Monday, August 18, 2008

And a Tree Shall Lead Them

As if we needed more reasons to love trees there is a science story out today that not only are trees our only proven hope to sequester atmospheric CO2 it would appear that trees are also able to remove airborne pollutants and convert them to amino acids.


So it would appear that the trees are important to us for a number a reasons. It would make for an interesting social and cultural study to look at populations that have extensive wood supplies and compare them with similar groups that do not. I bet that wooded societies are healthier and happier and probably wealthier. The anthropologists talk to us about Stone Age and Bronze Age societies but there must be a Wooden Age in there somewhere. I would guess that our complex master - slave relationship with our cellulosic neighbours must be an important part of our development.


In our own little corner of the world we have a property here at ABU where the campus sits on a much larger parcel of land that was clear-cut in the early 1970's. That is our best bet for the photo below. Notice that the highway has not been twinned and the old farm property that was here before ABU is still intact. In terms of the clear cut it makes for an interesting comment that the parts that were not clear cut are the high ground between Gorge Road and the Gorge Brook, the Gorge Brook area itself and a boggy area in the North - East sector of the property.


What I like about this early view of the property is that it clearly shows the property borders since I am sure the woodcutters would have cut right to the border with the neighbours. It also clearly shows where the logging roads are and that might be useful for access to the woods today.

If we now look at the 2005 Google Earth view of the ABU property we can see that the scrub forest has covered the property again. Up close it is a nasty tangle of poplar, birch and swamp maple with a seasoning of conifers. But it is treed and starting the natural process of succession from cleared land to conifer forest. What is also clear is the gaping hole in the property that is the surface pit for fill that worked the property from the time of the last clear cut and left about a quarter of the property stripped down below the subsoil leaving an almost Mordor like blasted moonscape of scum, slime and tufts of mis-begotten grass.



Well, it looks like we are going to be here for a while and it is clear that the good Lord gave us trees to save us from ourselves so I think we had better start planting some trees.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

"Recycled" Water ... It's About Time


I love this article in today's New York Times.


I have been lecturing for years that it is the mark of the civilized Western society that we can urinate, defecate and dump chemical waste into our own drinking water and not suffer for it. We can directly connect the success of urbanization with municiple water treatment systems. I always say that more people are alive today because of municiple water treatment than modern medicine ... but no one listens.
The author (not journalist in this case) visits a new water treatment plant and realizes that the purpose of the plant is to treat sewerage and return it to the city drinking water reservoir. The first response is "Yuck" but there is some really well developed science and chemistry here.
What really gets me cranking are the self righteous rural folk that claim that they have their own well and will not "pollute" their bodies with treated water. In most rural settings your well is down stream from someones septic field ... or a cemetery. At least with municple water someone is responsible for monitoring the water quality.
There is one line in the article that I really like and it shows the two objective and subjective sides of the science involved:
"You could argue that in coming to terms with wastewater as a resource, we’ll take better care of our water. At long last, the “everything is connected” message, the bedrock of the environmental movement, will hit home. In this view, once a community is forced to process and drink its toilet water, those who must drink it will rise up and change their ways. Floor moppers will switch to biodegradable cleaning products. Industry will use nontoxic material. Factory farms will cut their use of antibiotics. Maybe we’ll even stop building homes in the desert."
I think I am going to get a copy of the authors book.

Friday, August 08, 2008

Physical Science in the Olympics: Air Quality

There is a fight going on right now between the BBC



And the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee




In essence the BBC is saying that the air quality is bad and anyone can see that it is bad. In fact they have been measuring it and the numbers confirm that it is bad. For example, today (08.08.08) they obtained a reading of 191 micrograms per cubic meter of the worst kind of solid particle pollution called PM10 pollution. The WHO cites 50 micrograms per cubic meter as the the criteria for acceptable air but raised that to 150 for Beijing.


On the other side, the organizers of the Beijing Olympics are saying:

" Du said in the past seven days the Air Pollutant Index (API), an indicator of the air quality, in Beijing has been all below Level II, indicating excellent or good air quality.
"Maybe the fog makes it not a nice picture to look at the Bird's Nest or the Water Cube, but the monitor south of the two stadiums reads the API at 80 today. It conveyed a strong message that our efforts had paid off since August," he said. An API rating of 51-100 (level II) means good quality. "


What it comes down to is the number and how it was determined. It is amazing that scientists are capable of using modern technology to measure the same physical phenomenon and get such dramatically different numbers. Physical science is supposed to be above this sort of thing. If the data are distorted then who is distorting them? Is it more likely that the BBC is knowingly publishing false or skewed numbers to support a story and embarrass the host city and country or that the Olympic organizers have "adjusted" their numbers to look better. At least the BBC admits to a 20% error in their measurements. There is another possibility that both sets of numbers are false. We cannot know but there is a third voice on the issue from within China and on that blog this is a picture of the air quality today.


LINK TO BLOG


What we can know is how well the athletes respond to the air. According to the SOURCE OF ALL KNOWLEDGE (Wikipedia) an average human has a deep breath volume of about 5 liters. An adult will make about 40 deep respiration's per minute during physical exertion. So that is about 200 L of Beijing air a minute or one cubic meter of air every five minutes. You have to believe that even elite athletes pulling that kind of air into their lungs for that period of time will have to see an effect. This is the reverse of what high altitude training does to prepare and athlete. At high altitude the air pressure is lower so there is less oxygen, in response the body increases lung capacity and the number of red blood cells to capture as much oxygen as possible. When the athlete returns to sea level there is a short term benefit that can improve performance. In this case however what we are looking at are athletes that can perform well in bad air. I do believe that China may well have an advantage here.

As a post script to this issue there is also a bit of discussion about the air quality of these Olympics compared to air quality in previous Olympic cities such as Athens and Mexico City. According to the BBC this is what athletes faced in previous Olympics.

Other Olympic cities on the opening day of the Olympics:

London (United Kingdom) 21
Athens (Greece) 43
Sydney (Australia) 20
Seoul (Korea) 41

Beijing (China) 191

Source: World Bank 2004 and BBC 2008

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Liberal Arts Science: Opposing the Darkness

Teaching Science in a liberal arts university one often loses a bit of perspective. The reality is that we as a society have to come to some sort of agreement as to what basic level of science knowledge is necessary for functional adults. This is especially true for educated adults since we live in a world largely defined by its relationship with the products of science and technology. That is why we have science requirements for arts students ... the question haw effective a single isolated science credit is in a fourty credit degree. I don't know but I would hope our students would avoid the problem demonstrated in this video. One might even hope that their religious studies courses would explain mystery.



What is endearing about the video below is the completely unashamed attitude that personal assertion is equal to truth.

Christians Behaving Badly

Pound for pound I would say that the weirdest person in the Old Testament is Elisha. Weird stuff just happened around him.


"Elisha Is Jeered 23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. "Go on up, you baldhead!" they said. "Go on up, you baldhead!" 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths. 25 And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria."

What I find striking about this passage is the commonplace almost mundane reporting style. If we were blogging about a trip between Fredericton and Moncton we might mention the high price of corn at roadside vegetable stands in the same tone that our faithful biblical reporter indicates that 42 men get mauled by two bears (OK, I know the plausibility sensors are ringing on this incident but you must remember that people back then were addicted to cheap Kung Fu movies where the bad guys would willingly line up to get their faces smacked).

It would, as well, appear that Christians that travel are not always on their best behaviour. I, of course, like you all have been tailgated and passed dangerously by a maniacal person with "Honk if you love Jesus" bumperstickers (which is actually a quite clever way of making you NOT honk at a bad driver). It would appear that more recently the standards of Travelling Christians Behaving Badly has been raised by Victoria Osteen who apparently struck a flight attendant that got in her way down with hemorrhoids. It looks to me like a strange cross between Career Barbie and Harry Potter. What is that worship song we sing ... "Just Like in the Days of Elisha"?


LINK TO COMPLETE STORY