Asia to North America: Eat My Dust!

North Americans breathe dust, pollutants, and microbial spores that cross oceans and mountain ranges without difficulty. University of Washington researchers describe the phenomenon in a recent issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Plumes of Dust & Microbial Spores

For the first time researchers have been able to gather enough biomass in the form of DNA to apply molecular methods to samples from two large dust plumes originating in Asia in the spring of 2011. The scientists detected more than 2,100 unique species compared to only 18 found in the very same plumes using traditional methods of culturing, results they published in July.

“It’s a small world. Global wind circulation can move Earth’s smallest types of life to just about anywhere,” Smith said.

It’s been estimated that about 7.1 million tons (64 teragrams) of aerosols – dust, pollutants and other atmospheric particles, including microorganisms – cross the Pacific each year. The aerosols are carried by wind storms into the upper reaches of the troposphere. The troposphere, the layer of air closest to earth up to about 11 miles (18 kilometers), is where almost all our weather occurs. _University of Washington

The Earth's biosphere is interconnected by sea, air, and land. When volcanic islands erupt from the sea -- barren and lifeless -- it does not take long before life springs up on the mass of lava rock.

Update: Apparently someone notified the UW news site of their author's error, described below. The UW site has now corrected its error, but a number of other "science news" sites continue to repeat the mistake. How can they call themselves "science news outlets" when they mindlessly propagate such a basic error?

The paragraphs below were written in response to the original version of the news release, which contained the error described:

The UW newsrelease describes the increase in numbers detected in the most recent study as "99% more than reported in findings published just 4 months ago." But if 2100 unique species are detected now compared with only 18 unique species in findings published 4 months ago, the increase is much more than 99%. A 99% increase is almost 1 doubling, or roughly twice as many. 2100 is more than 100X 18, or over 10,000% more.

Such a mistake on the part of the news release author reflects a basic lack of mathematical understanding -- which reflects badly on the institution and on any news outlets which unwittingly repeat the mistake. This is particularly true for a science news article.

This is just one small example of a general dumbing down taking place in schools, popular culture, and the news media.

Examples of error propagation across the web:

A surprising number of microorganisms -- 99 percent more kinds than had been reported in findings published just four months ago -- are leaping the biggest gap on the planet. Hitching rides in the upper troposphere, they're making their way from Asia across the Pacific Ocean and landing in North America. _Sciencedaily

A surprising number of microorganisms – 99 percent more kinds than had been reported in findings published just four months ago – are leaping the biggest gap on the planet. Hitching rides in the upper troposphere, they’re making their way from Asia across the Pacific Ocean and landing in North America. _Newswise

A surprising number of microorganisms – 99 percent more kinds than had been reported in findings published just four months ago – are leaping the biggest gap on the planet. Hitching rides in the upper troposphere, they’re making their way from Asia across the Pacific Ocean and landing in North America. _RedOrbit

There is no telling how long it will take these websites to correct the mistake -- if they ever do. Just take it as fair warning when reading such sites, that they often unwittingly repeat significant errors that an intelligent 4th grader would have detected.

Keep that in mind as these "science journalists" tell you what you should think about climate change, gun control, resource scarcity, overpopulation, or any number of other complex concepts. Pity the poor school child who is at the mercy of teachers who themselves are incapable of catching basic science and maths errors in their teaching materials and other sources from which they draw.

Peak Oil: Meet Clear Coal

Update 11 June 09: A reader emailed to request contact information for Coal Sack Energy. It seems he has some investors who want to back the company but cannot find a way to invest. Is it possible that Barak Obama -- who promised to bankrupt the coal companies -- has decided to block all access to investing in new coal technology? Just kidding. More likely, the company listed below is playing hard to get, for reasons of its own. So be careful when you invest. Some things sound too good to be true because they aren't.Brian Westenhaus gives us a look at a promising new treatment for coal and other carbon sources, Clear Coal. This process claims to remove all mercury and almost all sulfur from the coal in the process of increasing the available energy.

The technology is claimed to make it possible to convert any type or grade of coal, including scrap coal, oil shale, tar sands, etc., into three basic by-products char, synthetic oil and gas - through one integrated process.

Greg Boyd, 47, is the more youthful leader of CoalSack Energy. Asked by Bob McCarty for a 60-second spiel to a prospect Boyd answers with some interesting numbers. “I’d say we have a patent on low-temperature carbonization which takes out 99.2 percent of the sulfur from a ton of coal,” Boyd explained. “The mercury is not even measurable. We’re raising the BTUs by upwards of 40 percent, averaging between 28 and 40 percent. With the same ton of coal, we’re producing the highest grade of light sweet crude oil which can be turned into Jet A fuel and that we’re getting about 7,000 cubic feet of gas.”

...Using a low temperature carbonization process, we are able to carefully control internal temperature ranges inside a roasting unit called a Coal Carbonization Module or CCM™ to vaporize the contaminate elements contained within coal. These vaporized elements are then transported to tanks using steam, whereupon they are condensed into their natural, uncontaminated forms. We are able to produce the nearly contaminate-free char, synthetic oil, and synthetic gasses that are sold to industrial markets, such as refined into Coke for steel production, used for electricity production, or refined into liquid fuels like gasoline, diesel, and Jet A. The carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide production is also converted into liquid fuel, and injected into the product stream where it is sold as a value-added product.

Those four products are interesting. The char is a clean burning smokeless boiler fuel, which can be used for electricity and heat production. The char may also be used in the production of steel and activated charcoal products including filters and carbon fiber. Char has a higher BTU range than coal, 12MBTU/lb – 14MBTU/lb, making it more valuable per ton. Utilities using char as a fuel source become carbon creditors, and could eliminate expensive flue gas scrubbing units. _NewEnergyandFuel

This is an intriguing promise. The process purportedly removes pollutants, incorporates all carbon -- including CO and CO2 -- into useful fuel, and turns low grade "junk coal" into high grade fuels and fuels precursors.

I would like to see how it works on bitumens and kerogens, as well as dried compacted biomass.

Despite what you may have heard from your peak oil friends, the energy game is just getting started. Only an incompetent political reich can thrust civilisation into abject energy scarcity -- "political peak oil".

Cross-posted in Al Fin Energy

Soot from China, Asia, Escapes into Global Air

Image Source

It is finally being recognized that soot plays a larger role in climate and the melting of polar ice than does CO2 and other conventional greenhouse gases. Besides this indirect role of causing melting snow and ice, soot may also play a more direct role in "climate change":

The report concludes that the atmospheric warming effect of black carbon pollution is as much as three to four times the consensus estimate released last year in a report by the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The findings are of concern to areas such as the Indian subcontinent, where retreating glaciers in the Himalayas have the potential to flood densely populated areas and affect the drinking water of billions of people.__LAT

China is likely the world's largest emitter of soot, by far, given its huge dependence upon dirty coal power plants. China has become so polluted, in fact, that Olympic athletes have traveled outside of mainland China to train for the summer games.

As can be seen from numerous satellite images, the soot emissions of China and Asia do not all stay close to the sources of blight. In fact, Canada and the US suffer from wind-blown soot from Asia. Certainly the northern sea ice has suffered from contact with Asian soot.

The IPCC GCM's are in urgent need of modification to address new findings in the area of soot contributions, ocean oscillations, cloud feedbacks, solar cycles, and other important contributions to climate change which have hitherto been ignored by the climate orthodoxy.

More Biofuels News: Going High-Tech

This is impressive: scientists at Purdue University and Chrysler LLC have genetically engineered poplar trees to function for both phyto-remediation of pollutants, and as a feedstock for cellulosic biofuels.

In a study Meilan co-authored, published last October in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, poplar cuttings removed 90 percent of the TCE (trichloroethylene) within a hydroponic solution in one week. The engineered trees also took up and metabolized the chemical 100 times faster than unaltered hybrid poplars, which have a limited ability to remove and degrade the contaminant on their own, he said....The transgenic poplars contain an inserted gene that encodes an enzyme capable of breaking down TCE and a variety of other environmental pollutants, including chloroform, benzene, vinyl chloride and carbon tetrachloride....TCE, the most common groundwater pollutant on Superfund sites, is a probable human carcinogen and causes various health problems when present in sufficiently high levels in water or air.

....Besides their utility in phytoremediation, or pollution removal, poplars have promise as a feedstock for cellulosic ethanol. To investigate their potential in this area, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $1.3 million grant to Meilan and two colleagues, professors Michael Ladisch, agricultural and biological engineering, and lead researcher Clint Chapple, biochemistry....They are currently investigating ways to alter the composition of poplar lignin, which provides rigidity to the plant cell wall by binding to strands of cellulose, a complex sugar that can be converted into ethanol.___NextEnergy

Transgenic poplars that extract, process, and eliminate pollutants--AND--can also be used to make cellulosic biofuels. Impressive.

Meanwhile, Oxford Catalysts is devising better catalysts for converting biomass to liquid fuels.

FT catalysts are ... important in the emerging field of biomass-to-liquids (BTL) which yields ultra-clean synthetic biofuels from lignocellulosic biomass.

Developing new catalysts can be a time consuming process, and each catalyst has to be custom-made for a particular application to suit a customer's requirements. Having this expanded lab facility will allow us to carry out the necessary testing to provide our customers with the essential information they need about a catalyst more quickly. It will also help us to develop further new and innovative catalysts at a rate that will allow us to meet demand for new applications within the clean fuels area as they continue to arise. - Derek Atkinson, Business Development Director, Oxford Catalysts___Source

The government of India's Department of Biotechnology is investing in cellulosic biofuels and other renewable biologically generated liquid fuels.

The University of Washington is financing research to turn forestry and agricultural waste into useful biofuels.

Canadian company Outlook Resources Inc. is getting into the "biomass fuel cube" business. Fuel cubes made of biomass are a sustainable alternative to coal and gas for traditional heating and power generation uses.

It is becoming clearer that those who denied the potential of bio-energy could not have been more wrong. Now that the potential is finally becoming reality--as particularly now that bio-energy is going high-tech--the sky is the limit.

Chinese Communism--Can China Ever Recover? Can the Rest of the World?

The story of Communist China is a story of ecological devastation on a monumental scale. The destruction being inflicted by the CCP and its policies upon China--and neighboring countries--is so severe as to require most of China's cash reserves to remediate. If it is even possible to repair.

In a mere two and a half decades, China has awakened from Maoist stagnancy to become the world's manufacturer. Among the planet's 193 nations, it is now first in production of coal, steel, cement, and 10 kinds of metal; it produces half the world's cameras and nearly a third of its TVs, and by 2015 may produce the most cars. It boasts factories that can accommodate 200,000 workers, and towns that make 60 percent of the world's buttons, half the world's silk neckties, and half the world's fireworks, respectively.

...Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world's biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006, but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations—the United States, Russia, and India—combined.

...the Mao era's ecological devastation pales next to that of China's current industrialization. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Acid rain falls on a third of China's landmass, tainting soil, water, and food. Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities, producing an estimated $12.9 billion in economic losses in Shanghai alone. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning and mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities; of the world's 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese.

...Acid rain caused by China's sulfur-dioxide emissions severely damages forests and watersheds in Korea and Japan and impairs air quality in the United States. Every major river system flowing out of China is threatened with one sort of cataclysm or another, including pollution (Amur), damming (Mekong, Salween), diverting (Brahmaputra), and melting of the glacial source (Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra). The surge in untreated waste and agricultural runoff pouring into the Yellow and China Seas has caused frequent fish die-offs and red-tide outbreaks, and overfishing is endangering many ocean species. ... the planet's deforestation problem is largely one of illicit logging, and China is the world's leading importer of illegally logged wood. Chinese wood purchases have also helped finance armed conflicts conducted by such international pariahs as Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Burma's military government, and the now-deposed regime of Liberia's Charles Taylor.

...The largest source of that pollution is the billion tons of coal China burns per year, more than virtually all the world's developed nations combined. The International Energy Agency reported in November 2006 that global coal consumption had increased as much in the previous 3 years as in the 23 before that, and that China was responsible for 90 percent of the increase. It operates more than 2,000 coal-fired power plants and puts a new one into operation every four to seven days. Few possess scrubbers that could limit emissions, and those that do tend not to use them, since scrubbers drive up the plants' energy and maintenance costs. China's central government has issued some fairly strict regulations to limit plant emissions, but they are rarely enforced because of corruption...

Source

The government of China wishes to export its "enlightened way of life" to Africa, South America, and much of the rest of Asia and the East Pacific. Clearly the ecological devastation China is creating within its "greater economic sphere" exceeds anything that "global warming" could ever produce in the developed western world--whether in the next century or in several dozen centuries. China has destroyed in a few decades what western industry would take thousands of years to destroy--given the strict environmental regulations in the west that are generally enforced.

But environmental pollution may not be the worst type of pollution being foisted upon the Chinese people and other peoples who are falling under the control of China's corrupt and oppressive CCP. The mental straightjacket such subjects of the CCP must wear is even worse than the physical pollution that is killing their bodies. The subjugation of the mind and spirit by the authoritarian police state destroys hope, even within the small proportion of Chinese who are benefiting from the current economic "boom."

While material improvements suggest the possibility of increased freedoms and opportunities of other types, relative material affluence also can increase a sense of personal worthiness--an expectation of something better. Revolutions tend to occur among the better educated, intellectual-leaning children of the first generation to experience a better life.

Tiananmen Square was a very premature gambit for liberty by students and young people who sensed an opening in the atmosphere of oppression. It failed because the students did not understand how to bring about change in an authoritarian system that had no mercy. Had Gandhi attempted to liberate China from the CCP rather than liberating India from the British, he would have ended an organ donor and a failed liberator. One must understand the system you are attempting to change.

China Set to be World's Largest Polluter and CO2 Emitter

China has had a booming economy for the past two decades, since economic liberalisation. One of the downsides of China's boom is the pollution that the populous country is spewing into the East Asian skies.

But it's not just sand, smog and ash that China is spewing into the atmosphere. The country's factories and power plants already emit more sulfur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) than Europe, even though the booming Chinese economy manages only a fraction of the per capita gross domestic product that the old industrialized nations do. Between 2000 and 2005, China's SO2 emissions grew to 26 million tons. In just a few years the country will surpass the United States to become the world's biggest carbon dioxide producer. China already accounts for more than 15 percent of total global CO2 emissions.

...In order to feed its appetite for energy, China is building coal-fired power plants as fast as it can. Every seven to ten days a new plant begins spewing smoke into the sky. The amount by which China increased its power production last year alone is greater than Britain's entire capacity.

Coal heavily pollutes the air, but China's leaders see little alternative to a dirty resource that is available in ample quantities around the country. Some 69 percent of all Chinese power plants are run on coal. China used 2.1 billion tons of it in 2004 -- more than the United States, the European Union and Japan together. Even if the Chinese economy only continues to grow seven percent annually, its coal usage would double to 4 million tons within ten years.

....The country is home to 16 of the world's 20 dirtiest cities. The inhabitants of every third metropolis are forced to breathe polluted air, causing the deaths of an estimated 400,000 Chinese each year. Half of China's 696 cities and counties suffer from acid rain. Two-thirds of its major rivers and lakes are cesspools and more than 340 million people do not have access to clean drinking water. The Yangtze River, once China's proud artery of life, is biologically dead for long stretches. Many other rivers flow with blackened water and along their banks there are the notorious "cancer villages" where many people die early.

More at the Source.

The combination of autocratic rule and a disregard for the environment leads to the same devastation of the atmosphere that Eastern Europe and the USSR suffered under communist rule, before the liberation of the late 1980s and early 1990s. A similar liberation may be necessary before China cleans up its industry. China certainly needs a leadership that cares more about the residents of the country and their health.