Hope is not a plan

A corroded point in an overland pipe at the North Slope Prudhoe Bay field dumped 267,000 gallons of crude over two acres of tundra. It was discovered and plugged on March 2nd.

The BBC story

Last month, the National Geophysical Data Center released an updated map of the world at night as seen from space, taken from 2003 satellite data. You can download such files from 1992 through 2003 at this NGDC page. You can also go to Blue Marble Navigator for various processed forms of this imagery, including a color-coded comparison between 1992 and 2002.

Notable changes in that time? The world as a whole may be brighter, but a substantial portion of the former Soviet Union is actually becoming darker.

Also, as the Blue Marble folks point out in the 2003 imagery, there is a stunning contrast between North and South Korea -- the South almost looks like an island.

Thanks to Science Magazine's Netwatch for the pointer.

This week, researchers from UC Davis and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) reveal in a Nature paper that they've identified an allele of the gene Sub1 that can be bred into commercial rice strains to allow them to survive up to two weeks completely submerged -- rather than a handful of days. This is significant not because it staves off financial loss (though it would, to the tune of $1 billion/year), but because it means more crops will survive to feed our exponentially expanding population -- half of which lives or dies on rice.

The BBC article notes that:

Although rice production has doubled over the past 40 years, demand is continuing to grow.

It's not as cheery as all that. In an article in the 28 July issue of Science, IRRI points out that that doubling in production largely happened over thirty years ago with the development of more robust strains, and very little progress has occurred since. Flood-resistant rice will help, but not nearly enough.

Instead, the real effort is to swap the carbon-fixing engine inside rice, removing its inefficient C3 mechanism and replacing it with the evolutionarily more recent, more efficient C4 mechanism. Success would mean rice yield jumping 50%.

This is not an easy job. At least one rice genome has been sequenced, but this isn't just a matter of swapping genes -- C4 carbon fixation uses a fundamentally different structural layout of the fixation components to achieve its goal. To quote a 1999 report, also from Science:

A joint team at Japan's National Institute of Agrobiological Resources and Nagoya University led by Nagoya microbiologist Makoto Matsuoka is now attempting to reproduce the C4 cycle in rice. For the transformation to succeed, a host of altered enzymes would have to work together properly, and the plant's structure may have to be changed to create the equivalent of mesophyll cells. As a result, the project may well be the most fundamental genetic alteration that humankind has ever tried in any organism. "Don't hold your breath," Lorimer [a biochemist] says.

Indeed, Matsuoka cautions, "I don't think we can really make a true C4 [rice] plant."

Right now, the goal is to demonstrate viability of the plan and then to beg for the estimated $50 million in funding they think they'll need. They're probably going to need more than that unless they get very lucky.

As it happens, certain parts of world ecology continue to trend in bad directions.

In an article in the August 18 issue of Science magazine, Westerling et al report that wildfires appear to have increased dramatically starting in the mid-80s due to warmer weather and an earlier spring snowmelt. As discussed in this perspective, this isn't simply a matter of "another problem caused by global warming." Forest fires currently contribute atmospheric carbon equivalent to 40% of fossil fuel emissions. This is what's known as a feed-forward cycle -- warmer weather yields more fires, which yield more carbon, which yields warmer weather, which leads to more fires, and so on.

On the disease side, tuberculosis is rapidly developing into an unkillable bug. For many years now, multi-drug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis has been a big problem, forcing doctors to rely on second-line drugs that are expensive, more toxic and less effective than the now ineffective first-line drugs. Since 2004, however, surveys of patients with MDR tuberculosis have found that from 5-15% of them have extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis, which is immune to both first-line drugs and at least half of the six classes of second-line drugs. As the MMWR says: XDR TB has emerged worldwide as a threat to public health and TB control, raising concerns of a future epidemic of virtually untreatable TB. New anti-TB drug regimens, better diagnostic tests, and international standards for SLD-susceptibility testing are needed for effective detection and treatment of drug-resistant TB.

The culprit in this case is poor implementation of proper drug treatment, bolstered in many areas by HIV clearing out the patient's immune system ahead of time.

It's likely that TB won't be effectively treated short of a completely novel approach. In the mean time, traditional public health measures will have to be taken to try and limit the spread of this deadly and untreatable TB variant.

The BBC article

A recently published study by Lyman et al shows that although whole-ocean temperatures have been rising over the last half century, the temperature of the top 750 meters of ocean has actually dropped. This isn't as happy as it might sound, however. Were the temperature simply dropping for some ocean-internal reason, sea level should show a matching decline. As sea level is actually increasing, it's likely that the cooling seen in the upper levels is either incidental to or because of large-scale glacial and ice floe melting.

In other words, our warm ocean is, indeed, melting away our ice.

You can read the article abstract here. Access to the article itself requires a subscription or a one-time fee.

A report from the National Center for Health Statistics tells us that although 4 of 10 children were born "out of wedlock" in the U.S. in 2005, the teen birth rate dropped yet again last year, to the lowest level on record. We still outpace other industrialized nations on teen pregnancies, but we're trending in a solid direction.

Most of the rise in births by unmarried mothers has occurred in women in their 20s.

The CNN story

The canonical "three Rs" of sound resource management are reduce, reuse and recycle.

The European Space Agency is applying this in a very clever way to providing satellite radio service to people on the ground.

Although broadcast television satellites are quite well built, they typically run out of fuel in a decade or so. Unable to correct their position, they drift -- making them useless for television broadcasting. However, if you could track them, you could still use them as a broadcast source.

The ground system developed by the ESA takes advantage of these satellites' durability by placing a tracking receiver, tied to a cache, into a car on the ground. The receiver can then maintain signal as the car drives, precaching signal for those times when the car goes through a tunnel or otherwise loses the feed -- just as modern "skip-proof" CD players precache music so they can keep playing evenly as you smack over a speed bump.

Should this go into wide use, it will represent an impressive reuse of "obselete" space systems, with the dual benefits of reducing the need for new systems and the expense of providing this type of service.

We've introduced a lot of infrastructure into the world, and we tend to drop it long before it actually becomes useless. Adaptations like this are part of our new wave of combined fiscal and environmental responsibility.

BBC article

Buried in this BBC article about Lord Lawson's "I don't want to spend money on prevention" critique of the recent Stern report on climate change is this gem:

Lord Lawson said Britain would see "great benefits" from climate change over the next 100 years.

Just imagine the benefits. All those desperate, displaced Bangladeshis just looking for work. The destruction of those pesky Low Countries over on the continent. You could win the big prize and have the Atlantic conveyor collapse, plunging all of Europe into a cold, famine-ridden ice age that forces everyone to import all their food from the Americas.

Of course, "it'll be good for us" is one of many well-reasoned arguments this peer gives, along with others that don't quite all connect such as 'we can't do anything about it anyway' or 'it'll be quicker and easier to build better flood devices' or this bit of clear thinking:

Even under the worst case scenario set out by Stern, future generations would only be slightly worse off financially as a result of global warming, Lord Lawson said.

"The proposition is that we should ask the people of this generation [to] make considerable sacrifices now so that their grandchildren, their great grandchildren, are seven times as well off as they are today, rather than only six times as well off."

Well, there is that issue of wars spurred by accelerated loss of arable land, flooding and droughts. But whatever. No resource or immigration issue has ever led to trouble for the UK, right?

Russia has begun construction on floating nuclear power plants, based initially on the low-end nuclear plants currently used in their icebreaker fleet, and then moving on to midrange plants based on the reactors used in their nuclear subs.

"This is a unique potential in both Russian and world power engineering. We have unique competitive advantages: no other country in the world had so many reactor-years and such a unique nuclear fleet as we did."

Greenpeace, naturally, is freaking out about this.

They're not unjustified, either. As Sergey Kiriyenko, head of the Russian nuclear energy agency Rosatom, said above, the former Soviet fleet has many "reactor-years" of experience. Some of that experience involves ditching nuclear reactors in the sea around the Kola peninsula. Given that the same people who cavalierly scrapped nuclear reactors by simply sinking them are now in charge of making these floating reactor platforms, Greenpeace is right to be concerned.

al Jazeera article

This is isoprene. It's a required chemical intermediate in the biology of every plant as well as being a byproduct of petrochemical production. You almost certainly own many products derived from isoprene.

In this perspective piece in Science magazine, Manuel Lerdau reviews an important interaction between human pollutants and isoprene that is actively shifting the landscape around us.

All plants use isoprene, but as Lerdau tells us, some plants produce an excess of isoprene. They generate so much, in fact, that this volatile, organic compound actually outgasses from the plant and into the air. Once it hits the air, isoprene can do two very different things -- it either decreases ozone levels, or increases them. This is happening at ground level, where increased ozone is bad, so it's vitally important to know why isoprene does one thing or the other.

As it happens, the determining factor is us. When nitrogen oxide levels are low -- say, in clean air -- isoprene effectively "pulls" ozone out of the air. Less ground-level ozone, and we're happier all around. When nitrogen oxide levels are high -- as happens in areas with cars, or lots of fertilizer -- isoprene, nitrogen oxides, and ozone combine to generate even more ozone. Naturally, that's not good. But it's even less good than you think.

You may be wondering why plants would make excess isoprene. What do they get out of it? Evolution isn't perfect, but it is pretty stingy, and all that isoprene costs the plants energy. There is a point, though -- the isoprene protects those plants that generate it from oxidative damage. Like the kind of damage caused by ozone.

Perhaps you've just seen the nasty feedback loop here. We put ozone and nitrogen oxides into the air, via cars and other pollution sources. Those already cause oxidative damage, so plants with more isoprene survive, replacing non-isoprene producers. These plants put out more isoprene. The isoprene interacts with our nitrogen oxides and ozone to make even more ozone -- more oxiders in the air. More non-isoprene plants die and are replaced by isoprene plants. There's more isoprene in the air, it helps generates more ozone...and so on.

Here, the climate change isn't one of heat, but of toxicity. By making the air harsher, we're selecting plants that, by protecting themselves, will make the air harsher still, and a system that's been in balance for a long time tilts progressively toward disaster.

This year's first issue of the McKinsey Quarterly has several research summaries devoted to environmental concerns. As is the McKinsey way, these are heavily devoted to the economics of these situations, rather than the environmental or moral factors. Thus, instead of asserting whether one should or should not attempt to curtail global warming, they address the costs of various components of that effort.

In other words, if I decide to improve my energy productivity and decrease greenhouse gas output, what's the most cost-effective way to do each?

Diana Farrell, Scott Nyquist, and Matthew Rogers address the first concern. "Energy productivity" is "the ratio of value added to energy inputs." More plainly, how much money do you make per unit of energy consumed? This has an obvious link to environmental concerns, inasmuch as low energy productivity means that you're burning a lot more energy to get the same economic output. You can, then, increase overall economic output either by dumping more energy into the system (costly, environmentally untenable) or increasing your energy productivity (a net gain for you and the world). McKinsey sees extant opportunities to increase productivity and thus reduce growth in global energy demand from a projected 2.2% per year to less than 1% per year. And, as they point out, increases in energy productivity are net moneymakers, so you don't even need to subsidize them -- in theory.

So where are the opportunities?

The report identifies substantial room for improvement in residential heating and lighting (a whopping 25% of global energy demand), in electricity generation and distribution, and in various refinery processes.

So what stands in the way of increasing energy productivity?

There are a couple big roadblocks to tapping into the potential of increased productivity. First off is the "if I ruled the world" problem, which crops up again when discussing greenhouse gas reduction. Sure, 25% of global energy demand is in residential heating and lighting, and sure, an average family might get a net savings in energy expenses after a couple years if they just reinsulated their place, but it's awfully hard to inform consumers about this, and convince them to spend money on new double-paned windows instead of something that rewards them right now. When you can't even convince people to stick money in the bank and let it earn interest, it's awfully hard to get them to spend money because it'll save them money three years from now. So, even though it would be great if all the individuals of the world made their homes more efficient, you just can't magically mobilize them all. Second is the problem that energy is not a major expense for business. As curious as that may sound, the average business may well see many other places where it can earn a better productivity increase than by upping energy productivity. Finally, a lot of government policies distort people's economic relationship with energy. The article cites fuel subsidies in the Middle East as well as the fact that residential gas is effectively free in Russia as two major examples of policies that motivate people away from increasing their energy productivity. Of course, as they know in Tehran, it's politically tricky to try and revoke this kind of subsidy.

In a second article, Per-Anders Enkvist, Tomas Naucler, and Jerker Rosander take a look at the costs of greenhouse gas reduction. Once again, the question is not "Should you do this?" but rather "If you decide to do this, how much do various measures cost?" They set as their upper bound a cost of 40 Euros per ton (of carbon dioxide not emitted) in 2020, and then look at the various measures that make it under that line, from cheapest to most expensive.

The first, and most important, realization here is that there's a whole chunk of this cost curve that's negative. In other words, many carbon-reduction measures make you money. Most of these money-making measures are, unsurprisingly, efficiency related. The top winner is building insulation, followed by a host of efficiency increases in subsystems, efficiency increases in vehicles, and so on, with sugarcane biofuel as the only big contender that isn't based on increases in efficiency.

The second major realization, and one that ties into the energy productivity issue as well, is that a lot of the cheapest emission-reduction measures lean on developing nations. There's much more opportunity for gains from energy efficiency there, precisely because many of the infrastructure components are being built right now. Making the coal industry in the United States more efficient involves rebuilding plants; making the coal industry in a developing nation more efficient involves building them efficiently the first time.

Here, again, we hit the "if I ruled the world" problem. Looking at the situation globally, it's obvious that you want to make all the gains you can in the areas where they're most affordable. However, if you're a local administrator somewhere in a developing nation and you need to power a growing city, you can't justify throwing extra money into a more efficient power plant just because it makes economic sense on a global scale. And until we can arrange things such that that does make sense, a big chunk of the most effective climate-saving measures just won't happen.

In an ideal world, an effective carbon cap-and-trade system would motivate players in industrialized nations to push money into increased efficiency in developing nations, making it a win-win all the way around. In the meantime, fragmentation and local politics will block many of the best opportunities to prevent climate damage.

The BBC reports that traffic police in Calcutta are going to be given supplementary oxygen to help them keep going in the heavily polluted air of the city. The pollution is tremendous -- the pictures in the article are quite telling -- and leads to Calcutta having the highest lung cancer rate in India, in addition to a host of other medical problems among its residents.

The oxygen, while thoughtful, is unlikely to do much to ameliorate the effects of a whole day spent in the heart of traffic.

The government attempted sweeping pollution reforms, but they didn't last:

In May 2005, the government set a deadline which ordered all vehicles in Calcutta manufactured before 1990 either to be off the roads or convert to greener fuel like LPG.

Only 10% of Calcutta's vehicles have converted to greener fuels like LPG.

Did you catch that last line? "Only 10%" have converted to green fuels. Although presented as a disappointing low performer here, Calcutta with its 10% gives America's record a huge stomping. Consider the 1.5 million E85 flex-fuel vehicles on the road in America, many of which aren't actually running on E85. With 243 million vehicles on our roads, that's a paltry 0.6%.

There's room to improve everywhere.

In its report Climate Change: Financial Risks to Federal and Private Insurers in Coming Decades are Potentially Significant, GAO evaluates a frequently overlooked area of high impact for global warming -- insurance.

The report opens by reviewing the likely outcomes of continued global warming. As ever, the GAO's eye is focused on financial impacts, in this case specifically focusing on financial impacts on property insurers:

This table, although instructive, is a little bit dry and hard to draw financial conclusions from. Fortunately, the GAO has some real numbers to work with:

You can easily pick out two disasters by eye -- the WTC in 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Absent those extraordinary cases, the trend is still obviously toward greater property damage over time. Two additional tables in the report clearly show that both flood and crop damage claims are trending upwards over time. Although flood damage increases (again, not counting Katrina) can be at least partially attributed toward cyclical upswings in hurricane activity and unwise coastal building, crop damage has nothing to do with choosing to live anywhere new or foolish.

As it happens, many private insurers are taking measures to try and account for this apparent increase in risk. After all, it affects their bottom line.

In addition to managing their aggregate exposure on a near-term basis, some of the world’s largest insurers have also taken a longer-term strategic approach to changes in catastrophic risk. Six of the eleven private insurers we interviewed reported taking one or more additional actions when asked if their company addresses climatic change in their weather-related risk management processes. These activities include monitoring scientific research (4 insurers), simulating the impact of a large loss event on their portfolios (3 insurers), and educating others in the industry about the risks of climatic change (3 insurers), among others. Moreover, major insurance and reinsurance companies, such as Allianz, Swiss Re, Munich Re, and Lloyds of London, have published reports that advocate increased industry awareness of the potential risks of climate change, and outline strategies to address the issue proactively.

The nonprofit Federal insurance programs, however, have not taken steps to try and model increasing risk ahead of time, preferring to operate reactively:

Neither program has assessed the implications of a potential increase in the frequency or severity of weather-related events on program operations, although both programs have occasionally attempted to estimate their aggregate losses from potential catastrophic events. For example, FCIC officials stated that they had modeled past events, such as the 1993 Midwest Floods, using current participation levels to inform negotiations with private crop insurers over reinsurance terms. However, NFIP and FCIC officials explained that these efforts were informal exercises, and were not performed on a regular basis. Furthermore, according to NFIP and FCIC officials, both programs’ estimates of weather-related risk rely heavily on historical weather patterns. As one NFIP official explained, the flood insurance program is designed to assess and insure against current—not future—risks. Over time, agency officials stated, this process has allowed their programs to operate as intended. However, unlike private sector insurers, neither program has conducted an analysis of the potential impacts of an increase in the frequency or severity of weather-related events on continued program operations in the long-term.

NFIP is Fema's National Flood Insurance Program. FCIC is the FDA's Federal Crop Insurance Program.

Reactive measures are a bit of a worry, because the rate of increase in risk appears to be outpacing the historical trend:

AIR Worldwide, a leading catastrophe modeling firm, recently reported that insured losses should be expected to double roughly every 10 years because of increases in construction costs, increases in the number of structures, and changes in their characteristics. AIR’s research estimates that, because of exposure growth, probable maximum catastrophe loss—an estimate of the largest possible loss that may occur, given the worst combination of circumstances—grew in constant 2005 dollars from $60 billion in 1995 to $110 billion in 2005, and it will likely grow to over $200 billion during the next 10 years.

As a cap to this discussion, consider the fact that insured losses account for only 40% of total losses from any typical natural disaster. Obviously, it's in everyone's best interest to consider the financial impact of changing weather.

AIDS has been devastating in Africa. Although HIV/AIDS is a problem elsewhere in the world, Africa is the only place that sees prevalence rates up in the double digits across multiple nations. So what, then, is the problem?

We know that there are still problems getting anti-HIV drugs to people, that other endemic diseases promote AIDS, and vice versa, and that there are quite a few treatment scams out there, despite our best efforts. We also know it's not about promiscuity, since Westerners are likely to have more partners.

Still, the question remains -- what's up? Did AIDS just get too strong a foothold in Africa, and now we're fighting back from a huge disadvantage?

John R. Talbott's thesis is that prostitution is the key to the AIDS problem in Africa. In this PLoS One article, he uses statistical analyses to support his hypothesis that African nations with high HIV/AIDS rates have high levels of infected prostitutes (that is, a large number of prostitutes, and a large percentage of those infected with HIV):

(CSWs are Commercial Sex Workers -- prostitutes)

The statistical analyses seem sound enough, and certainly this concept anecdotally fits with other reports I've read about 90% HIV infection prevalence in prostitutes who serve truck drivers in various parts of Africa.

You can read Talbott's pitch at his site, Africans Against AIDS. Read the PowerPoint for a bit more on his views. Although he equates HIV-infected prostitutes with drunk drivers, he quickly settles down into a rational, harm-reduction-based approach that seeks to punish enablers of prostitution (e.g. customers, pimps) and transition women from prostitution into subsidized jobs.

Talbott is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, who has written books predicting various market crashes and pushing world democracy.

My home county is burning down again. This time it's much worse than the fires of a few years ago. According to the AP wire, as reported on KNBC in Los Angeles, the statewide evacuation estimate is about 900,000 people now, with over 500,000 of those in San Diego (meaning they're evacuating a sixth of the county). The reporter cited this as the largest peacetime movement of Americans in the history of the country.

Here's a schematic view of the burn in San Diego county as of earlier today:

(This map courtesy San Diego news station CBS 8)

Here's a satellite view of the smoke plumes heading out to sea from southern California:

People, especially in Orange County, have been complaining about the lack of available resources. Credit the firefighters for making their case, over and over again for decades, for additional resources. San Diego county alone probably needs another thousand firefighters, give or take. No credit to representatives who now complain about the lack of resources while vigorously opposing "big government" and refusing to pay taxes, believing that infrastructure and infrastructure defense solves itself.

Also no credit to all of you who fear terrorists more than anything else, when our long history and our very recent history show that, short of a terrorist group with a nuclear weapon, there is nothing that even a motivated group of terrorists could do that can match the trauma of this kind of super-disaster.

We don't have enough firefighters to put fires down and keep them down. Right now, they're skipping from place to place, not sleeping, just fencing with the flames and hoping the winds will change.

CNN coverage

You can get live feeds from SoCal news stations (such as KNBC) at wwiTV.

The winds have largely died down and even shifted direction, fire-fueling East-West Santa Anas being replaced by slower and moister offshore breezes. Even so, the is still quite dry and no rain is coming, and as the president tours the area to survey the damage, firefighters still struggle to contain flames that face no natural boundary other than the ocean.

Unfortunately, two more deaths have been reported in Poway, directly attributable to the fire. Several other people died during or just after evacuation.

Elsewhere, we learn that police have arrested one arson suspect and killed another one.

Here's a map of the damage in the San Diego area:

Taken from this BBC page, which also tells us that over 300,000 acres have burned in San Diego county.

The State of California today filed suit against the U.S. Federal government to push the EPA to approve a two-year-old California law mandating a 30% reduction in vehicle emissions (in new vehicles) by 2016. American auto manufacturers have been fighting this law, saying that it will hurt their ability to compete and other random nonsense -- nonsense, because the California law will apply equally to vehicles from foreign and domestic manufacturers. Were they honest, auto industry representatives would just out and out admit that they know California is a bellwether for nation-wide legislation impacting human health and safety, and they'd like to keep us off laws like this as long as possible. They've been very successful nationally, although that was with the backing of a Republican legislature that happily let automotive emissions standards stagnate for well over a decade.

Since the California law is stricter than current Federal standards, the state needs a waiver from EPA before it can go ahead and enforce the law. The official word from EPA is that they'll have a "decision" by the end of the year. It is not terribly surprising that the current EPA, hamstrung by manipulation from industry carpetbaggers associated with the Bush administration, had not even reached a decision about when it was going to decide whether or not to allow California to police our own air -- not until we sued.

Pathetic, but expected. The last word here goes to our governor:

Speaking at a news conference, Mr Schwarzenegger accused the federal government of "ignoring the will of tens of millions of people" by failing to approve the legislation.

"There's no legal basis for Washington to stand in our way."

BBC article

A recent BBC article takes a look at the ongoing problem of an aging, decreasing population in Japan. If the current trend continues -- and there's no particular reason to imagine it won't -- the Japanese population will be overwhelmingly top-heavy by mid-century, with nearly 40% of the populace at age 65 or older. This naturally leads one to imagine all sorts of problematic consequences as the demographics of Japan progress farther away from what current social structures effectively support.

Japan is just one of several countries facing population contraction at the moment. Consider the trio of Japan, Russia, and South Africa.

Japan, with a population of about 127 million, has a median age of 43.5 years and a population growth rate of -0.088%. This contraction comes down entirely to birth rate issues, as Japan sees 8.1 births/1,000 people per year, and 8.98 deaths/1,000 people per year. With no real immigration into Japan and a lifetime tally of 1.23 children born per woman, Japan appears to be slowly easing itself out of existence by way of a long, comfortable retirement.

Russia, coming in at 141 million people, has a median age of 38.2 years and a population growth rate of -0.484% (notice how much stronger a contraction Russia is suffering in comparison with Japan). Here, the collapse runs on the heals of mortality rather than a reluctance to have kids, with 10.92 births/1,000 people per year being drastically outpaced by 16.04 deaths/1,000 people per year. Russia's lifetime tally is 1.39 children per woman, but mortality is high across the board from infants through adults. Unlike Japan, Russia does see some immigrants, coming in at 0.28 migrants/1,000 people per year, but this does little more than round out the difference between "new people" and deaths to about 5 per year in favor of deaths.

South Africa is a case study in population collapse at the hands of a lone pandemic. Its 44 million people have a median age of only 24.3 years, with a population growth rate of -0.46%. Once again, mortality is to blame. Even though the birth rate is much higher than Russia's, at 17.94 births/1,000 people per year, the death rate is astonishingly high, at 22.45 deaths/1,000 people per year. The infant mortality rate in South Africa is also egregious, at 59.44 deaths/1,000 live births.

One thing that rolls out of this comparison is the perhaps astonishing realization that the populations of Russia and South Africa are collapsing at about the same rate (in fact, Russia's rate is slightly higher). South Africa is in the grip of a pandemic, with perhaps a quarter of its population infected with HIV. What, then, is going on in Russia?

(Figures taken from the CIA World Factbook)

If you're reasonably well read on global warming, you'll already know about the low, but problematic chance that the Atlantic Conveyor could shut down, leading to catastrophic and devastating climate change that would fundamentally alter life in much of Europe, among other places.

In this week's issue of Science, Kump and Pollard address a puzzle from geologic history that brings up another potential catastrophe scenario from global warming.

Those who model climate history have long wondered at a few periods of "supergreenhouse" temperatures that can be detected in the geologic record, without concomitant carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to match. A number of hypotheses have been presented, including high methane levels, greater ocean heat transport to the poles, and so on. In their article Amplification of Cretaceous Warmth by Biological Cloud Feedbacks, Kump and Pollard posit a different cause for these temperature spikes, with specific implications for our current climate problem.

Quite recently, we've discovered that cloud formation often depends on biological materials floating in the air. As a consequence, greater biological productivity in an area can lead fairly directly to greater cloud formation overhead. At the same time, increases in temperature can depress biological productivity.

Thus, a certain increase in temperature from other causes could have led to decreased biological productivity. This, in turn, would have led to fewer clouds, and more sunlight penetrating the atmosphere instead of being reflected away by cloud cover. More sunlight would have led to more warmth, and even lower productivity, and thus even less cloud cover, and so forth. Eventually, the system stabilized and corrected, but only after a period of dramatic atmospheric heating.

Clearly, this is relevant now, and represents yet another reason that global warming is not just an incremental thing that we can scale back on at leisure. World ecology is buffered against a certain amount of change, but there are limits, and as those limits are exceeded, we can expect some kind of runaway catastrophe to occur.

Leonid Fedun, vice president of Russian oil giant Lukoil recently indicated that without major spending on new reserves, Russian oil production could be expected to fall off sharply in the next decade.

In fact, Russian oil output fell for the first time at the beginning of this year, primarily on the back of poor weather and supply issues in Western Siberia. However, the larger problem of the depletion of proven reserves is one that will severely limit Russian oil production in the near future as long as no money is directed into developing new reserves.

Analysts at Citigroup recently said annual increases in Russian output could "no longer be taken for granted" but argued that production was expected to rise until 2012.

"I believe the decline will continue for quite a number of years."

This is not strictly a peak oil issue, in that it is understood that additional oil reserves assuredly exist in Siberia. However, high taxes and a lack of financial incentives to explore for new reserves means that companies have been avoiding extra costs and simply leaning on their available oil fields. As a consequence, the Russian oil industry may hit the bottom of its collective barrel without any replacement in sight.

BBC article

In a recent policy piece in Science Magazine titled The MPG Illusion, Richard Larrick and Jack Soll bring up the issue of how the basic way we visualize fuel efficiency -- in terms of miles per gallon -- may mislead us into making incorrect choices when it comes to prioritizing changes we make in favor of more efficient vehicles.

In short, increases in fuel efficiency among low efficiency vehicles have a much more dramatic effect than increases in fuel efficiency among higher efficiency vehicles. Consider this excerpt from the article:

To illustrate these issues, consider the criticism that has been directed at adding hybrid engines to sport utility vehicles (SUVs). In a New York Times Op-Ed column, an automotive expert (4) has said that hybrid cars are like "fat-free desserts"--they "can make people feel as if they're doing something good, even when they're doing nothing special at all." The writer questions the logic of granting tax incentives to buyers of "a hypothetical hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source" but not to a "buyer of a conventional, gasoline-powered Honda Civic that gets 40 miles per gallon." The basic argument is correct: The environment would benefit most if all consumers purchased highly efficient cars that get 40 MPG, not 14, and incentives should be tied to achieving such efficiency. An implicit premise in the example, however, is that an improvement from 12 to 14 MPG is negligible. However, the 2 MPG improvement is actually a significant one in terms of reduction in gas consumption... A car that gets 12 MPG consumes 833 gallons to cover that distance (10,000/12); a car that gets 14 MPG consumes 714 gallons (10,000/14). The roughly 120-gallon reduction in fuel used is larger than the reduction achieved by replacing a car that gets 28 MPG with a car that gets 40 MPG over that distance.

This isn't just an abstract concern -- studies with American consumers back the idea that by cleaving to the MPG standard, we confuse ourselves about what constitutes real gains in efficiency. This has implications for upgrading vehicles as a response to resource limitation, both in the abstract ("Let's use less petroleum") and in the personal and specific ("How 'bout I spend less money on gas for my next car").

In other words, make your van more efficient before you make your car more efficient, if you have to choose. And, if you're mandating efficiency via legislation, focus on the low end first, because it's where the largest gains can be made.

You can also hear an interview with the authors on the June 20, 2008 Science Magazine podcast.

In late may, the Brookings Institution released its report Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America. Two of the standout findings of this report were that the average metropolitan resident has a smaller carbon footprint than the average American as a whole, and that our per capita carbon footprint is significantly higher in the Eastern half of the country. This latter finding is captured well by this map (graphic taken from the report):