Don Braid, a columnist in the Calgary Herald, writes from a position of minimal knowledge about a complex subject and thinks that we should listen to him (and the NDP who raised this question in the Alberta legislature).

He thinks the government of Alberta should prohibit the use of in-situ combustion (i.e. injecting air into oil reservoirs and igniting is so the heat of combustion helps reduce the viscosity of the oil, and the combustion gases will help push the oil towards the production wells) because it sounds like a PR nightmare on par with the 1950′s era dream of using nuclear bombs for the same purpose.

First of all – lots of crazy ideas about nuclear bombs were dreamed up in the 1950′s.  Read Dyson’s book on the Orion Project for evidence of that…

But on the subject of in-situ combustion, if Don Braid had asked people with knowledge in the field, he would have learned that in-situ combustion has been used commercially around the world since the mid-1960s, including in Alberta.  Has there been any safety problems?  It would be lying to say no.  But the risks are understood.  And turning off the fire is easy – turn off the air supply – it’s not like you can light an underground oil reservoir and it just burns for five years (as Braid insinuates).  If you stop supplying the air, it stops burning.

Braid might be surprised to know that there are in-situ combustion projects (including toe-to-heel) already operating in Alberta.   He might also be surprised to learn that there are projects to gasify (partially combust) coal underground to make gas to run a power plant. Including one proposed in Alberta that has received Government money.  Some of this technology dates to the middle of the 19th century.

So I would recommend that Braid do more research before spouting off about a subject he clearly knows little about.

On the other hand, since Braid (and others) are clearly terrified of this technology, those companies involved with it need to do a better job of selling it to the public and explaining the risks and how they are managing them.

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…

It was nice to see thousands of people protesting tax increases in the streets of Quebec this weekend, but I am suspicious about what they really understand:

Participants called for the government to clean up its own spending before imposing new taxes

But, like the protestors in Greece a few weeks ago – do these people understand that Quebec cannot afford it’s social programs?  When they say “clean up its own spending”, do they understand real cuts are necessary, or are they hoping for “efficiencies” that have never before been found in a government bureaucracy?

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.

OK – so we have had another major condo fire in Calgary, and I once again find myself frustrated by the news focus on the “poor residents” who didn’t have insurance against fire…

Excuse me, if they can afford to buy the condo, they can afford insurance.  It’s cheap.  But don’t expect me to feel sorry for them.

Here is a good link to some facts about oil sands operations and their real impact on the environment.  Please read.  And avoid the over-hyped nonsense about the oil sands bringing doom to our world…

Recently, I’ve stumbled onto a few bad science columns and articles in major science publications, Discover and Scientific American.

To start, Lawrence Krauss, a respectable physicist, starts delving into ocean chemistry and climate when he brings forth the notion that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere will decrease the pH of the ocean, making it acidic and preventing the formation of calcium carbonate shells in shelled animals and coral reefs.  The problem is, that isn’t good science.  That is taking a simple concept (i.e. dissolving CO2 in water makes carbonic acid) and applying it to the very large and very complex chemical system that is the ocean.  It has been shown that increasing acid species (like CO2) in the ocean cannot drive the pH very far because the CO2 in the water will react with minerals in the sea floor, forming salts – in fact, on page 17 of the same issue of Scientific American is a short article on storing CO2 by reacting it with the basalt underlying the ocean…   Ian Plimer has explained the ocean chemistry issue very clearly previously, showing the Dr. Krauss is misleading the public in his column.  Further, recent studies have shown that increasing CO2 in the oceans actually increases shell development in some species…  A good question for Dr. Krauss would be “How did the oceans stay alkaline during the Jurassic-Cretaceous period when atmospheric CO2 levels were 5 times the current value?”

In Discover, they have interviews with Judith Curry and Michael Mann about the impact and importance of ClimateGate.  Judith Curry makes a very eye-opening statement to a question:

Q. Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis?

A. Yes.

Egads – why the hell should we act if we don’t know whether the uncertainty overwhelms the supposed effect?

Michael Mann tells us:

We’ve reached a point now … where we’ve got climate scientists, who understand the physics of climate and how that translates to uncertainties, working hand in hand with economists who will run the projected impacts through a cost-benefit analysis.  The way it plays out is that the small probability of extremely bad things happening incurs huge potential costs, and you want to hedge against those potential catastrophic costs.  So when you taken uncertainty into account, it actually leads to the decision that we should taken action more quickly.

Of course, Dr. Mann makes us rely on faith that (1) climate scientists really do understand the climate, and (2) that economists are hard scientists who can accurately predict the future.  Considering how well economists and their ilk did over the past 5 years, I would have to question that one…

And I won’t waste my time with Jeffrey Sachs monologue, which sounds like a desperate plea to act while at the same time avoiding any comment on the fact that the science is clearly unsettled.