linkstream2 microblog

An…Attempt to Save the Reefs & Forests
http://NewYorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/a-radical-attempt-to-save-the-reefs-and-forests Engineering the #chestnut tree to express OxO, a defense against its blight

QT:{{”

“Powell attended graduate school in the nineteen-eighties, around the same time as Gates, and, like her, he was fascinated by molecular biology. When he got a job at the forestry school, in 1990, he started thinking about how new molecular techniques could be used to help the chestnut. Powell had studied how the fungus attacked the tree, and he knew that its key weapon was oxalic acid. (Many foods contain oxalic acid—it’s what gives spinach its bitter taste—but in high doses it’s also fatal to humans.) One day, he was leafing through abstracts of recent scientific papers when a finding popped out at him. Someone had inserted into a tomato plant a gene that produces oxalate oxidase, or OxO, an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid.

“I thought, Wow, that would disarm the fungus,” he recalled.

Years of experimentation ensued. The gene can be found in many grain crops; Powell and his research team chose a version from wheat. First they inserted the wheat gene into poplar trees, because poplars are easy to work with. Then they had to figure out how to work with chestnut tissue, because no one had really done that before. Meanwhile, the gene couldn’t just be inserted on its own; it needed a “promoter,” which is a sort of genetic on-off switch. The first promoter Powell tried didn’t work. The trees—really tiny
seedlings—didn’t produce enough OxO to fight off the fungus. “They just died more slowly,” Powell told me. The second promoter was also a dud. Finally, after two and a half decades, Powell succeeded in getting all the pieces in place. The result is a chestnut that is blight-resistant and—except for the presence of one wheat gene and one so-called “marker gene”—identical to the original Castanea dentata.”

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SF, the SV of #Recycling
http://www.NYTimes.com/2016/03/29/science/san-francisco-the-silicon-valley-of-recycling.html Describes a Willy-Wonka like center w/o the chocolate that has become a tourist attraction

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““It’s Willy Wonka’s everything-you-can-imagine-recycling place,” Mr. Reed said during the recent tour. The former freelance reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle loves talking about recycling and composting so much that it is as enjoyable “as a woman asking if she can give me a back rub.” he says.”
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Methane Has Never Looked So Beautiful
http://NYTimes.com/2016/03/08/science/methane-has-never-looked-so-beautiful.html Me bubbling up in frozen lakes. Great #photos but ominous for #climatechange

The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst
Nightmarehttp://NYTIMES.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html Scary account of the risks from unregulated flurochemicals incl #PFOA
QT:{{”
Last May, 200 scientists from a variety of disciplines signed the Madrid Statement, which expresses concern about the production of all fluorochemicals, or PFASs, including those that have replaced PFOA. P “}}

How Much Warmer Was Your City in ’15
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/19/us/2015-year-in-weather-temperature-precipitation.html#new-haven_ct Great #viz of NHV’s freezing Feb. & hot Dec. HT@chaubtu

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/19/us/2015-year-in-weather-temperature-precipitation.html#new-haven_ct

Stopping the big burp
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21688374-researchers-new-zealand-are-trying-prevent-livestock-belching #Methane from livestock is a major greenhouse gas, perhaps reducible with genetic engineering

Power to the people
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/power-to-the-people Will utilities go for refitting homes w/ solar & more insulation? Or will they resist?

The Other Cost of #ClimateChange http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture Disincentive to Franciscan v eschatological efforts, eagles v personal CO2 footprint

Dept. of the Environment APRIL 6, 2015 ISSUE
Carbon Capture
Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?

QT:{{"A book that does justice to the full tragedy and weird comedy of
climate change is “Reason in a Dark Time,” by the philosopher Dale
Jamieson. Ordinarily, I avoid books on the subject, but a friend
recommended it to me last summer, and I was intrigued by its subtitle,
“Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What It Means for
Our Future”; by the word “failed” in particular, the past tense of it.
I started reading and couldn’t stop.

….
which argues for a different expensive solution. A problem like this
(a “wicked problem” is the technical term) will frustrate almost any
country, and particularly the United States, where government is
designed to be both weak and responsive to its citizens. Unlike the
progressives who see a democracy perverted by moneyed interests,
Jamieson suggests that America’s inaction on climate change is the
result of democracy. A good democracy, after all, acts in the
interests of its citizens, and it’s precisely the citizens of the
major carbon-emitting democracies who benefit from cheap gasoline and
global trade, while the main costs of our polluting are borne by those
who have no vote: poorer countries, future generations, other species.
The American electorate, in other words, is rationally
self-interested. According to a survey cited by Jamieson, more than
sixty per cent of Americans believe that climate change will harm
other species and future generations, while only thirty-two per cent
believe that it will harm them personally.

Shouldn’t our responsibility to other people, both living and not yet
born, compel us to take radical action on climate change? The problem
here is that it makes no difference to the climate whether any
individual, myself included, drives to work or rides a bike. The scale
of greenhouse-gas emissions is so vast, the mechanisms by which these
emissions affect the climate so nonlinear, and the effects so widely
dispersed in time and space that no specific instance of harm could
ever be traced back to my 0.0000001-per-cent contribution to
emissions. I may abstractly fault myself for emitting way more than
the global per-capita average. But if I calculate the average annual
quota required to limit global warming to two degrees this century I
find that simply maintaining a typical American single-family home
exceeds it in two weeks. Absent any indication of direct harm, what
….

Jamieson’s larger contention is that climate change is different in
category from any other problem the world has ever faced. For one
thing, it deeply confuses the human brain, which evolved to focus on
the present, not the far future, and on readily perceivable movements,
not slow and probabilistic developments. (When Jamieson notes that
“against the background of a warming world, a winter that would not
….

The meaning of climate-related actions, because they produce no
discernible result, is necessarily eschatological; they refer to a
Judgment Day we’re hoping to postpone. The mode of meaning of
conservation in the Amazon is Franciscan….

The most striking thing about Amazon Conservation’s work is the
smallness of its constituent parts. There are the eight female paco
from which a season’s worth of eggs are taken, the humbleness of the
plastic tanks in which the hatchlings live. There are the conical
piles of dirt that highland women sit beside and fill short plastic
tubes in which to plant tree seedlings. There are the simple wooden
sheds that Amazon Conservation builds for indigenous Brazil-nut
harvesters to shelter the nuts from rain, and that can make the….

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This Cold House
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/24/opinion/this-cold-house.html Low ‘excess’ winter #mortality for Scandinavians; their motto: “No bad weather, only bad clothing.”

“Excess winter mortality” seems to be a useful number to remember in keeping warm in the winter

QT:{{”
Life at 45 degrees isn’t for everyone — I wouldn’t recommend it for the sick, the elderly or children. And there are, of course, legitimate hazards to the cold. The National Weather Service reports that there were 66 cold- and winter-related deaths in 2013 in the United States. A more useful measurement, popular in Europe, is “excess winter mortality,” which simply compares deaths during winter to those during the rest of the year. The resulting figures tend to be much higher than the weather service’s: In England and Wales there were an estimated 31,100 such deaths in the 2012-13 winter.

Using this measure, paradoxically, warmer countries like Spain and Portugal suffer more cold-related deaths than colder countries, because they aren’t as well versed in the art of keeping
warm….Scandinavians, who also have a low excess winter mortality rate, have a common saying: “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.”
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Sliding #Oil & Gas Prices
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/business/economy/lower-oil-prices-give-a-lift-to-the-american-economy.html US spends $1B/day on gas, 1.4K gal/yr/person; $3.23/gal 11/13 price, falling to $2.89 now

QT:{{”

With Americans spending roughly $1 billion a day on gasoline, Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, estimates that consumers will save roughly $8.4 billion in November and December, compared with the last two months of 2013, based on an average price for regular gasoline of about $2.89 a gallon as opposed to $3.23 last November and $3.26 last December.

The typical American household buys 1,200 gallons annually, so if prices fall to the level Mr. Kloza predicts and stay there, that adds up to a yearly savings per household of at least $400. A 15 percent drop in the cost of home heating oil since last winter should also be helpful, especially as cold weather arrives in the Northeast.

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