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I'm a chemical oceanographer working on my PhD. My thesis involves some stuff indirectly related to climate change, but I'm very familiar with ocean acidification, warming of the oceans, and other interactions between the atmosphere and oceans. I'm more than happy to (try and) answer any questions on those topics as well as give a little perspective as a scientist.
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Dec 7, 2011 00:54
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Fried Chicken posted:Ok, short version: How bad is it? I used a good chunk of hyperbole there in the OP, but from my extreme layperson understanding, we should basically be in triage mode to save as many lives as possible, rather than adapting. Am I overstating the probable case and impacts? Is there any source for optimism? In an oceanic context it's pretty damned bad already. Coral reef bleaching events (caused by increase sea surface temperature and lowered pH) have been far more frequent in the last couple decades. There's not likely to be much in the way of coral reefs left by mid-century. And that's just one of the more obvious effects. The ocean itself is very "layered." There's a narrow, warm surface layer of water (typically 30-50m deep) and a deep, cold layer that extends to the bottom (average depth of the ocean is 3.8km). Most of the biological activity of the oceans occurs in that top narrow slice where all the light and heat are. With rising SST, the mixed layer at the surface is expected to shrink even smaller, and the oceans will likely become more intensely stratified. What that means is likely lower productivity which will have huge impacts on the entire marine food web. Less marine "plants" to soak up CO2, less economically important fish that depend on those phytoplankton and algae for food. It's also worth putting the pH changes in perspective. Remember that the pH scale is logarithmic. Current average ocean pH is about 8.3, and a modest decrease of 0.3 units means the oceans will be fully twice as acidic as they currently are. Not to mention that the warmer and more acidic the water becomes, the less it is able to absorb new CO2. Here's a good (and exact) analogy: a bottle of soda. The "fizz" or carbonation in soda is dissolved CO2. Sodas are pressurized with more CO2 than they could normally hold (they're supersaturated) so when you open one, you get bubbles of CO2 escaping. What happens when you leave a soda out to warm to room temperature? It goes flat, all the CO2 leaves. Gases are more soluble at cooler temperatures, right now the ocean is responsible for soaking up a lot of the extra CO2 we're producing, but poo poo's gonna get ugly eventually when the oceans are no longer able to absorb as much as they currently are. It's a nasty feedback loop. That's the science. Here's my opinion in response to your question: I think we're pretty hosed. Money for basic research is being cut with all of this economic trouble, so a lot of scientific research that could increase our understanding of this incredibly complex system isn't being done. I'll freely admit there's a ton we don't understand (give us more money plz). That's not even touching the political issues. I'm not implying the science behind anthropogenic climate change is unsound. The Earth is warming, humans are mostly at fault, end of story. How bad is it going to get? What should be our policy responses? Which regions are going to be wetter/drier/colder/hotter/stormier/underwater? How will ecosystems, agriculture, and economies be affected? We simply don't have the knowledge to be able to accurately predict most of that. And even if we did, I have very little faith in governments to take the necessary and appropriate actions needed to mitigate or prevent the impacts.
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Dec 7, 2011 01:13
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BobTheFerret posted:On the biochemistry side, you have carbonic anhydrases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonic_anhydrase), which will catalyze the conversion of CO2 to HCO3 using only water and a metal cofactor. They are already incredibly efficient (they are among the most efficient enzymes around, and will happily truck along at the rate of diffusion until the protein degrades - which takes a very, very long time). All that needs to be done to make them effective for carbon fixation is to optimize the pH and temperature at which they will function, which many powerplants are already contracting out to biochemistry labs to do. Since you can isolate HCO3 as a solid (baking soda!), you can simply complex it with a counterion that will prevent its re-dissolution or prevent it from coming into contact with water again (bury it underground in a lined container? Preferably both methods). Better yet would be to chemically convert it into something useful (another protein could do this, or we could use it in some sort of chemical reaction). Incoming biochem jargon deluge: I'm pretty familiar with carbonic anhydrases (CAs from now on) as CO2-concentrating mechanisms in phytoplankton. The rate-limiting step in photosynthesis is usually CO2-fixation by RuBisCO and virtually all (95%+) of CO2 is present as bicarbonate in seawater, so converting a bunch of the HCO3- to CO2 allows algae to "dope" RuBisCO and minimize the undesirable oxygenase reaction. CAs also usually contain Zn as a metal cofactor but Zn tends to be <10nM in open ocean waters and so some phytoplankton can use metals like Cd or Co interchangeably, which is whacky and not really relevant to this topic. Do you have any references on using CAs as a carbon sequestration? I guess at first glance it doesn't make much sense to me. The vast majority of CO2 equilibrates as HCO3- in water anyway (or carbonate/carbonic acid at lower/higher pH, either way only a tiny proportion is CO2). What would using CAs to enhance the speed of that reaction accomplish? And how would you efficiently get from dissolved bicarbonate to solid salts? I mean, hypothetically you could just use saltwater (loaded with Ca and Na and other counterions, plus it's cheap!) and evaporate off the water to get some carbonate salts. But I can't fathom how the process of going from gaseous CO2 -> dissolved HCO3- -> carbonate salts wouldn't be horribly inefficient. Anyway, getting down to low pH where carbonate is the dominant anion and using Ca as your counterion would be better anyway, baking soda is way more soluble than aragonite or calcite (forms of CaCO3) and we can do useful things with lime! Edit: and the oxalate stuff is neat but that's gonna be like 4-8 electrons to reduce CO2 to oxalate (I'm guessing the reaction is between H2O and CO2? I don't have journal access at home). Anyway, you can't handwave away "only needing a few electrons and acid" to do that reaction. That's a lot. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 05:04
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BobTheFerret posted:Ahh yep, my bad, that's what I was thinking when I was referring to pH optimization was bringing things into the range where you can use calcium or other ions to bring down solubility. Removing bicarbonate would be as simple as having an immobilized enzyme with a mobile reaction phase bringing in water that is not saturated with bicarbonate, while drying the saturated water product in a separate chamber (you could use seawater as you suggested, since it seems to be a great source of counterions). Recapture the water and you can have a self-contained system that only requires the addition of counterions. I'm not sure where you're thinking we're losing efficiency at if we're only going to bicarbonate (other than the issue of heat for evaporation...) - CO2(g) -> HCO3(aq) is just enzymatically accelerated, and pairing with a counterion isn't an energetically demanding process. The biggest issue with bicarbonate is having to dry it to take it out of the system, but if you use something like a nuclear powerplant (where excess heat is always an issue), it seems a bit more feasible. As well, most other plant designs (coal and natural gas) use turbines, which have plenty of waste heat that could be used. Ah ok, yeah that makes a lot more sense, thanks! Now the science nerd gears in my head are spinning, something like that might work pretty well. Especially if you found a CA from a thermophilic organism, CaCO3 is more insoluble at higher temps. Still doesn't solve your problem of getting from bicarb to carbonate, though. You might look into the biochemistry of shell-forming marine critters. You wouldn't necessarily have to maintain reaction conditions at low enough pH that all your bicarb converts to carbonate. In fact that might be a bad idea, low pH is no good for calcite formation. You just want your rate of calcite precipitation to equal your rate of CO2 conversion to bicarb. How you do that, don't ask me  I don't usually think much about practical applications of these things :PEdit: yeah, that oxalate reaction is pretty slick. It's just a matter of how you generate those 4e- per CO2 molecule sequestered. Have you done any reading on the more primitive CO2 fixation pathways? I'm not super familiar with them, but there are several fairly unusual and recently discovered biochemical alternatives to the Calvin cycle. I have no idea if there's much inspiration there for engineering CO2 sequestration reactions based on those, but nature has a way of coming up with some pretty awesome stuff all on its own. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fixation#Other_autotrophic_pathways Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 05:57
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Fried Chicken posted:My understanding is that the proposed solutions either didn't pan out (iron fertilization)copper Short answer: yes, iron fertilization of the oceans is a terrible idea. I could write a gigantic post on this if there's interest but no one in the thread seems to be suggesting it as a serious option so I won't invest the effort unless it's desired. BobTheFerret posted:Do you mean high pH (low proton concentration maybe is what you were thinking)? I wasn't sure about that in your last post. pH stability is important, but actually, the internal pH in a protein can be way different from external, so as long as we perform all steps within the protein (from CO2 to CaCO3). Hypothetically we can just use amino acid residues in the active site to deprotonate HCO3 and have a calcium ion bound nearby as well as saturating Ca2+ in solution.
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Dec 7, 2011 06:32
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RPZip posted:I'd appreciate it if you expanded on this, as I'm curious. I've heard it bandied around before as a possible solution, but I'm not too familiar with the particulars. Ok, this will be a slightly abbreviated version so as not to turn into a rant-length diatribe (what I do for a living is intimately tied to iron fertilization and I've spent a great deal of time studying it): Starting in the 90s, oceanographers realized that large parts of the world's oceans are deficient in iron (Fe hence). If you added some Fe, they reasoned, you should be able to stimulate blooms of phytoplankton (algae) who would then die, sink to the bottom of the ocean, and thus sequester all that juicy CO2 (now in the form of organic matter) at the bottom of the ocean. Several field experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis, several of which seemed to sort of work and the rest of which failed miserably. The consensus that has developed over the last decade (and is pretty much universal in the last ~5 years) is that Fe fertilization is just plain not a workable idea, though we learned a lot about the ocean in the process of studying it. Problems: 1. Logistics. Most of the regions of the ocean that are Fe-deficient are in the middle of nowhere. It's not as simple as dumping Fe into the coasts, as virtually all coastal oceans have plenty of Fe and other nutrients are the limiting factor (such as nitrogen or phosphorus). You'd need to cart many boatloads of Fe to (for example) the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, or the Bering Sea off of Alaska. I've seen several projections using very optimistic sequestration yields and all of them concluded it's basically a net loss or very minor gain of CO2 sequestered versus CO2 generated in shipping and dumping the iron out that far to sea. 2. Efficiency. Somewhat ironically, the guy that first realized the importance of Fe in the oceans (John Martin) is also very well known for his studies of CO2 export to the deep oceans. It's called the "Martin curve" and it's an exponential curve describing the percentage of organic CO2 that's fixed by organisms near the surface that makes it to a certain depth. About 1% of carbon is exported from the surface ocean to the deep, and about 0.1% overall ends up buried in ocean sediments. 0.1% is, of course, a laughably lovely sequestration efficiency. 3. Sustainability. You can't just dump Fe in forever and expect the same yields, obviously. At some point you'll deplete the other nutrients required for life. Organisms need things like nitrogen, phosphorus, silicon (in the case of diatoms whose shells are made of it), and other metals to live, and those elements are also in short supply. In fact, most of the ocean is nitrogen-limited, Fe-limited regions are the exception rather than the rule. You might get some response initially, but eventually you'd have to start fertilizing with nitrogen to maintain your algae yields. And phosphorus. Etc. 4. Organism specificity. This kind of relates to efficiency, but only certain kinds of algae are good at sequestering carbon. You want to trigger gigantic blooms of critters that form hard calcium carbonate shells. Those shells then sink to the bottom largely intact and get buried in the ocean floor (and eventually form limestone, huzzah!). Here's the problem. We have exactly zero control over what organisms Fe fertilization causes to bloom. In fact, in the field experiments where Fe fertilization successfully triggered blooms, by far the most abundant organism that grew was Pseudonitzschia, a diatom (which has silica, not carbonate shells--no good for CO2 sequestration!) which normally lives encrusted on the gills of fish and also is known to produce domoic acid, which causes amnesic shellfish poisoning in humans. OOPS
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Dec 7, 2011 07:07
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ascii genitals posted:Do you know much about methane clathrates? Those are what really freak me out. Ocean acidification is also bad, but I feel like there are ways we can mitigate it.. giant deposits of methane becoming soluble and boiling out of ice and the deep ocean would really gently caress us. Not a ton, honestly. Supposedly there's loads of methane clathrate deposits in e.g. the Pacific ridge systems, but it's not something I've heard a lot of in a while. It's yet another of a long list of nasty feedbacks that can occur if we let things get bad enough. The Earth warms sufficiently and the vast amounts of organic matter locked up in permafrost in the tundras all of a sudden thaws, decays, releases massive amounts of additional CO2. Same for clathrates.
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Dec 8, 2011 06:27
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A lot of scientists prefer the term "climate change," myself included. "Global warming" is not a particularly good description of the actual changes expected to occur. Yes, the Earth as a whole will get warmer, but some areas will be colder, drier, wetter, stormier, underwater, etc. For the general public who may not be adequately educated on the subject, "global warming" implies it's simply going to get warmer everywhere and that is just not true and somewhat misleading. "Anthropogenic (or man-made) climate change" is what I use.
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Dec 8, 2011 20:45
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"Global warming" also focuses the discussion on the warming aspect and neglects so many other related issues that are more easily incorporated under the broader umbrella term "climate change." Such as deforestation, ocean acidification, desertification, sea level rise, water scarcity, etc. It's like preaching the evils of liver cirrhosis. The larger problem is chronic alcohol abuse, and cirrhosis is only one of a myriad of problems associated with alcoholism.
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Dec 8, 2011 20:51
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Stephen Harper posted:"Canada only emits 1% of emissions. China emits way more! Therefore we should do nothing." gently caress I hate that line of logic. Bbbbut China and India are developing countries! The industrialized world burned through a lot of fossils fuels when it developed, so we're hypocrites for calling the Chinese on their coal-burning bonanza! No one is to blame, everyone is to blame.
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Dec 9, 2011 04:00
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Office Thug posted:Could this system also work in oceanic environments, like capturing CO2 from sea water solutions? Yes, but the main problem would be that the dominant form (>95%) of dissolved CO2 is bicarbonate and the equilibrium between HCO3- and CO2 is rather slow. So if you were going to sequester CO2 directly from seawater you'd either want to use a process that works directly with bicarbonate or some way to get force it into CO2, like carbonic anhydrases
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Dec 9, 2011 18:48
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superjew posted:One thing he never talks about, however, is how to harvest these clathrates, and my question to anyone who knows about this is how feasible is this idea of collecting the methane? Not terribly, I'd guess. The rule of thumb is that pressure increases by 1atm for every ~10m of ocean depth, and those clathrates are thousands of meters down. You're talking about hundreds of atmospheres of pressure and a km or two of water to get to the clathrates. I mean, the technology for deepwater oil drilling exists, but that's for a liquid. I'm not sure how you'd recover methane clathrates, you'd have to deal with the solid water-ice matrix. It'd be tough. Squalid posted:Could you get into some the specific difficulties of reconstructing past climates, maybe some of the difficulties with using marine microfossils? The question wasn't directed at me but I'll take a stab at it. I've worked with a number of paleo-oceanographers who reconstruct past climate using foraminifera (microfossils). Off the top of my head, here are some of the challenges involved in paleo reconstructions: 1. Uncertainty in dating. Some forams can be dated using 14C (radiocarbon), but that's only good for about 60,000 years back. For reconstructions older than that, often you have to rely on guesswork based on the species of the forams (which have very unique shells). For example, "we know this kind of foram lived during this time period, so we're going to assign it a semi-arbitrary date." You cannot simply date the age of rocks or sediments to accurately determine the age of the microfossils due to a process called "bioturbation," which despite appearances is not related to masturbation. Bioturbation is simply a fancy term for "worms and clams and various things live in sediments and stir them up so the microfossils don't layer cleanly into sediments based on their age." 2. Uncertainty in proxies. Paleo reconstructions rely on various "proxy" measurements to determine past temperatures and other climate metrics. For example, foraminiferal shells are usually analyzed for their del-18O ratios (oxygen stable isotopes). We just happen to have pieced together that there is a relationship between the temperature of the seawater (note that is DIFFERENT than air temperature) and the oxygen isotope ratios of the foraminiferal shells formed in that water. We think we know why this relationship exists, but there are a number of caveats and complications to it. Similar story for various other proxies. What all that adds up to is our temporal resolution isn't great. Keep in mind that anthropogenic climate change is occurring over the time scale of ~150 years (since the industrial revolution). Our climate proxies simply don't have enough resolution to study intervals that small beyond the last couple millenia. Then you throw in all the complications from the proxies... I'm not saying they're bad or unreliable, they aren't. We have many different proxies from many different reconstructions that say similar or the same things. Edit: I'm not sure what WAFFLEHOUND's point is re: "we are only adding to climate change that was already happening." Earth is currently in an interglacial period. For the last few hundred thousand years, the planet has cycled in and out of ice ages. Don't consider this a terribly strong assertion on my part (don't have time to pull up the relevant graphs) but if memory serves we should be due (eventually, not anytime soon, remember we're talking geologic timescales!) for another ice age, if anything. Based on the glacial/interglacial patterns, Earth getting even warmer is unusual as we're already at the warmest part of the interglacial phase. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Dec 9, 2011 |
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Dec 9, 2011 20:05
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:Yes, there is absolutely and undeniably an element of antrhopogenesis in current climate change.
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Dec 13, 2011 00:28
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downout posted:I'm no expert, but from my understanding temperatures are changing too rapidly for species to adapt. This interrupts evolution, and the process becomes unable to handle the change due to how fast it is happening. Evolution would normally handle (is that even the right word?) an environmental change for a species, but it works over longer time scales. In a short time scale it collapses, and there is an extinction event for many species. Those better educated can probably explain this better. There's an important distinction here between acclimation and evolutionary adaptation. Organisms will acclimate to higher temperatures, drier conditions, higher sea levels, etc to a certain degree. They can adjust, with varying amounts of success, to changes in their environment. Some can migrate (plants can't). However, those organisms evolved to excel in pre-industrial environments, and any significant changes will stress them. True evolutionary adaptation takes many many generations--hundreds to thousands of years depending on how quickly an organism reproduces to effect significant change. A Pretty Red-Bellied Jungle Frog may well survive a 4-degree increase, but it's not going to reproduce as well. It will have a harder time finding food. Eventually it might be out-competed by another organism which is better able to acclimate to the new conditions. Furthermore, consider that many (or most, I don't want to try and put a number on it) organisms actually live within a relatively small area with a very specific diet and require certain conditions for reproduction and optimal growth. They occupy a narrow ecological niche. It's a simple fact of evolution that most organisms, in order to survive, will become increasingly specialized in order to outcompete other organisms within the same ecosystem. It's absolutely true that there are some organisms that succeed by being generalists or "win" by being adaptable and resilient, but many organisms are highly specialized, and they will die off very easily. Sorry, I'm kind of hand-waving around some basic ecological principles here, but the point I'm trying to make is that specialized organisms will get hit incredibly hard by any significant climate changes. And 4 degrees is a HUGE change.
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Dec 13, 2011 04:47
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:I've been backing out of this because it's clear people don't want to do anything more than yell at me about how wrong I am, since people were just fine making appeals to authority wrt geologists until they realized I am one and now I'm a shill. Yes, please, if you're unable or unwilling to support and defend your viewpoints and assertions, goodbye. Part of me would still like some clarification on what you were asserting earlier about the Earth warming naturally, though.
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Dec 13, 2011 05:00
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:Last post on the topic from me since this one keeps popping up, but interglacial periods aren't periods between ice ages, they're periods within an ice age where there is glacial retreat. Look up the quaternary ice age. I am well aware, you seemed to be arguing earlier that anthropogenic climate change was acting in addition to natural warming of the Earth. In the absence of fossil fuel burning, however, we're actually due for another glacial cycle sometime in the next 10,000 or so years and the Earth is similarly warm to past interglacial cycles, there is no evidence to support the notion that Earth is warming naturally within a time frame relevant to this conversation. If I confused the terminology for glacial/interglacial cycles and ice ages, it was because this is largely a layman audience and the relevant point I was trying to make is Earth was due to get colder, not warmer, and human activity is sending us in the opposite direction.
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Dec 13, 2011 06:20
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Dreylad posted:Honestly, overfishing isn't to blame. Fish stocks come back remarkably quickly if you ease off or shut down fisheries and try to help the environment recover. The acidification of the oceans is far more long-term and, uh, permanent. Acidification is a problem we're not really seeing the effects of in fisheries (yet). The main cause of disappearing fish stocks is overfishing coupled with base-of-the-food-chain shifts due to various human activities. The most productive fisheries are those near the coasts where all the nutrients to support algae (fish food!) are. The open ocean is essentially a desert. A really loving big, wet desert. The coasts are also where we dump all our runoff and crap. Largely due to fertilizer and wastewater and other runoff, we've caused some very major changes to the base of the food chain. Example: California current. Fisheries off the California coast used to be incredibly productive. The base of the food chain was supported by large diatoms (a kind of phytoplankton which fish just fuckin love). Due to human impacts, the dominant phytoplankton species are now mostly dinoflagellates (which can cause toxic red/brown tides) instead of diatoms. Those big fat tasty diatoms are almost impossible to find nowadays. This is part of an ongoing shift in the marine food web away from diatoms, coccolithophores, microzooplankton (krill and tiny shrimp buddies), and fish towards picophytoplankton (cyanobacteria), dinoflagellates, and jellies.
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Dec 14, 2011 01:08
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Uranium Phoenix posted:There are more photosynthetic organisms than just trees. While planting trees and turning them into wood/charcoal works, it's inefficient, and takes up a huge amount of land. Something like algae would be much more efficient. I've seen a number of proposals/studies done about natural carbon sequestration, and from what I've seen algae is the way to go. I touched on this much earlier in the thread when I posted about how iron fertilization of the ocean was a pretty terrible idea, and I'll comment on algae in general since it's come up again. Honestly I don't think algae are any better than trees and are far inferior to inorganic methods for the purpose of carbon sequestration. If you're interested in biofuels or other natural products, then algae are potentially valuable. Photosynthesis is horrifically inefficient. The conversion efficiency from sunlight to biomass is in the range of 0.1-10% depending on the plant. Algae are even less than that, typically, because water is really awesome at absorbing light. To build an algae bio-reactor that works off of sunlight (or artificial light, either way) you'd have to use tremendous amounts of space to get enough surface area to light your algae. It's actually a very delicate balance between not enough light and sub-optimal growth and too much light will cause photoinhibition. There's also the added problem of turbidity--algae grow very very quickly, they mature in a matter of hours or days depending on species, so if you have a bioreactor that's growing at optimal speeds you also have to have some way to constantly clean out the mature biomass or the turbidity in the water will shade your algae and kill it. This happens pretty regularly in cyanobacterial cultures, which is more than likely what you'd use for such a bioreactor and definitely what you want for making biofuels. They're bacteria and as such they grow exponentially but tend to crash very quickly when they run out of nutrients or sunlight. Algae are also mostly soft-bodied, so the biomass they produce would have to be sequestered or stored in some way so that it doesn't simply decompose and go right back into the atmosphere. Land plants are made mostly of cellulose (think wood) which will store fixed carbon for quite a long time. Cyanobacteria do grow very quickly, but the trade off is that their carbon sequestration is far less permanent than a slower-growing tree. Edit: that article is also from 2007, which in science terms is quite dated. There's a lot of awesome research going on in algal fuel cells and particularly with chemoautotrophic strains. Did you know some bacteria pass electrons to each other through carbon nanowires? Yeah! And there's a lot of research into iron-oxidizing bugs and the like, which would probably work better than photosynthetic algae as you could "feed" the carbon fixation with an electrical current as opposed to light. Though they do grow a lot slower. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Jan 3, 2012 |
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Jan 3, 2012 09:10
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Painkiller posted:Welp. Dreylad posted:Yeah, this is why the international community needs to come to terms with geoengineering and sort out strategies and methods for employing geoengineering (because we are probably going to anyway in the future) otherwise every nutbar with enough money or a country that's being hit hard by climate change will just chuck its GDP at the problem regardless of the large, global, consequences. I need to read this thread more regularly! PhD candidate here wrapping up the last year of my thesis, I'm an oceanographer and can chime in about ocean stuff. While I agree with Dreylad in general (that geoengineering needs to be more actively pursued by the scientific community), there are a lot better candidates than iron fertilization. Altering ocean alkalinity would be a far smarter option, for example. Part of me is a little worried that successful/promising geoengineering projects will lull us all into a false sense of having solved the problem such that we don't actually address the root causes (burning fossil fuels, slash and burn agriculture, fertilizers, livestock, etc). Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Oct 18, 2012 |
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Oct 18, 2012 07:14
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Dreylad posted:Oh, yeah, I mean I'm not saying we just dive into a geo-engineering project without considering our options and spend as much time as we can coming up with a solution that wont make things worse, or damage other things at the same time. I know one person posted an article (it might have been you?) that showed that iron fertilization was a terrible, terrible idea and could make things worse. I did post early on in the thread about iron fertilization, yeah. In some sense, we're already in the middle of a massive geo-engineering project entitled "What happens when we flood the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and dick around with its ozone chemistry, dam all the rivers, burn a bunch of forests, and generally gently caress everything up?" Fundamentally, we don't really even understand much about what we're doing to the environment now, much less all the myriad feedbacks and how things will look in future decades. I think we should actively pursue geoengineering to relieve some of the tremendous pain we have coming, but we just goddamn don't know very much about the complex systems we're trying to play with. I have a long rant about science funding I could write up someday. Admittedly I have a bias being a scientist myself, but as a nation our investment into basic (non-biomedical) research is absolutely laughable, and the scientific community has very little public credibility and political influence in the climate arena. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Oct 18, 2012 |
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Oct 18, 2012 22:03
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Guigui posted:Is this not a good thing (somewhat) that the scientific community remains outside the political sphere? If there is one thing that Carl Sagan and David Suzuki imprinted on me through their books; it's that science isn't a good thing - nor is it a bad thing - it just "is". If policy-changing discoveries are found by using the methods of science, well, that is up to our elected officials to debate. I feel like politics (particularly at the national-level) is dominated entirely by moneyed interests and ideologues who have no use for science and empirical facts except when they can be twisted to conform to their political worldview. It's not that I think scientists should play partisan roles, in fact I think that's the root of the problem. Scientists are stereotyped as ivory-tower liberal atheist elitists, which makes them easy for the right to slander and ignore when convenient. Honestly, that stereotyping of scientists as liberal atheists is really pretty accurate (demonstrably and empirically so), but should have no (or very little) bearing on the perception of the quality and conclusions of their research. I'd love to have a discussion about public funding of science. The annual budget of the National Science Foundation is ~$7 billion, which is pretty laughable, really. If I'm a reputable, established scientist, I can spend a fair chunk of time and money (several tens of thousands of dollars minimum, in my field) generating preliminary data for a grant proposal to the NSF. Upon submission of that proposal (which I can do yearly or twice, depending on the NSF section) it is reviewed in a two-tiered peer-review process mediated by NSF section managers who are themselves professional scientists within my discipline (NOT politicians and career bureaucrats, the NSF is run by scientists). I have a 5-10% chance of having my grant funded, typically at a level significantly less than in the proposed grant budget. Once the money is dispensed, the funded research program is very tightly monitored and quality-controlled by both the NSF and the awarded institution (university or whatever). It's really loving hard to get NSF money. Of course, there are other sources of gov't funding that are more discipline-specific. For my field of oceanography, I could potentially get dollars from NOAA, NASA, and possibly the DOE, DOD, or USGS. However, every ingredient in that alphabet soup (other than the NSF) is a mission agency. That is, they're focused either on applied research with specific practical goals and applications (DOE, DOD) or only fund research which narrowly fits their chartered mission statement (NOAA, NASA, USGS). Those are not at all bad things, but the NSF is really the only big gov't funding source for basic/pure research, and it's absurdly competitive (a good thing) to win the very limited (bad thing) NSF funding. Anyway... discuss  That was probably rather scattered.Edit: holy gently caress I love parentheses, apparently. Heh. One thing I forgot to mention that might be a common misconception is that universities do NOT fund research in any meaningful way, at least in the US. Quite the opposite, in fact. Universities and affiliated research institutions actually take a big fat cut of any incoming grant money as overhead. 50-60% is a typical overhead percentage, at my university it's 62%. Graduate students, laboratory technicians, and professors (to varying degrees) have their salaries and benefits paid for from grants. It's not underhanded at all and the overhead is a line item calculation in grant budget proposals. Need $100k for your research? You'll have to submit a grant application for $162k so the university gets it cut for overhead! Anyway, my point is that gov't entities, private foundations, and industry fund scientific research, not universities. They derive a fat chunk of income from their researcher's incoming grant funding. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 01:26
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Eyes Only posted:I'm not sure if you mean that the university takes a 62% cut, which would imply a $263k grant to get 100k to go to the project, or a 38% cut (62% retention), which would imply your ~$162k. There's a pretty significant difference between the two. I'm somewhat curious what grad program finances are like, so please clarify. It would be the latter; let me give a practical example. In the second year of our PhD program we're required to take a proposal-writing class, from which most of my knowledge of the subject comes. I'll give a simple example of an NSF grant budget. Most grants are for a 3-year time frame. Let's say I want $75k to buy a gas chromatograph (GC) to measure CO2 concentrations and $25k for laboratory supplies. Permanent equipment over $50k (I think that's the number) is the only material cost not subject to overhead, but the $25k in supplies will be. Next, I have the meat of the budget: salaries, and they do indeed get charged overhead. I'm not understand why that is, logically. Professors are usually either "soft" or "hard" money, referring to the proportion of their salaries they derive from grant funding. Soft money is usually at research institutions where the scientist is going to be doing research essentially 100% of the time, and means they must derive their entire salary from grants. This, as you might imagine, is incredibly stressful since you're forced to continuously win and manage enough grants to support your entire income. Only the most competitive, driven researchers can handle being on soft money. Hard money is the more common setup and sort of analogous to K-12 teachers; scientists on hard money have their school year salary (9mo) paid by the university since they'll be teaching and providing other services to the university, but must derive their 3mo summer salary from grant money. Anyway, let's say I want this grant to be the thesis project for my PhD student, who will be a TA half of the time and be supported 6mo/year for 3 years on the grant. I'll also need 3mo/year for some of my lab technician's time (who despite being a university employee is paid entirely through my grants) and I'll take 1mo of summer salary for myself for the time spend directing/managing this project. In addition to equipment and salaries, I'll need a couple grand toward travel to present the results of the research at scientific conferences and a grand or so for publication costs. I also should budget a few thousand for educational and community outreach (which is taken very seriously and a solid outreach program is necessary to get NSF funding). I don't remember if these items get charged overhead but it's chump change relative to the rest of the budget so whatever. Summing up: Permanent equipment = $75k (no overhead) $25k in supplies plus overhead = $40.5k 6mo salary for a grad student for 3 years @$25k/year plus overhead = $60.75k 3mo salary for a lab technician for 3 years @$50k/year plus benefits and overhead = $68.25k 1mo salary for Dr. Me at $80k/year plus benefits and overhead = $36.4k Travel costs = $3k Publication costs = $1k Educational outreach = $6k For a grand total of $291k, of which ~25% goes to the university. I just threw that example together, in reality NSF grant budgets for my field are usually $500-700k over three years, so this is a small project. Additionally, the NSF is unlikely to hand me $75k for the permanent equipment without extremely good justification for why I need that instrument since I'll continue to get use out of it for many years and for projects beyond the scope of this grant. The 25% chunk the university takes is low, it usually ends up being about a third. Lest any taxpayers be concerned about their NSF dollars going to waste, NSF grants are very tightly monitored by both the program managers at the NSF itself and administrators at the grantee university. It's very obviously in the best interests of the university to make sure the money gets spent as efficiently and productively as possible so they can continue to pull down grants and take their fat cut. As the lead researcher I have to submit periodic (6mo or a year) updates on the progress of the project, and once it's all over I have to give a summary of the publications and results produced. If a researcher is ever caught wasting funds or fails to produce, they get shitlisted and will never again receive NSF or probably other gov't money. Additionally, grants are rarely funded at the proposed level. If your proposal gets funded, you'll get a call from the NSF program manager saying "hey we really liked your proposal and think it shows great potential, could you do it for 2/3 costs? 80% cost? No? Oh, well, here's 80% of the money you requested, try again next year for a supplement." At which point you're now expected to do all the proposed work for 80% of the budget and pray you can convince the NSF to give you a little more for the project in a supplemental proposal in a year or two. tl;dr My take home point is that contrary to what a lot of people I've met assume, universities don't usually pay for research themselves, in fact they derive a major major share of their income from overhead charged on the grants their scientists receive from the gov't and private foundations. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 20:53
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