the ideal forms of thought but the real complexity of nature. He was a mathematician who was never welcomed into the fraternity (“Fortress Mathematics,” he said, where “the highest ambition is to wall off the windows and preserve only one door”), and he pretended that was fine with him.
Gleick, himself the author of Chaos: Making a New Science, declares that Mandelbrot “let us appreciate chaos in all its glory, the noisy, the wayward and the freakish, from the very small to the very large” and “gave the new field of study he invented a fittingly recondite name: ‘fractal geometry’"—and wanted it understood as ordinary.
A key excerpt about that understanding:
If you closely examine the florets of a cauliflower (or the bronchioles of a lung; or the fractures in oil-bearing shale), zooming in with your magnifying glass or microscope, you see the same fundamental patterns, repeating. It is no accident. They are all fractal. Clouds, mountains, coastlines, bark and lightning are all jagged and discontinuous, but self-similar when viewed at different scales, thus concealing order within their irregularity. They are shapes that branch or fold in upon themselves recursively.
Gleick declares that from Mandelbrot’s “first paper studying fluctuations in the rise and fall of cotton prices in 1962 until the end of his life, he maintained a simple and constant message about extraordinary economic events.” It was that the “professionals plan for ‘mild randomness’ and misunderstand ‘wild randomness,’” in that they “learn from the averages and overlook the outliers.” They “consistently, predictably, underestimate catastrophic risk.”
Near the end of the remembrance, Gleick quotes from Mandelbrot’s last book, The Misbehavior of Markets, written “near the peak of the bubble,” six years ago: “The financiers and investors of the world are, at the moment, like mariners who heed no weather warnings.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the Media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
More about the authors
Paul Guinnessy, pguinnes@aip.org
