'Climate crisis' needs brain gain

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, Liverpool

The most brilliant minds should be directed to solving Earth's greatest challenges, such as climate change, says Sir David King. The former UK chief scientist will use his presidential address at the BA Science Festival to call for a gear-change among innovative thinkers. He will suggest that less time and money is spent on endeavours such as space exploration and particle physics.

He says population growth and poverty in Africa also demand attention. "The challenges of the 21st Century are qualitatively different from anything that we've had to face up to before," he told reporters before the opening of the festival, which is being held this year in Liverpool. "This requires a re-think of priorities in science and technology and a redrawing of our society's inner attitudes towards science and technology."
Huge expense

Sir David's remarks will be controversial because they are being made just as the UK is about to celebrate its participation in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest physics experiment. The Collider, built at the Cern laboratory under the Swiss-French border, is starting full operations this Wednesday.

It will seek to understand the building blocks of matter, and, in particular, try to find a mechanism that can explain why matter has mass. This international venture is extremely expensive, however. The UK alone has contributed more than £500m to the LHC - the largest sum of money to date invested by a UK government in a single scientific project. Sir David said it was time such funding - and the brains it supports - were pushed to answering more pressing concerns.

"It's all very well to demonstrate that we can land a craft on Mars, it's all very well to discover whether or not there is a Higgs boson (a potential mass mechanism); but I would just suggest that we need to pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial."

Big ideas
Chief among these challenges for Sir David is the issue of climate change. When he was the government's top scientist, he made the famous remark that the threat from climate change was bigger than the threat posed by terrorism. He said alternatives to fossil fuels were desperately needed to power a civilisation that would number some nine billion people by mid-century - nine billion people who would all expect a high standard of living.

"We will have to re-gear our thinking because our entire civilisation depends on energy production, and we have been producing that energy very largely through fossil fuels; and we will have to remove our dependence from fossil fuels virtually completely, or we will have to learn how to capture carbon dioxide from fossil fuel usage," he said.

Finding and exploiting clean energy sources was now imperative, he said; and Sir David questioned whether the spending on particle physics research in the shape of Cern's Large Hadron Collider was the best route to that goal.
He even doubted whether Cern's greatest invention was an outcome that could only have come from an institution that pursued so-called "blue skies research".

"People say to me: 'well what about the world wide web? That emerged from Cern'. Brilliant. Tim Berners Lee was the person who invented that. What if Tim Berners Lee had been working in a solar [power] laboratory? Perhaps he would have done it there as well. The spin-out would have come from the brilliant individual."

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I think the worlds best minds should be deciding what the worlds best minds are working on.


RichC

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__________________

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Jimi Hendrix

Oh, you said, "BRAINiacs." I misread your message header. I thought you said , "MAINiacs."

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

Check it out. This gal figured out how to make solar cells in a pizza oven.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/21/127236

__________________
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman

You rang?

__________________
"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

or "Rainiacs" if your in the path of a hurricane.

__________________
"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

Or DRAINiacs,if your forte is visiting friends and dropping handfuls of oatmeal and rice in their sink drains.

__________________

Or perhaps FEINiancs if you're just puttin' on . . .

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

Or STrainiacs,if you're stuck on the ring unable to force out last night's casserole...

__________________

Or PTOMAINE-iacs if you got a really bad meal last night . . .

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

What a dumbass!

- Peter.

__________________
2021 Chevrolet Spark
Formerly...
2000 GMC Sonoma
1981 240D 4spd stick. 347000 miles. Deceased Feb 14 2021
2002 Kia Rio. Worst crap on four wheels
1981 240D 4spd stick. 389000 miles.
1984 123 200
1979 116 280S
1972 Cadillac Sedan DeVille
1971 108 280S

Yup.

Oh yeah. I, for one, will not rest until men (and woman) are residing on Mars so that we can ship water and oxygen to them at great expense to keep them alive.

The very integrity of the human species depends on us living on a planet where solar rays will slowly cook us and where we can ponder at length the incredibly random coincidence that such planets as earth come into being amidst the vast quantities of space dust that is utterly dead, from all indications.

I see no reason in remaining on a planet that has the proper air pressure, air mixture, temperatures, and food stuffs that our bodies require (oddly enough, as our precursors evolved in that approximate mix for untold millions of years) when we could instead relocate to a planet that will probably not have such things between now and the time the sun goes super-nova, projected by some to occur in 14 billion years.

ONWARD!!

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

"Lunatics" is a more accurate description of them. 'Climate crisis' needs brain again is definitely the right slogan for them. Hopefully they will find somebody that actually HAS a brain so the whole 'Climate crisis' fad can be put to an end and we can devote resources to ACTUAL science.

Science News

Tropical Wetlands Hold More Carbon Than Temperate Marshes
ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2008) — In one of the first comparisons of its kind, researchers have demonstrated that wetlands in tropical areas are able to absorb and hold onto about 80 percent more carbon than can wetlands in temperate zones.
The scientists extracted soil cores from wetlands in Costa Rica and in Ohio and analyzed the contents of the sediment from the past 40 years. Based on their analysis, they estimated that the tropical wetland accumulated a little over 1 ton of carbon per acre per year, and the temperate wetland accumulated .6 tons of carbon per acre per year.
The temperate Ohio wetland in the study covers almost 140 acres, meaning it sequesters 80 tons of carbon per year. The tropical wetland covers nearly 290 acres and stores 300 tons of carbon each year.
“Finding out how much carbon has accumulated over a specific time period gives us an indication of the average rate of carbon sequestration, telling us how valuable each wetland is as a carbon sink,” said William Mitsch, senior author of the study and an environment and natural resources professor at Ohio State University. “We already know wetlands are outstanding coastal protection systems, and yet wetlands continue to be destroyed around the planet. Showing that wetlands are gigantic carbon sequestration machines might end up being the most convincing reason yet to preserve them.”
Mitsch, also director of the Wilma H. Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park at Ohio State, conducted the study with graduate student Blanca Bernal, who presented a poster on this research Wednesday (10/8) at the Geological Society of America joint meeting in Houston.
Often called the “kidneys” of the environment, wetlands act as buffer zones between land and waterways. In addition to absorbing carbon and holding onto it for years, wetlands filter out chemicals in water that runs off from farm fields, roads, parking lots and other surfaces.
But wetlands are also a natural source of methane, and bacteria present during the decay of organic material cause wetlands to release this greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
“A big issue in wetland science is how carbon sequestration balances against the release of greenhouse gases,” Mitsch said. “Methane is a more effective greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide in terms of how much radiation it absorbs, but it also oxidizes in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide does not degrade – it is an end product. If you take that into account, I think wetlands are very effective systems for sequestering carbon.”
Mitsch and Bernal collected soil cores from Old Woman Creek, a freshwater wetland near Lake Erie in northern Ohio, and from a similar flow-through wetland located at EARTH University in northeastern Costa Rica. Old Woman Creek had accumulated between 16 and 18 centimeters (about 7 inches) of sediment since 1964, while the Costa Rican wetland accumulated between 30 and 38 centimeters (12 to 15 inches) of sediment during the same time period.
To determine the age of the sediments, the researchers used radiometric dating with cesium-137. Above-ground nuclear testing in the mid-20th century left behind the cesium-137 compound as a marker in sediments throughout the world. Based on how deep cesium-137 was detected in the soil cores, the researchers were able to date sediment from each wetland that has built up since 1964, the year the concentration of the compound reached its peak.
The tropical wetland sediment was more densely packed with carbon. Its average carbon density was 110 grams of carbon per kilogram of soil (almost 1.8 ounces for every pound of soil), while the Ohio wetland’s average carbon density was less than half that, 53 grams of carbon per kilogram of soil (.86 ounces per pound).
Mitsch and Bernal plan to conduct additional comparisons of carbon sequestration in wetlands from different climates to look for patterns that might inform policymakers who are exploring carbon storage options across the world as a strategy to offset greenhouse gas emissions.
This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a Payne Grant from the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, the Wilma H. Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.