Category Archives: Soapbox

Year of Air: 2013

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I mentioned some time ago (Noise Transfer on 3rd April, 2013) that we are privileged to have magnificent views of the river and hills beyond from our city centre house.  From the back bedroom window you can just about see the sea and we are certainly aware of it in most days due to the almost constant sea breeze (or gale).  So despite living in a city centre we are not amongst the 95 percent of EU city dwellers who are exposed to fine particles levels that exceed WHO guidelines.  However, the EU levels are well below those in Beijing that are 300 times the guidelines and probably comparable to those in London during the Great Smog of 1952 that caused cows to choke to death and contributed to the death of about 3000 people.  London has come a long way in the intervening 60 years with current levels of fine particles at about half the WHO guideline, which is 25 micrograms per cubic metre, whereas Beijing has recorded levels of 400. it has been estimated that 13,000 people die prematurely in the UK due to combustion related pollution compared to 1.2 million in China

In my post entitled ‘Extraordinary Technical Intelligence’ on 10th April, 2013 I wrote about the process of urbanisation and industrialisation that has been seen repeatedly across the world.  The progress of this process in a region can also be measured in the levels and type of pollution being generated.  The West has been where China is now, and where India and Africa are likely to go next.  Air pollution on this scale effects the neighbours of the polluter so we have an incentive to help alleviate the problem.  We should also feel a moral obligation because much of the pollution is associated with factories producing goods that we buy and probably don’t repair or recycle at the end their useful life [see ‘Old is Beautiful’ posted on May 1st, 2013] .  If we drew the system boundaries more appropriately then the pollution generated during the manufacture of these goods is as much our responsibility as the manufacturer’s [see my post on 19th December, 2012 about ‘Drawing Boundaries’].

This is the Year of Air, maybe it should have been called the Year of Clean Air to make it absolutely clear what it is all about, i.e. giving everyone on the planet the chance to live and breathe clean air!

BTW, a fine particle is one of diameter less than 2.5 microns or 1/30th diameter of one of your hairs.  One my PhD students is working on tracking nano-particles about a hundred times smaller as they interact with biological structures such as human cells, but that’s another story [see last week’s post].

Sources:

‘Under a Cloud’ by Pilita Clark in the Financial Times, July 13/14, 2013 [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/83ef4b78-eae5-11e2-9fcc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2cgRhFXMs ].

Yim SHL and Barrett SRH. Public Health Impacts of Combustion Emissions in the United Kingdom. Environmental Science and Technology, 2012, 46 (8), pp 4291–4296.

‘Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Premature Deaths in China’ by Edward Wong in the New York Times on April 1, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-linked-to-1-2-million-deaths-in-china.html?_r=0

Silva, R.A., et al., 2013, Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change, Environmental Research Letters, 8:034005. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034005/pdf/1748-9326_8_3_034005.pdf

Clean fossil fuel?

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The amount of energy stored in methane hydrate could be twice that of all other fossil fuel reserves based on data from the US Geological Survey, the New Scientist reported on 31st August, 2013 in an article entitled ‘Buried Treasure’.  At this point, most of you are probably wondering what methane hydrate is and where it is stored.  Microbes on the seabed eating organic matter produce methane molecules that at high pressure and low temperature combine with the water to form a hydrate, which is white crystal.  Large deposits of methane hydrate deposits are believed to lie along continental margins, mostly in ocean sediments.

Natural gas and shale gas (‘Fracking’ on August 28th, 2013) are also methane, which releases less carbon dioxide when it is burned than coal or gas and hence is regarded as cleaner.  However, methane hydrate deposits might have an additional advantage because some research has shown that the methane molecule trapped in the hydrate crystal can be replaced by a carbon dioxide one.  So we might be able to extract methane and simultaneously store carbon dioxide.  Sounds too good to be true and the second law of thermodynamics will ensure that there is a price to be paid somewhere and somehow (see post entitled ‘Sonic Screwdriver’ on April 17th, 2013 for more the 2nd law).

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929320.800-frozen-fuel-the-giant-methane-bonanza.html

https://www.llnl.gov/str/Durham.html

http://www.jogmec.go.jp/english/oil/technology_015.html?recommend=1

Chemical Imbalance

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chemicalimbalance

Cover of the book to go with the film

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about population and its rapid rise (see ‘Population Control’ on September 25th, 2013).  Despite our burgeoning population many university engineering schools in the English-speaking world tend to recruit from only half the population, i.e. the male population.  Representation of females in engineering is woefully low, generally worse than in science.  To learn more how women feel about the situation in chemistry watch a short film called ‘A Chemical Imbalance’  – I highly recommend that you spare the 15 minutes to watch it at  http://chemicalimbalance.co.uk/

Go on do it now! The rest of this posting is boring stuff so watch the film which was made with support from the Royal Society.

In the film ‘the leaky pipeline’ is talked about in the context of women entering science and engineering not making it to the top.  Of course this is not unique to science and engineering; only about 20 of the Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO.  This is an important issue but the supply to the pipeline is a bigger problem.  Only 20% of the students awarded an A-level in Physics in the UK this year (equivalent to AP exams in the US) were female and since most university engineering programmes require Physics the supply of qualified women is almost decimated before it gets to the pipeline.  This year my school has taken the step of dropping the physics requirement and accepting that we will need to teach the necessary physics as part of our engineering courses; incidently we also raised the grades we require so this does not represent a lowering of standards!

Another sobering thought is that nearly half of co-education state schools in the UK had no females studying for A-level physics.  I don’t have statistics for the US but I suspect they would be the same.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a political scientist at Princeton argues that ‘the way we view women [has] changed radically, [but] the way we view men not at all’ so that achieving further gender equality requires a cultural change about and by men, which is going to be tough in a male-dominated conservative profession like engineering but we have to do it.  So if you didn’t watch the film, do it now and think about how you can be an agent for change.

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19603399

Eduardo Porter’s column ‘Economic Scene’ entitled ‘Is leaning in enough to fix the gender gap? in the New York Times on September 24th, 2013 see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/business/economy/for-american-women-is-it-enough-to-lean-in.html?ref=eduardoporter&_r=0

Population Control

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The jury is out on whether the global population will reach 10 billion though there seems little doubt that our planet cannot sustain the current population, never mind 10 billion, with a Western life style.  Maybe some of you saw Stephen Emmott’s show ‘Ten Billion’ at London’s Royal Court Theatre last year; I didn’t but you can read his book of the same title.  As you will probably have guessed from the title, he thinks we are headed for a global population of 10 billion and that radical social and political action is needed because science and technology cannot avoid the impended disaster.  Erle C. Ellis does not believe that overpopulation is problem because he subscribes to Ester Boserup’s theory that population growth drives land productivity.  He suggested in the New York Times last week (13th September 2013) that we have transformed ecosystems to sustain ourselves in the past and will continue do so.

This idea could be extended to suggest that the human society or population is self-controlling that has parallels with the Gaia principle that the planet is self-regulating system in which organisms co-evolve with their environment.  The UN low-fertility model offers some evidence of self-regulation of the human population being to operate because it predicts the global population reaching a maximum of 8.34bn in 2050 and declining to 6.75bn by 2100.  At those levels engineering solutions could probably manage the rest and avert disaster.  Danny Dorling in his book ‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ provides further evidence by pointing out that the global average family size has never been so small with the norm being less than one child per woman for more than half the planet and immigration to wealthier countries leading to further declines in birth rates.  If the UN low fertility model is right then perhaps we will be able to avoid overpopulation but  scientists and engineers will still need to redouble their efforts to provide sustainable goods and services.  Progress is being made but mainly through incremental improvements that many of us take for granted perhaps in part due to our ignorance of science and engineering or at least of the advances in living standards that it are being delivered to billions of people who previously did not access to the internet, mobile phones and medicines.

Sources:

‘Overpopulation is not problem’ by Erle C. Ellis in the New York Times on September 13, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem.html?_r=0)

‘Crowded Planet’ by Clive Cookson in the Financial Times on July 13/14, 2013 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a7e5ba20-e7e4-11e2-9aad-00144feabdc0.html

‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ by Danny Dorling, published by Constable http://10billion.dannydorling.org/

’10 Billion’ by Stephen Emmott published by Penguin http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141976327,00.html

‘Damn the cynics and embrace the positive’ by Luke Johnson in the Financial Times on August 14th, 2013 http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson or http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson