There have been numerous stories in the news over the last few months regarding the growing plague of bedbugs, even in the best hotels.  There has been much made of the fact that bedbugs were mostly eradicated in the developed world in the 1940s, but they have been brought back from the developing world by tourists and business travellers.

The only problem is that they were largely eradicated in the developing world too, until the 1990s.  When the world tried to stop using DDT completely.

The world has started using DDT again, in Africa, for malaria control.  Perhaps we need to think about it for other things, in a controlled manner.

I apologize to the masses who check my blog on a regular basis (all three of you) – I’ve been busy and the summer hasn’t had much gripping political stuff for me to comment on..

But today I read something I just shook my head at:

An enzyme found in the roots of soybeans could be the key to cars that run on air.

Vanadium nitrogenase, an enzyme that normally produces ammonia from nitrogen gas, can also convert carbon monoxide (CO), a common industrial byproduct, into propane, the blue-flamed gas found on stoves across America.

While scientists caution the research is still at an early stage, they say that this study could eventually lead to new, environmentally friendly ways to produce fuel — and eventually gasoline — from thin air.

Umm..  No.  I don’t think so.  A few things that make the last statement extremely unlikely, if not completely ridiculous:

• An enzyme is simply a catalyst.  It facilitates a chemical reaction, often reducing the activation energy (i.e. temperature) required to make the reaction happen.
• Catalysts cannot reduce the actual energy balance of the reaction – the reactants have a “Gibbs Free Energy” content, and the products have another “Gibbs Free Energy” content.  This delta is the same regardless of the path taken to get from state 1 to state 2.
• Therefore, this enzyme – vanadium nitrogenase, needs some external energy source to drive it’s reaction.  No indication from the article as to where this comes from…
• Producing hydrocarbons from CO (and H2 or H2O) requires energy input – it’s endothermic.  This is the Fisher-Tropsch reaction.  Historically, this is done with an iron or cobalt catalyst, ala Sasol in South Africa.
• The second law of thermodynamics states that I need to put in more energy than I can take out.  So the energy input required to produce a hydrocarbon from CO and H2O must be greater than the energy one can get back out – during the combustion of the hydrocarbon.
• Now there is one place the math works out – if you start with CO and H2 and make hydrocarbons, then burn the hydrocarbons completely – producing CO2 and H2O, then you could get a net positive energy content out.  The only problem is that you failed to include the energy needed to produce the CO and H2 in the first place.  These do NOT exist  in significant concentrations in air or exhaust gas.
• So the statement “produce gasoline from thin air” is impossible. The feedstocks aren’t there and if you started from what is in air – the energy balance doesn’t work and you consume energy.

So – beware of people claiming to make something from nothing.  If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.

The failure is not in solving the problem, it is in the rush to judge who is responsible for a problem.  Because the finger pointing scares people from wanting to be involved in solving the problem.  It scares people from wanting to propose new ideas or try new things out of fear of being blamed when it goes wrong.

The current mess in the Gulf of Mexico is a very good example of this.  Dr. Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and the only scientist to go to the moon (Apollo 17) wrote a VERY good comparison of the current oil spill situation and the fire on Apollo 1 (he uses the internal NASA designation 204).  To quote:

“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation “from day one” in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland Security. With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.

…

NASA’s response to the 204 fire was to rapidly implement its previously well-formulated, objective investigation of its causes, both technical and managerial. Managerial responsibilities were identified, and George Low and his engineering team made appropriate changes without a prolonged exercise in finger pointing or the delays of another Presidential, buck-passing “commission.” NASA of that day moved forward and even accelerated the Apollo effort to its successful conclusion. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon less than two years after the 204 fire. Seven months after that, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, with Mike Collins in orbit overhead, landed on the Moon.

The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, President Obama’s and his Administration’s otherwise rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop offshore oil exploration by the United States.

…

Essential to the prevention of future accidents will be an objective, complete technical and managerial investigation of why a geological and engineering situation of known risks spun out of control. The primary question is, will such an investigation be possible in the politically charged, adversarial “boot on the neck” atmosphere created by President Obama and his team? Imagine if such an atmosphere had surrounded the 204 fire investigation and recovery.

Responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon accident ultimately lies with the chaotic regulatory environment for petroleum exploration created over recent decades by the Congress, courts, Department of the Interior and environmental pressure groups. Will we learn anything about regulatory overkill from this tragic loss of eleven lives, extensive environmental damage, and disruption of business and employment in the Gulf?

A second example of this, on a much smaller scale, has occurred in Calgary in the last week.  Last weekend, a small group of ne’er-do-wells decided to steal a city transit bus and take it on a joy-ride.  One of the miscreants has been apprehended in part because of an onboard video camera that captured the action.   In order to prevent future incidents, Calgary Transit has decided that they must install video cameras on all buses.  Excuse me, but isn’t that a knee-jerk reaction to a single event?  How often are there problems on a bus where video evidence would be useful in a court of law?  Or are we hoping that because Big Brother is watching that it will deter criminal activity?  This seems like an unnecessary expense to deal with an uncommon event.  If we have a problem with civil behaviour in society, perhaps we need to look at causes, not deal with the after effects.

Margaret Wente, in the Globe and Mail this week, writes that we live in an era of big “blow ups” that cannot be stopped.

The problem, as I see it, is not that Wente’s smartest people in the world have no idea how to stop it.  It is a combination of:

• People who think they are the smartest, but are not, trying to control things they don’t understand or refuse to understand the law of unintended consequences…
• The smartest people being sidelined because they make the “not smartest people” fearful
• The smartest people being prevented from do what would solve the problems because of bureaucratic restrictions, fear of retribution, or fear of being second-guessed.

On the subject of economics, the problems of the last few years are not failures of free market capitalism.  They are failures of government regulation to foresee how the free market would react to such regulation.   Reducing interest rates to sub 5% levels for nearly 10 years, coupled with government policies to restrict housing development in many areas, coupled with government policies created to increase home ownership did two things – it drove up demand and reduced supply.  Prices rose – as should be expected under a free market.  The problem became that people, and businesses, believed that prices would continue to rise, and therefore boring at very low interest rates against such assets was a good idea.  And for those individuals, this was a perfectly rational decision – except that the party couldn’t continue, because there was too much debt piling up and interest rates can’t stay at zero forever.

If interest rates were set in the free market (solely), they would have risen significantly as the level of debt in society increased – because lenders would fear defaults and want a larger return for the larger risks they were taking.  But with the government setting interest rates and backstopping banks lending into the market, the free market was solely distorted.

On the subject of oil drilling and the safety and environmental issues, it is only in times like this that the engineers are tasked with the exciting job of “fix it now and cost is no object”.  The problem is that it should have been avoided.  But how many businesses will keep working with a piece of machinery that is dangerous because stopping to wait to replace it will have significant negative financial impacts.  And what if the person who should make that decision, to shut down the plant to replace the equipment, has their job on the line based on the financials?  In some cases, those individuals will take the risk on the unsafe equipment because the risk to themselves (their livelihood) is greater than the potential consequences of the failing equipment.   As many incidents have shown, both in industry safety and the financial markets, the human ability to quantify risks is skewed.  Very unlikely events with very bad consequences are often underestimated because of their low probabilities – if you ever hear someone say “but that will never happen”, they have done exactly that.  The history of industrial accidents is filled with such events.  The financial crisis and the Deepwater Horizon incident follow this pattern.

Sometimes, mathematically modeling can help – as it does in the case of real insurance in large markets.  It makes senses to buy insurance for some events because it is cheaper for all of us to pool the risk.  This is even the logic of the hedge funds that try to “hedge” out risk.  But if the risks are underestimated (or misunderstood), when they happen all hell can break loose.

But sometimes, you just need to rely on the smart people, be it the engineers, financial wizards, scientists – to be allowed to make a call and the rest of us have to accept they won’t always be right – but we might be better of than demanding they always be right and therefore are too frightened to speak out or act.

PBS’s Frontline had a very good documentary this week, discussing the dispute that has raged for the last 12 years or so regarding the safety of vaccination, particularly with regard to the misguided belief of some people that autism can be caused by adverse reaction to the vaccines.  I commend Frontline for staying on the side of real science, and not the witch-hunting fears of those who think temporal correlation means causation…

Many people who are dealing with children who exhibit development problems are looking for someone to blame.  The fact that they began to see symptoms in their children after vaccination is an interesting correlation, but correlation does not equal causation.  That is why so many studies have been done looking at the relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism, or thimerasol and autism.  But the studies have found no correlation, let alone causation.  Failure to find correlation means it is EXTREMELY unlikely that there is any relationship at all.  And without correlation, causation is nigh impossible to find – especially if you have no idea what the causation pathway might be.

The problem here is that the general public do not have sufficient understanding of the scientific method or statistics.  It is easy to see relationships, even where none exist – that is a human cognitive feature.  And when we are dealing with a single case (anecdote), many people fail to realize that this CANNOT show causation, without a lot more information of exactly how that cause/effect relationship is organized.  It is IMPOSSIBLE for medical science to prove beyond all doubt that a vaccine or drug is safe – but they can show that the benefits outweigh the risks.   Prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine in the US in the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of cases PER YEAR were reported, and the death rate was often in the hundreds.  Considering no scientific study has shown vaccines to have a such significant downside, we must side with real science and accept vaccination as a safe technology.

So please, have your children vaccinated – the need for herd immunity is great.

And remember, the only way we can ever discontinue a vaccine is if we eradicated the disease from the human population – as was done with smallpox in the 1970s.  We should have eradicated measles and polio by now, but fear-mongering has scared too many people away from vaccines, both in the developed world (in the case of measles) and the developing world (see Nigeria).

Prof. Ignatieff is proposing that the government get MORE involved in the production and sale of food in Canada, to help farmers, help Canadians eat healthier, and improve exports…

Wait, one of the reasons why many Canadian agricultural products aren’t exported is because of the supply management systems that make Canadian dairy, poultry and eggs uncompetitive on the world market.

And past government “help” for farmers has meant higher prices for Canadian consumers – so I want no part of this.

And Kevin Libin showed months ago in the National Post that local produce often has a higher GHG footprint than food from distant locales simply because growing some produce in Canada is inefficient.

Mr. Ignatieff – get out of the way and let the free market do the job it does best.

Mother Earth may be about to show us how insignificant we are.  The recent eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland has shutdown air travel in northwestern Europe.  News reports indicate air travel may be curtailed for a couple days.   But the geologic history is interesting:

The eruptive phase started on 19 and 20 December 1821 by a series of explosive eruptions continuing during the next days. The sources talk about heavy ash fall in the area around the volcano especially to the south and west.   After that event the eruption continued on a more subdued level until June 1822.

From the end of June till the beginning of August 1822, another series of explosive eruptions followed. The eruption columns were shot to considerable heights, with ashfall both in the far north of the country, inEyjafjörður, and in the southwest, on the peninsula of Seltjarnarnes near Reykjavík.

The period from August to December 1822 seemed quieter, but farmers attributed the death of cattle and sheep in the Eyjafjörður area to poisoning from this eruption, which modern analysis identifies as fluoride poisoning. Some small glacier runs occurred in the river Holtsá. A bigger one flooded the plains near the river Markarfljót. The sources don’t indicate the exact date.

In 1823, some men went hiking up on Eyjafjallajökull to inspect the craters. They discovered a fissure vent near the summit caldera a bit to the west of Guðnasteinn.

In the spring of 1823, the nearby volcano Katla under the glacier Mýrdalsjökull erupted and at the same time steam columns were seen on the summit of Eyjafjallajökull.

What would the consequences for Britain, Norway, France, Germany and Denmark be if the eruptions continue for two years?   I dare say that would be economically very bad.

Today, there is an open letter to President Obama from two of the twelve men who walked on the Moon and a third who was supposed to but instead survived perhaps the most harrowing ordeal of them all:

The United States entered into the challenge of space exploration under President Eisenhower’s first term, however, it was the Soviet Union who excelled in those early years,” the letter begins.”Under the bold vision of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and with the overwhelming approval of the American people, we rapidly closed the gap in the final third of the 20th century, and became the world leader in space exploration.

When President Obama recently released his budget for NASA, he proposed a slight increase in total funding, substantial research and technology development, an extension of the International Space Station operation until 2020, long range planning for a new but undefined heavy lift rocket and significant funding for the development of commercial access to low earth orbit.

Although some of these proposals have merit, the accompanying decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating.

America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz (at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future) until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves. The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

It appears that we will have wasted our current ten plus billion dollar investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature. While the President’s plan envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years.

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity. America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space. If it does, we should institute a program which will give us the very best chance of achieving that goal.

Neil Armstrong - Commander, Apollo 11  (aka the first man on the moon)

James Lovell - Commander, Apollo 13

Eugene Cernan - Commander, Apollo 17 (aka the last man on the moon)

Now I don’t agree that The Constellation Program was the right program, but it was better than nothing…

Once again, I am frustrated by the mainstream media’s insistence on turning every science story into a crisis or disaster.  The Globe and Mail today has the headline:

BPA Widespread in Ocean Water and Sand

containing such gems as:

Japanese scientists testing ocean water and sea sand have found widespread contamination with high levels bisphenol A, a chemical used to make plastic that’s able to mimic the female hormone estrogen in living things.

Its presence in sea water comes from the breakdown of the plastic trash being dumped into the sea and from the use of the compound in anti-rusting paints applied to the hulls of ships. BPA is man-made and does not occur naturally in the environment.

and:

Because BPA is able to stick to substances, the highest levels detected were in sand, at a staggering 28,000 times Environment Canada’s proposed limit for water.

Many scientists have been concerned about BPA because it has a shape that allows it to fool the body’s cells into viewing it as the same thing as naturally occurring estrogen.

The problem is, this isn’t entirely true.  In a recent months, the editor of Chemical & Engineering News (subscription required), the weekly magazine published by the American Chemical Society, has written the following:

1 March 2010 : The fact is that the evidence linking BPA with adverse health effects is weak. Many studies have been carried out, and the results have been contradictory. This is why FDA has acted cautiously with regard to BPA and why the chemical and food-packaging industries resist stringent regulation of it. FDA announced earlier this year that it has “some concern” about the potential health effects of BPA in infants and children, but also said that more research is needed to fully assess the safety of the chemical.

Nevertheless, the drumbeat against BPA continues. Once suspicion of any kind has been leveled against the safety of a chemical, watch out. No amount of contrary evidence will ever convince some chemophobic environmentalists that use of the chemical should continue. Ban it. Period. It’s no wonder the chemical industry shudders at the mere mention of the precautionary principle.

A front-page story in the Feb. 23 Washington Post, “Replacing BPA in Cans Gives Foodmakers Fits,” carries on in that tradition. Despite the fact that it calls BPA a “synthetic estrogen,” which it isn’t (BPA exhibits weak estrogenic activity, but it is not related to estrogen structurally), the story is, for the most part, factually accurate. Its underlying premise, however, is that exposure to BPA is dangerous. Running throughout the story is the assumption that BPA should be removed from all food containers.

No one has shown that adults exposed to BPA at the levels that leach from food container liners suffer any harm. Potential replacements for BPA don’t work as well and very likely will pose risks of their own. BPA and the polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins that are made from it are useful chemicals that are getting a bum rap from people who don’t know what they are talking about.

And previously:

20 July 2009 :  Another bad idea, in my view, is the agitation to remove the bisphenol A-based epoxy resin liners from food and beverage containers. This is one of those hysterical overreactions that give environmentalism a bad name.

The main problem, writes Senior Editor Melody Voith, “is the lack of a ready replacement for epoxy that meets the canned food industry’s needs. Epoxy liners have been used in cans since the 1950s, helping preserve everything from peas to tomatoes to soda. Existing food-grade substitutes are not popular because they cannot be used as broadly, are more expensive, or both.”

It probably makes sense to have removed BPA from baby bottles; infants are a particularly susceptible group and should receive an extra level of protection from substances that can harm them. But the science pretty strongly suggests that BPA at the levels humans are exposed to from epoxy liners in food cans is safe. Safer, probably, in a holistic sense than whatever substitute can be found.

Emphasis in blue is mine.  My opinion on this matter is that BPA is getting driven from the market based on supposition, overblown media reports and fear.  But not science.  Science doesn’t really show that this stuff is dangerous.

One of my readers has asked a question about climate risk.  Recently, statements have been made in various publications, ranging from Scientific American, Discover and The Economist positing that:

Action on climate is justified, not because the science is certain, but precisely because it is not.

This is a combination of the precautionary principle and the logic of buying insurance.

The fundamental problem with applying this to the climate change issue is that the likely magnitude of the problem is not very large (if it exists at all), and the costs to mitigate the supposed source is ridiculously high.

One buys fire insurance for your house because that while the risk of fire is small, the consequences are catastrophic.  But you do it because the cost of insurance is low.  If the cost of fire insurance was, say 10% of the replacement cost of the house on an annual basis, you wouldn’t buy it.  You’d bet that you wouldn’t have a fire.

With regard to the climate, while the IPCC has claimed very wide ranges of potential temperature increases, 1.4°C to 6.4°C, the probabilities lean much more to the bottom end of the range.  This must be particularly considered as the data of the last 12 years indicates a leveling off of global temperatures, even with increasing CO2 concentrations.

The question of whether such risks are catastrophic must be compared to past temperature changes and the impact on the civilization and ecosystems.  As there is significant evidence that the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods were warmer than today and the consequences for civilization was good, I would posit that attempting major changes to our economic structure in the name of “maybe things are going to go bad” seems awfully foolish.

Second, the cost of the such mitigations efforts must be compared to the risk.  Capture of CO2 costs >$100/tonne.  For Canada alone, this would be >$100 Billion just to reduce emissions by 17% from 2006 levels to by 2020.   This will result in us being 7% poorer than if we do nothing.  Are we willing to pay that much for that little change in emissions.  Atmospheric concentrations will still be rising…  To begin to reduce atmospheric CO2 and actually “stop” the suspected warming will cost a lot more.

Plus there is the question of whether it is even possible.  Replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar isn’t going to work unless there is a major improvement in PV cell technology and cost.  Nuclear could do some of the work, but environmentalists don’t like that and the regulatory structure makes it expensive – and the projects take too long.   Replacing 100 years of infrastructure isn’t going to happen in 40 years while still growing the economy.  This is why I used the cost of carbon capture as the yardstick – only it will be able to happen fast enough…

We must also look at whether adaptation is the better path.  People have adapted to climate change before – just not with the population we have.  But they also didn’t have the advantages of modern technology or free market forces that will create incentives and opportunities.

The “act now” crowd are responding to a statistically small risk with an exaggerated consequence – much like a lot of the health insurance programs in the United States – they cost too much for what they really do.

The real problem with the proposals to “act now” are that this action is to be arranged and operated by inefficient and corrupt government and supranational agencies, like the UN.   Adaptation will happen at the level of the individual, village, city, and nation, with entrepreneurs figuring out how to turn challenges into opportunities and profit.

So say no to “act now” and prepare to adapt if things do change.