Dust and Water

Dust by Jay Owens and The Three Ages of Water by Peter Gleick.

Friends, I have recently read two books that have caused me to re-evaluate – in the words of Peter Gleick – the true value of water. The first book, Dust, considers the role of dust in human culture. And the second, The Three Ages of Water, describes the critical importance of fresh water for all life on Earth. Partly to help me recall the contents, I thought I would write a précis of the two books, and I hopefully you will find this of interest too.

Dust

Dust may seem an odd topic for a book, but it in fact dust is an intrinsic part of the natural world and plays an outsize role in many geophysical processes. As materials break down, they turn into small and smaller particles and at some point – below around about a tenth of a millimetre or so – we somehow lose consciousness of them as individual particles. But the materials are still there. Crucially, when not bound by water, particles of this size are small enough to be lifted by the wind and held aloft.

Jay Owens begins her assessment of the significance of dust in her own flat as she reflects on the astonishing amount of otherwise invisible dust made visible in the beams of sunlight. This is the start of a world-wide journey.

She first revisits the origin of the concept of ‘dusting’ – a task which arose from combination of the appalling particulate pollution from coal burning, and the development of consumer goods which needed to be displayed. She argues that the idea of household cleaning as “women’s work” led to the oppression of women throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries.

She visits Owen’s Valley, California where in the 1920’s entrepreneurs from Los Angeles acquired – through techniques of dubious legality – water rights that underpinned the growth of Los Angeles and led to the destruction of Owen’s lake, which became a source of toxic dust, and led to the desolation of a fertile valley. And she visits the land at the heart of the creation of the dustbowl in the US in the 1930’s.

Likewise she visits the Aral Sea where in the 1960’s soviet planners re-directed the sources that fed the Aral Sea in order to grow cotton. Since then the sea has all but disappeared, leading to toxic dust storms that have led to the desertification of a once fertile ecosystem.

Click on image for a larger version. USGS Landsat images of the Aral Sea in 1992 and 2020. Even in 1990 the sea, once the 4th largest freshwater lake on Earth, had already undergone significant contraction.

She visits the areas around atomic bomb test sites and investigates the lasting impact of the clouds of invisible radioactive dust that spread across the USA from the explosions.

Click on Image for a larger version. From the Downwinders Website, this graph shows the dose of radioactive Iodine -131 at locations across the US as a result of dust particles from atomic bomb tests.

And she visits Greenland to see the effect of particles of black carbon on the melting of the ice sheet.

Click on Image for a larger version. The upper image from the American Museum of Natural History shows a section of an ice core from the Greenland Ice sheet. The yearly bands are clearly visible. The lower graph shows analysis of such ice cores revealing the amount of black carbon dust deposited year by year over the last 800 years.

Throughout all her travels, Jay Owens emphasises the outsize role that tiny particles of dust play, and notes that somehow it always the less powerful groups in society that suffer. Although her writing is polemical at times, I feel that the book has nonetheless raised my consciousness of dust. Previously I had thought of dust as being incidental or peripheral, but in fact, if you look for it, dust is everywhere.

Water 

We all know that water is important, but Peter Gleick’s aim in writing this book is to urge is to see the true value of water.

In the first age of water, he discusses the role of water in the prehistory of the solar system, our planet, and the development of life, and leads us eventually to the critical role of water in the first civilisations that we know of, circa 5,000 BC.

What I had not fully appreciated is the profound extent to which control of water – via the construction of dams and irrigation structures – was at the base of all of the activities of these civilisations. And that loss of control – either via floods or drought or conflict – led to the collapse of societies, over and over again.

The second age of water – the age in which we are now living – is the age in which we ‘mastered’ fresh water. We can now control the flow of water from mountains to the sea, and we can ‘mine’ water from deep underground. And we know how to create potable water almost anywhere on Earth. And yet after perhaps 150 years of mastery, we find ourselves in a very difficult place.

Most critically, despite the UN declaring water to be a fundamental human right – with a nominal target of 50 litres per day – millions of people on Earth still lack basic facilities for drinking and hygiene.

Click on Image for a larger version. Based on weekly meter readings, the graph shows the household usage of water for myself and my wife is on average around 100 litres per person per day.

Additionally, and I don’t need to tell this to UK readers, many of our rivers and water courses are polluted to the point where ecosystems have been damaged.

Perhaps the defining feature of the second age of water is that we have treated water as being “ours” and considered any water which is not captured or used to be wasted or ‘lost’.

And worldwide we have mined “fossil” water collected in aquifers over thousands of years to create agricultural systems that have flourished for a few decades, but which are – literally – unsustainable. If we run out of almost any other substance, we can find a substitute, but there is no substitute for water.

The third age of water is the age which Gleick believes we are entering, and age in which we truly value water as the unique element around which all ecosystems are constructed. Some features of this age are:

• Reduction of the amount of water that we use, domestically, industrially and agriculturally – but with no reduction in the utility we extract from the water.
• Valuing potable water for the wonderful product that it is and using ‘grey’ water for many of the functions for which we currently use potable water.
• Valuing the ecosystems within which all life exists, even to the point of giving rivers and ecosystems legal representation. Already, the US is removing dams to allow the slow re-building of natural water courses, and wetland restoration projects are underway world -wide.

I found the book by turns educational and inspiring. Although hearing of the phenomenal degradation left over from the second age of water, I feel that we have now universally accepted that it’s generally a bad thing when rivers catch fire. [Note added: Randy Newman wrote a song about one of the better known river fires]

As I was reading the book reports were unfolding of the appalling behaviour of Thames Water, the company that supplies my own water. And I was reminded that water is still of fundamental importance and that as in the civilisations of Early Mesopotamia, kingdoms could fail if water was not well-managed.

Water & Dust 

As regular readers will know, I am personally immersed in issues around our Climate Crisis. And I try to avoid becoming too involved in our other ongoing ecological crises – things can get very depressing! But together these books have raised my consciousness without getting me down too much. The Three Ages of Water in particular sets out a very positive and achievable agenda for change.

Our Fragile Moment: A Review

Friends, recently I have been writing less because I have been reading and reflecting on “Our Fragile Moment” by Michael Mann.

Click on image for a larger version. The colourful geological graphic is from the NOAA web site.

The book takes a look at Earth’s climate from a geological perspective, highlighting climatic changes in Earth’s history and asking whether what we learn from these changes might be relevant to our current situation.

The answer is “Yes“: we can learn a lot about our current situation by looking at previous non-anthropogenic episodes of Climate Change.

An Epic – but difficult – story

Our Fragile Moment takes us on a rip-roaring tale through Earth’s history in which total global glaciation is followed by a hot-house Earth, and mass extinction ‘events’ appear to be rare, but inevitable occurrences.  But despite the epic scale of the drama, and our compelling motivation to understand such changes, this is not an easy read.

Firstly, the geological naming conventions are arcane and arbitrary. I had a similar sensation to reading novels with long and unfamiliar names (think Tolkien or Dostoevsky) and realising I mixed up two characters with similar names (e.g. Paleocene and Paleozoic).

Secondly, the time scale of Earth’s history is unimaginably long. Human history and prehistory – perhaps the last 3 million years – is less than 0.1% of the age of the Earth. And the rate of change of geological processes is so slow it almost hurts to think about them. It is easy to be unsure about whether ‘snowball Earth’ last millions of years, or tens of millions of years.

Thirdly, the way we infer past climates is not straightforward. Except for ‘recent’ changes (i.e. the last few hundred thousand years) all we have left are rocks, and we have to infer what has happened by evidence left – or not left – in rocks. It’s a kind of ultimate Crime Scene Investigation of the coldest of cold cases. And so there is inevitable uncertainty in working out what has happened.

All this being said, as we evaluate our current situation, the geological perspective is especially valuable, and as an overview of that perspective, the book is valuable. For most of time, no being has been able to understand the present and predict future events. Humanity’s ability to predict climate change is only decades old and is still imperfect – despite using the most detailed and complex computer models. Having historical systems to ‘calibrate’ the models is invaluable.

Lesson #1: The Players 

Some of the ‘characters’ with which have become familiar in discussing our current predicament, come up time and time again as Michael Mann describes what we know of Earth’s Climate Saga:

• water – in the oceans, as rainfall, as vapour, and as clouds.
• carbon dioxide – in the oceans and the atmosphere.
• methane – captured in the biosphere and free in the atmosphere.
• the Sun – it’s variability and stability.
• the Land – its motion around the Earth over geological time.
• life – and it’s influence on atmospheric composition.

As each episode of climate change is described – it eventually becomes clear that it is the same characters as play each time – but each time with a different starting position, and with interactions that are similar, but distinctly different, from previous episodes.

Lesson #2: Feedback 

Whatever event ‘initiated’ an episode of climate change, the evolution of the climate that results depends on the strengths of various responses to the initial change.

Some responses are ‘rapid’ on a geological timescale, and some are slow. For example, if I have remembered correctly, the creation of the Himalayas resulted in enhanced weathering of rock which slowly reduced carbon dioxide concentrations over millions of years, and thus reduced global temperature on a similar timescale.

Some responses re-inforce the initial change – positive feedbacks – and some responses act to reduce the effect of the initial change. In periods where the climate is reasonably stable, the stability is the result of negative feedbacks being larger than positive feedbacks. So in a stable climate small changes to say – the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth – result in changes in (say) ice albedo or cloud cover that negate the initial change.

But this stability only exists for a small range of initial perturbations. Larger perturbations can cause the stability to be lost and positive feedbacks can drive the climate into an entirely different state, which is generally not predictable.

The interplay between these feedbacks plays out time and time and time again through the episodes described in the book.

Lesson #3: The scale of human intervention

When we started emitting carbon dioxide on an industrial scale, humanity was unaware of climatic consequences of the emissions. Now, almost two centuries later, the energy we have released – and are continuing to release – has transformed the way we live – and altered Earth on a geological scale. Our emissions have changed the composition of the atmosphere – increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide by about 50% about ten times faster than even the most rapid changes in the geological record.

Lesson #4: What’s going to happen next? 

Fascinating as the story of Earth’s Climate is, what I really wanted to know was whether my doomiest thoughts were justified. Are we already outside the range of change where negative feedbacks will resist us sliding into a new climate paradigm? Unfortunately, it’s still hard to tell. But Michael’s Mann’s interpretation is that the doomiest outlooks are probably not justified.

In the doomiest outlooks, the consequence of the CO2 we have already emitted is that we are already committed to warming way beyond the initial likely warming of 3 °C by 2100. In these outlooks we are already committed to losing the Greenland Ice Sheet and parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This will result in unknown climatic consequences, but will raise global sea levels over the next few centuries by more than 10 metres. Teddington where I live will – along with most of London – be submerged.

Michael Mann’s view is that this outcome – while possible – is not the most likely result. “Our situation is urgent, but we have agency“. He considers that if we act to reduce CO2 emissions now, reaching zero emissions in the coming decades, then the lesson from the relatively-recent Eemian period (about 130,000 years ago) is that we are unlikely to suffer a ‘methane-runaway’ – because the Earth was warmer then and that did not occur then. Sea levels were also higher – but we did not totally lose the ice sheets.

Précis

Michael Mann’s summary is that the reality of the climate change that we are facing right now – this year and in the coming years – is bad enough. We don’t need to motivate ourselves with doomsday scenarios. But we do need to act urgently, because the lesson from Earth’s history is that if we do push the complex, interlinked climate system too far from its stable state – then doomsday scenarios can ensue. And then Our Fragile Moment could be over.

Global Warming Trends

 

The anomaly in the Earth’s temperature based only on thermometers in meteorological stations and excluding the oceans which cover about 70% of the Earth’s surface. The Daily Mail only draw your attention to a small fraction of the data – and they include monthly fluctuations which disguise the clear warming trend.

Why do I ever even look at the Daily Mail website?

The other day I came across this pernicious article purporting to describe a plummeting of global temperatures above the land surfaces of the Earth. The article states:

Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record. [P.S. by 1C they mean 1 °C not 1 coulomb]

The news comes amid mounting evidence that the recent run of world record high temperatures is about to end.

Some scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, head of Nasa’s climate division, have claimed that the recent highs were mainly the result of long-term global warming.

Others have argued that the records were caused by El Nino, a complex natural phenomenon that takes place every few years, and has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions by humans. The new fall in temperatures suggests they were right.

It is accompanied by a misleading graphic:

Graphic from the Daily Mail website. Notice their graph only runs from 1997 and includes large fluctuations due to sub-annual changes. It describes only the changes in temperature above the land surfaces of the Earth.

The article is nonsense from start to finish, but I just thought I would show you how to get at the data for yourself so you can make up your own mind.

Decide for yourself

This excellent NASA web page allows you plot various graphs of temperature data, and change the degree of smoothing applied to the raw data. I invite you to try it out for yourself.

This NASA web page has excellent links and descriptions

You can choose to include land stations only, or combine land and ocean data. Remember that the land surface of the Earth represents less than 30% of our planet’s surface, and so the most relevant measure of global warming involves both land and ocean data.

As well as generating graphs, you can use the website to download data and then graph the data in Excel™ as I have done for the graph at the top of the page.

I don’t fully understand where the data in the Daily Mail graphic comes from. They appear to have picked only recent data and included monthly data rather than annual averages to increase the noise and de-emphasise the obvious trend in the data.

The background colouration in the Daily Mail graphic implies that the high temperatures are all associated with the El Nino conditions. This is not correct. As the graphic below (from skeptical science) shows, years with and without an El Nino are all showing a warming trend.

An animated file showing global surface temperatures in El Nino years, La Nina years, and neutral years.

For the technically-minded reader, this article from Victor Venema may help.

The Trend 

What struck me as shocking was what happened when I set the smoothing of the data to 20 years – so that the trend represented a trend in climate rather than annual or multi-annual fluctuations.

In the figure below I show the data for the land and ocean mean temperature anomaly and the red line shows the smoothing with a 20-year running average. Since 1980 – which was 36 years ago – the data is essentially a straight line.

The estimated change in the temperature of the air above the oceans and the land. The red line shows a smoothed version of the annual data with a 20-year window to reflect changes in climate rather than the internal fluctuations of the Earth’s complex weather systems. Notice that since 1980 , the smoothed line is essentially straight with a gradient of approximately 0.017 °C per year. Source: NASA-GISS: see article for details

What if…

Friends, just suppose that NASA had spotted not a global warming trend, but an asteroid headed straight for Earth. Suppose they calculated it would not destroy civilisation, but it would nonetheless be devastating: its tidal disturbance would cause widespread floods

Would we want to know? Well Yes!

Now suppose that the entire world got together in, say, Paris, and developed a plan to deflect the asteroid. The plan would be expensive and risky – costing about 1% of global GDP – but after about 100 years of effort we would be freed from the risk of a collision.

Would we follow the plan? Well Yes!

Friends, Global warming is equivalent in its impact to an asteroid headed to Earth, and the Paris Accord, while inadequate in itself, represents the start of a plan in which the disparate governments of Earth have agreed to slow development (that brings direct benefit to their citizens) in order to tackle this threat.

Please don’t let the Daily Mail deceive you into thinking global warming is not happening: it is. It is happening slowly – 0.017 °C per year  – and the odd year of inaction makes no difference.

But year upon year of inaction condemns us to a fate that is out of our control.

 

1001 grams: Film Review

Scene from the film ‘1001 grams’ showing delegates to the BIPM ‘Kilo Seminar’ holding their respective national kilograms.

It has been one year, 5 months and  23 days  since I posted a trailer for the Bent Hamer movie “1001 grams”. And this week I finally saw the film.

I had sought it out many times with no success, but a couple of weeks ago I managed to obtain a DVD encrypted as DVD Region 1. And so when the DVD arrived, I then needed to buy a new multi-region DVD player just to watch the film!

The story follows Marie, who works at the Norwegian National Measurement Institute, her relationship with her metrologist father, her trip to Paris with the Norwegian prototype of the kilogram, her adventures with the kilogram and her relationship with Pi, a scientist who is now a gardener.

Sadly I have to report that although I enjoyed the film, I was disappointed.

The whimsy and insightful observation that characterise Hamer’s films is certainly there. But whereas it is concentrated in the trailer, it is diluted in the film itself.

The film has many great features:

For this metrologist as least – it had many many laugh-out-loud moments. The casting and characterisation (caricaturisation?) of the delegates to the BIPM meeting (i.e. people like me and my colleagues) is shockingly perfect; the scene in which the camera fleetingly captures two delegates asleep in a seminar is also true to life.

The metrologist’s obsession with minutiae and attention to detail is well-captured, both in Marie’s day-to-day work calibrating ski-slopes and petrol pumps – and in relationship to the kilogram. The moment that the delegates peer in to see the ‘Mother of all kilograms’ is exquisite.

And the cinematography is beautiful. The filming of the metrological artefacts and activities is delightful, and the depiction of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) is charming.

And I have to admit that tears did fill my eyes at the point where the meaning of the film’s title is revealed.

But overall I felt the film was just a little light on content, in both the storyline and dialogue. This may be because I lack Hamer’s Norwegian perspective. Or perhaps silence is a bigger part of personal interactions between Norwegians than it is between English people.

The lingering shots at the start and end of scenes that establish a sense of continuing stillness can eventually become irksome for the non-auteur. After a while I got the sense that these were simply padding to get the film past the 90 minute mark.

But overall, I do not regret the £62 I spent to see the film!

Back in 2014 I wrote:

Bent Hamer’s films about IKEA researchers and retired railwaymen were not really about IKEA researchers or retired railwaymen. And I am sure this film is not really about the kilogram.

It is probably about the same thing that every other Bent Hamer film is about: the weirdness of other people’s ‘normal’ lives, and by implication, the weirdness of our own lives. And how important it is to nonetheless grab whatever happiness we can from the passing moments.

I was right.

You can catch a more detailed review with spoilers here

 

SI Superheroes

Somehow this episode of SI Superheroes came out last May (2015) and I didn’t notice!

If anything, this is even better than the first episode – perhaps because it’s more focussed on a single theme without the need to introduce all the characters.

In case you are unfamiliar with the work of NIST, the US National Institute for Standards and Technology, they are basically the US version of NPL and are a very serious organisation. In my recollection, this is only the second output from NIST that has featured laugh-out-loud moments (which I will not reveal!).

I can foresee great things for these characters.

Remember that Superman, Batman and their friends and foes inhabited a (DC) universe of paper comics for decades.

Then they became TV cartoon characters.

And only relatively recently have they become the stars of the current genre of all action, computer-graphic laden movies.

I wonder if they will be recruiting for a male with slightly older looks to play Dr. Kelvin…

9192631770

Incidentally, the number 9,192,631,770 displayed on the side of the cartoon satellite is the number of oscillations a Caesium atom that defines what we mean by the passage of one second.

At places like NPL and NIST we can make clocks based on Caesium atoms that very perfectly realise this definition.

The atoms in these super-clocks vibrate at  9,192,631,770.000 000 ± 0.000 001 oscillations per second and form the basis of Universal Coordinated Time (UTC)  that is used throughout the world.

One of the difficulties which Major Uncertainty may have tried to exploit is that the number of oscillations per second changes very slightly with changes in the physical environment of the atom.

Some of the environmental parameters that matter for clocks mounted in space are:

• the strength of the gravitational field,
• any accelerations that the atom experiences,
• the  speed of the clock with respect to the person (often on the ground)  counting the oscillations,
• the temperature of the walls surrounding the atoms.

Anyway – all is well now that the League of SI Superheroes has done their job again.

Science Demonstrations: the art of seeing things differently.

One of the highlights of the last few weeks was attending the premiere of Demo: The Movie by Alom Shaha and Jonathan Sanderson.

Mingling with the gliterati of the science communication world, the event, the conversations, and the film all helped me to reflect on the purpose of science demonstrations.

To me the purpose of a demonstration is to highlight one aspect of the everyday world, and to allow us to look at it ‘differently’.

This is necessary because for most of us, for most of our lives, the world doesn’t seem mysterious: our world comprises familiar objects that behave in a familiar way.

So famously in 1848 Michael Faraday gave a series of six lectures about an object which must have been extremely familiar to his audience: a candle. And this ground-breaking lecture series is the starting point for Demo:The Movie.

From this point Alom, a teacher, travels from his classroom to San Francisco via the western deserts of the USA performing demonstrations and reflecting on the their role in teaching as he travels.

He concludes that performing a successful science demonstration is an art which incorporates elements of stage magic, understanding of teaching aims and objects, and that most difficult to pronounce word, pedagogy.

For me the most important point made in the film is the profound (and paradoxical) point that demonstrations are different from videos of demonstrations.

This point is made by showing a plastic bottle (which you previously saw Alom fill with air at the top of a mountain) has been crushed when he reaches Death Valley, exactly as viewers probably expected.

But Alom points out that seeing this on video, you have no idea whether this is the same bottle you saw filled earlier. Indeed, you have no idea whether that it was even ‘earlier’.

It is the power of seeing things for yourself which is personally challenging. In terms of my own favourite demonstration, anyone who has ever seen a sausage attracted to a balloon is in some way personally challenged to ask themselves’ What is going on?’.

I can strongly recommend this 30 minute epic to anyone who engages in science communication in any form, but most especially to teachers who might feel inclined to simply show a class a video of something happening instead of performing the demonstration themselves.

And if you want help on performing demonstrations and tips on ‘getting it right’ Jonathan and Alom have created a website Sciencedemo.org which has many videos showing you how not to use videos in class!

Finally, if you love the movie as much as I do, you can check out the bloopers movie/trailer below.

 

 

Musical Inclusion: Ballads for the Age of Science

Album covers from the series ‘Ballads for the Age of Science’

Last week I wrote about how the technical nature of professional music or professional science could lead to people feeling excluded from a musical or scientific cognoscenti.

This week the antidote:  – a series of songs (just recently available on iTunes) which will help everybody to feel included in the scientific endeavour. I recommend them to every parent, every teacher of science, and every science communicator.

Ballads for the Age of Science was written and performed in a different age – an age of scientific optimism: the 1950’s. An age when it was OK to sing about the Greenhouse Effect in a primary school classroom in the USA.

The album series consists of:

• Experiment Songs, by Dorothy Collins (Link to iTunes)
  • My favourite? “It’s a magnet”, which is just a delight.
• Nature Songs and More Nature Songs by Marais and Miranda (Link to iTunes)
  • My favourite? “Why is the sky blue?” which is not quite technically correct, but so ambitious!
• Weather Songs by Tom Glazer  (Link to iTunes )
  • My favourite? That’s hard because every one is a gem. “What is the Climate?” is a classic, but “What does the Glass of Greenhouse do” is brilliantly ambitious – and bold in its use of banjo!
• Energy and Motion Songs by Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans (Link to iTunes )
  • My favourite? It has to be the catchy “E-lec-tric-ity” which is a true work of genius.
• Space Songs by Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans (Link to iTunes )
  • My favourite? Despite the naiveté it has to be “A scientific fact”, a paean to age when things were simpler .

These will become hits in the UK – they will spread first like a secret amongst friends and then like wildfire until you are sick of them. But by joining music to learning about science they unite two disparate ends of circle which has been cut for too long. Enjoy 🙂

Just in case you are interested, the songs we use in Protons for Breakfast are:

• E-lec-tri-city : (Link to iTunes )
• Ultra Violet And Infra Red: (Link to iTunes )
• Motion, Motion Everywhere😦Link to iTunes )
• Why Are The Stars Of Different Colors?: (Link to iTunes )
• What is the Climate?: (Link to iTunes )
• What Does The Glass Of A Greenhouse Do?:  (Link to iTunes )
• Why does the Sun shine? (Link to iTunes )

… and if we had the time we would use loads more!

You might also be interested in an obituary for Tom Glazer from The Independent and you can also read about his life on Wikipedia

Vacuum Bazooka

Today I spent a few pounds and a couple of hours with my son making a bazooka. Is there a better way to pass a Sunday afternoon?

Our adventures were cut short by rain, but I hope that next week we may be able to find the tweaks that will double the projectile speed to perhaps 30 metres per second.

The project is described in a new book (The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science) by a colleague from Air Products, Neil Downie. Neil is a man on a mission to get people doing things – preferably things to do with science and engineering. If you like the sound of this but don’t know where to start, this book will give you inspiration, enough information to get started, and a description of the science involved. What it won’t do is tell you exactly what to do. I am sure this is deliberate.

I built this bazooka by copying pretty much what was in the book – copying is just such a great way to learn! But there are so many variables that it is inevitable that everyone who builds one of these projects will have to invent something for themselves as they go along. And it is by doing this that people will take ownership of the projects – and I am sure that would make Neil smile.

Christian and I may have begun by copying, but when we have finished, that bazooka will be ours!

The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science by Neil Downie. A source of inspiration for science projects that will takeabout an afternoon.

We are still a little way from raw rambo-esque figure of the naked scientist strutting the halls of the Royal Institution!

But just give me a rain-free weekend!

Sustainable Chemistry

A Healthy Wealthy and Sustainable World is indeed possible according to John Emsley. But only if we exploit the skills of chemical engineers.

I have just read two books with a positive message about the role of chemical engineering in modern life.  A Healthy, Wealthy, Sustainable World and Islington Green are both by John Emsley, and they both tell the same story, but in two different ways.

A Healthy, Wealthy, Sustainable World, tells the story ‘straight up’. It considers the role of chemistry in the food we eat, the water we drink, medicine, transport, plastics and city life. In each case Emsley considers whether the status quo is sustainable, and whether it could be conceivably made so. Emsley takes a narrow view of sustainability as implying non-reliance on fossil fuels. But even that’s a tough call and his discussion of what this involves is interesting. If you were teaching GCSE or A level chemistry this would give you a plethora of applications of basic chemistry in the context of our daily lives.

Islington Green tells the same story by introducing two comic-book caricatures  Justin Thyme and Teresa Green (!) who start out trying to live an ‘organic, green’ lifestyle without using any ‘chemicals’. However they end up deciding that the most sustainable and convenient choices are those offered by the chemical industry. Along the way Emsley shares a few traditional Yorkshire opinions on the valuable contribution that merchant bankers make to our society.

I have been an admirer of John Emsley for years, ever since I acquired his book about The Elements now sadly out of print, but replaced by the excellent Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements. I also enjoyed his book on ‘The Elements of Murder: a history of poison‘. He writes in a clear, uncluttered style which is refreshing to read.

But I do have a caveat. If you are sceptical about the role of the chemical industry, you will find little to persuade you to change your mind. He devotes a fair amount of time to demolishing the ‘straw arguments’ of hypothetical ‘greens’, but fails to even acknowledge more mundane concerns. For example Emsley fails to mention the ozone hole. 

In the 1950s the chemical industry introduced a range of super-chemicals to replace hydrocarbons: chlorocarbons, fluorocarbons and mixed chloro-fluoro-carbons. These chemicals performed fantastically in refrigerators and a range of other applications. But they had the unintended consequence of lingering in the atmosphere and through a bizarre and unanticipated feature of atmospheric chemistry, destroyed the ozone layer above the Antarctic (mainly) and the Arctic (a little) each spring.

This episode must have cost billions of pounds, required the re-engineering of an entire industry, and the ozone layer will still take more than 100 years to return to normal. Independent of whether these chemicals are made with or without fossil fuels, chemistry of this type is clearly not sustainable.

The positive story about the role of the Chemical Industry is a story worth telling, and Emsley tells it well. But in my opinion it is a story worth telling with a little less hubris.

[UPDATE: May 30th: I have updated this article, removing my comments about Biological Washing Powders which may be found here.]