It ain't half wet, Mum

I have been rather engaged in writing for publication, so here to prove that, like Granny Weatherwax, I aten't dead yet, here's a sampler about a little-known event that I came across while in NZ.

*

Into every life cycle, a little catastrophe must fall, and in the Carnian stage of the late Triassic, the geological record shows what seems like a long monsoon. That, at least is what the evidence suggests, but ‘long’ is a weak descriptor for a wet spell that went on for a million years, or maybe two. At the end of the downpour that was the Carnian pluvial episode (CPE), the lepidosaurs (the ancestors of the modern-day snakes and lizards) were present, and so were the mammaliaforms (the ancestors of the mammals). The heavy rains had triggered some major changes.

Quite a few invertebrates went missing at this time from among the ammonoids, bryozoa and crinoids, so what caused this changeover? At that time, there was just one continent, Pangaea, and the sea was probably hotter than it is now, so there would have been enough water in the atmosphere to feed continual torrential rain. To make things worse, there were huge volcanic outpourings at this time, generating the flood basalts of western North America.

Basalt flows, Snake River, Washington state, USA.

That sort of volcanic activity makes things warmer, and it also injects lots of water vapour into the atmosphere, and also lots of CO₂. This would have fed global warming, again raising atmospheric water levels, and down came the rain, in the Carnian Stage, a subdivision of the lowermost Upper Triassic period. On 10 November 1987 Alastair Ruffell and Michael Simms linked a stripe of grey in the red stone of Somerset’s Lipe Hill to Simms’s research on crinoid extinction in the mid-Carnian.

This period was about 234 to 232 million years ago, and aside from wiping out some branches of life and opening the way to others, the CPE left a number of traces in the rocks. These include clay deposits in sedimentary basins, pollen traces that reflect vegetation that thrives in humid conditions, lots of amber, and many changes in the isotope balances.

The oxygen isotope ratios (¹⁸O:¹⁶O) alter, suggesting global warming of 3 to 4°C during the CPE (though this could also point to a change in seawater salinity). The carbon-13 levels rose and fell in parallel with higher levels of sedimentation (which points to higher rainfall).

In other words, the world may survive massive changes in the climate, but can humans manage to cling on? That is probably a key question for the generations after mine, and also my generation, if we have a descendant-based interest in the future.

Shipwrecks

Recapping what I said in a recent essay, every ship has to be a compromise. Sailing vessels must trade off a reduction in strength from thinner hulls in order to float higher and sail faster—or to carry more cargo. A broad-beamed vessel would carry more cargo, but it would wallow along, losing time. The tea clippers were lean, narrow and beautiful, and carried a light cargo, the new season’s tea, from China to a waiting world, eager to pay a high price for fresh tea.

The wreck of the Admella in Australian waters was a colonial scandal and cause for concern, but the loss of the Royal Charter in late 1859 was a far greater concern in Britain. Charles Dickens visited the site of the wreck and wrote about it in The Uncommercial Traveller, while every British man and his dog held an opinion on the cause.

Royal Charter was a famous iron ship which had gone from Liverpool to Melbourne in 59 days. The Reverend Captain William Scoresby FRS had travelled to and from Australia in the ship in 1856, studying how the compasses behaved, because compass adjustment was still an inexact art at best. 

Scoresby wanted to study the interplay of terrestrial magnetism and compass deviation on board an iron-hulled ship, but achieved little before he died in 1857. The meagre results of his researches were published posthumously in 1859.

Scoresby was a famous whaling captain who later became a parson and scientist. Aside from the link to Scoresby, the ship’s owners also made her famous, advertising her speed. Royal Charter was 2719 tons, and had 200 hp auxiliary engines, so the ship was 8 times the weight of Admella, but she only had twice the engine power. Royal Charter also had sails, which became part of the problem.

Late in August, the ship left Hobson’s Bay in Victoria with half a million pounds (around $100 million today) worth of gold and 400 passengers, bound for Liverpool. Reaching Ireland in late October, she anchored off the Cove of Cork, and some of the passengers sent letters and telegrams by the Petrel pilot-boat to their family and friends, then the captain pushed on for Liverpool as the weather closed in.

A wild storm on October 25 wrecked more than 200 vessels, but one ship grabbed people’s attention later. Off the Skerries, the Royal Charter signalled for a pilot, but no pilot could put out. The ship anchored, but both cables parted in quick succession. Wind pressure on the masts and rigging probably added to the strain, but the skipper may have avoided getting rid of the masts, fearing that the stern screw might be fouled by some of the lines that would still be attached– or perhaps he thought the masts would not go over the side cleanly.

The ship struck and the masts were then cut away, but it was too late. Guns of distress were fired, blue lights were sent up, and a line was put ashore. The captain sent 16 crew members ashore to work the line, but before anybody could be landed, the ship broke up and only 39 of the 498 passengers and crew survived.

A writer styling himself ‘Amicus’ wrote to The Times on December 6, arguing that iron ships were made of poor quality iron called ‘boat iron’. The writer wondered why a ship, a mere 50 yards offshore with a hawser in place saw so many deaths. The Great Britain had stayed aground for a whole winter without breaking up, and ‘Amicus’ said other examples showed that a well-built iron ship was safe, but Royal Charter was made of materials as wrong as a Yankee trader’s wooden nutmegs, a grocer’s sanded sugar or a petty swindler’s sewing cotton that is shorter than advertised.

Three days before the ‘Amicus’ letter, The Times reported that the plates had been tested earlier, and had then been found to be “above standard”. The view now is that the captain of an ordinary sailing ship might have dropped anchor, but the proud skipper of a famous fast ship felt impelled to rely on a drastically underpowered engine which could only drive the ship at eight knots per hour (“knots per hour” was the common usage in 1859) in dead water, according to The Times. It was a learning experience, but a harsh one.

H. Hallock and Isaac Smith announced in Scientific American that they had designed a state-room, self-contained and sheltered below a deck that might open, a room able to be sealed and equipped with food and water for those within. In an accident, the state-room would be detached and allowed to float free of the ship. It had a pump to keep waters at bay and lamps that could be lit at night. The idea sank without trace.

Other inventors were determined that warships, which by definition carried explosives, would be safer. In France, La Gloire was launched in 1859, described as the world’s first iron-clad, though Korea had iron-clad ships in the late 1500s. A ship of the line in the early 19th century used 3500 oaks, the product of 900 acres, timber which needed to be seasoned fir up to 25 years, but saving trees was not La Gloire’s inspiration, because she was timber beneath the plating. The ship was a response to the burning of the wooden Turkish fleet at Sinope in 1853 by the Russian navy’s explosive shells.

The launching of La Gloire signalled the end of the wooden warship, because where one nation led, others had to follow. In 1860, the Royal Navy’s HMS Warrior had guns mounted on a single deck, running 380 feet, displacing 9000 tons. The last wooden British ship-of-the-line was a three-decker launched in 1859, but by the end of the century, timber ships had been replaced by iron and steel dreadnoughts weighing 20,000 tons.

Charles Atherton wrote to The Times in January from Woolwich Dockyard to share his idea for making vessels with an interior of light material up to the waterline. Gunboats, floating-batteries and mortars could benefit, he said. The solids might consist of “cork shavings, light wood sawdust, rush stems, cotton waste, flocks, hemp, and other lightweight material, which, by the aid of a solution of gutta percha or other chemical process, would form a solidifying mass, so tough that it could not be knocked to pieces by shot, and so light that it would only be one half the specific gravity of water, and therefore, unsinkable, however perforated by shot…”

Atherton had previously offered a similar idea for treasure ships, so they would float, allowing recovery of the riches. It took until the end of the year for Scientific American to mention the idea, when a writer said that cork would not suit because heated shot could set fire to it, but a suitable material ought to be able to be found. Half a century on, most lifeboats were fitted with sealed cork-filled compartments and self-draining seacocks to keep them afloat under the worst of conditions.

Australian Backyard Earth Scientist

I have now turned back to earth science for younger readers again, as the editor's responses come my way from the Number One editor at the National Library of Australia, Jo Karmel. This is the fifth book we have worked on together (or seventh, if you count new editions separately), and there's another on the way

Anyhow, by the time we are finished, Australian Backyard Earth Scientist is going to be a good book, but here are some left-overs, more suited to older readers. These might have been epigraphs, but we don't do those for younger readers. Here are the unused quotes, and a few pics from my short-list (~250 shots at last count).

You can find more extra shots at these links:
ABES Teaching Pictures
ABES Teaching Pictures 2
ABES Teaching Pictures 3

ABES Teaching Pictures 4

ABES Teaching Pictures 5

ABES Teaching Pictures 6

Earth science

Folds, Mt Pilatus, Switzerland.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

— Proverb, dating back to the 16th century.

To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.

― James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, vol. 3, 46.

A rock or stone is not a subject that, of itself, may interest a philosopher to study; but, when he comes to see the necessity of those hard bodies, in the constitution of this earth, or for the permanency of the land on which we dwell, and when he finds that there are means wisely provided for the renovation of this necessary decaying part, as well as that of every other, he then, with pleasure, contemplates this manifestation of design, and thus connects the mineral system of this earth with that by which the heavenly bodies are made to move perpetually in their orbits.

— James Hutton. Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, Vol. 1 (1795), 276.

An historian should, if possible, be at once profoundly acquainted with ethics, politics, jurisprudence, the military art, theology; in a word, with all branches of knowledge … It would be no less desirable that a geologist should be well versed in chemistry, natural philosophy, mineralogy, zoology, comparative anatomy, botany; in short, in every science relating to organic and inorganic nature.

— Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, 3, 1835.

…the successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry.

— William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, Bridgewater Treatise 6, Vol. 1, 37, 1836.

Folds and faults, S. coast NSW.

[When] spring and summer come round, how easily may the hammer be buckled round the waist, and the student emerge from the dust of town into the joyous air of the country, for a few delightful hours among the rocks.

— Sir Archibald Geikie, in The Story of a Boulder: or, Gleanings from the Note-book of a Field Geologist (1858), viii.

Apart from its healthful mental training as a branch of ordinary education, geology as an open-air pursuit affords an admirable training in habits of observation, furnishes a delightful relief from the cares and routine of everyday life, takes us into the open fields and the free fresh face of nature, leads us into all manner of sequestered nooks, whither hardly any other occupation or interest would be likely to send us, sets before us problems of the highest interest regarding the history of the ground beneath our feet, and thus gives a new charm to scenery which may be already replete with attractions.

— Sir Archibald Geikie, Outlines of Field-Geology (1900), 251-2.

Experimental geology has this in common with all other branches of our science, petrology and palaeontology included, that in the long run it withers indoors.

— Phillip H. Kuenen’ 'Experiments in Geology', Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow (1958), 23, 25.

No Geology without Marine Geology!

— Phillip H. Kuenen, Title of paper, Geologische Rundschau, 47(1), 1958, 1 – 10.

Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aspects of Culture, The American and Continental Monthly, Volume 1, April 1870, 5.

Beneath all the wealth of detail in a geological map lies an elegant, orderly simplicity.

— Tuzo Wilson, As quoted G.D. Garland in obituary 'John Tuzo Wilson', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (Nov 1995), 552.

Atoms

Hexagonal packing can turn up unexpectedly.

To understand the very large, we must understand the very small.

— Democritus (470 – 380 BC)

… in the field some amount of information concerning igneous rocks can be obtained by rubbing down the chip on a grindstone and using a whetstone, carborundum file, or water of Ayr stone for the final grinding. By these and other methods … there are obtained slices of rocks which, though thick, uneven, scratched, and all that is bad, from the point of view of the professional maker of thin sections, are nevertheless capable of yielding much information. With a pocket lens it is possible to make out from such a 'thin' section the nature of the minerals present, the texture and the nature of the rock.

— Frank Rutley, Elements of Mineralogy, 22nd edition, 1915, p. 104.

The difference between a piece of stone and an atom is that an atom is highly organised, whereas the stone is not. The atom is a pattern, and the molecule is a pattern, and the crystal is a pattern; but the stone, although it is made up of these patterns, is just a mere confusion. It's only when life appears that you begin to get organisation on a larger scale. Life takes the atoms and molecules and crystals; but, instead of making a mess of them like the stone, it combines them into new and more elaborate patterns of its own.

— Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963), Time Must Have a Stop. London: Chatto and Windus, 1945, chapter 14.

A crystal lacks rhythm from excess of pattern, while a fog is unrhythmic in that it exhibits a patternless confusion of detail.

— A. N. Whitehead (1861 – 1947), An Introduction to Mathematics. Oxford: OUP, 1948.

 Change

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.

— Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes, 1:4

To explain the observed phenomena, we may dispense with sudden, violent and general catastrophes, and regard the ancient and present fluctuations . . . as belonging to one continuous and uniform series of events.

— Sir Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875), Principles of Geology.

Rather more than a century ago Sir Charles Lyell, then an Oxford student, noticed that a small lake on his father's Scotch estate was capable of depositing an appreciable layer of limestone on its bottom within quite a few years — and on his discovery that rocks could be built up as well as worn away is based a large part of modern geology.

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937.

Thermal mud, Orakei Korako, New Zealand

Compared with what we think of as long periods in our everyday calculations, there must have been enormous time and considerable variations in circumstances for nature to lead the organisation of animals to the degree of complexity and development that we see today.

— Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 – 1829), Philosophie Zoologique.

We may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical.

— Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, 2nd edn. (1845), ch. XIV, 311.

… millions of our race are now supported by lands situated where deep seas once prevailed in earlier ages. In many districts not yet occupied by man, land animals and forests now abound where the anchor once sank into the oozy bottom.

— Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, 373, 1835.

While a glacier is moving, it rubs and wears down the bottom on which it moves, scrapes its surface (now smooth), triturates the broken-off material that is found between the ice and the rock, pulverizes or reduces it to a clayey paste, rounds angular blocks that resist its pressure, and polishes those having a larger surface. At the surface of the glacier, other processes occur. Fragments of rocks that are broken-off from the neighbouring walls and fall on the ice, remain there or can be transported to the sides; they advance in this way on the top of the glacier, without moving or rubbing against each other … and arrive at the extremity of the glacier with their angles, sharp edges, and their uneven surfaces intact.

— Louis Agassiz, La théorie des glaciers et ses progrès les plus récents. Bibl. universelle de Genève, (3), Vol. 41, p.127. Trans. Karin Verrecchia.

On the morning of May 8th, 1902, the clocks of St. Pierre ticked on towards ten minutes of 8 when they would stop forever. Against a background of bright sunshine, a huge column of vapour rose from the cone of Mont Pelée.

A salvo of reports as from heavy artillery. Then, choked by lava boiled to white heat by fires in the depths of the earth, Pelée with a terrific explosion blew its head off.

— Fairfax Downey, 'Last Days of St. Pierre', in Disaster Fighters, G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Temperature gradients in ordinary [volcanically] quiet areas range from less than 10 to as much as 50 degrees Celsius per kilometre.

— A. E. Benfield, 'The Earth's Heat', Scientific American Reader (1953), page 71.

Volcanic bombs in the making, Mt Yasur, Tanna, Vanuatu.

Naturally a good deal of thought has been given to how the immense energy of volcanoes might be harnessed for man's use. It has been done on a relatively minor scale in several countries, notably Italy and Iceland.

— A. E. Benfield, 'The Earth's Heat', Scientific American Reader (1953), page 86.

Just as the level of Stone Age finds gives an average sinkage of 9 inches in a hundred years, so calculations based on Roman remains suggest a similar figure… Presumably it is still doing so to-day, although it will be another five hundred or a thousand years before the problem of maintaining the Thames embankment will begin to become acute.

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937. (The Thames Barrier went into operation in 1986!).

Field reversals, occurring roughly every million years, are the most dramatic of the wide range of phenomena exhibited by the earth's magnetic field. And the next reversal on Earth may not be so far away: if the current rate of decay of the Earth's dipole component is maintained, it will vanish in less than 2000 years' time.

— Jeremy Bloxham, 'Evidence for asymmetry and fluctuation', Nature, 322: 13, 1986

Time

The poor world is almost six thousand years old . . .

— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It, IV, i, 95

There are said to be a billion billion insects on the earth at any moment, most of them with very short life expectancies by our standards.

— Lewis Thomas (1913 – ), The Lives of a Cell, Penguin Books, 1978.

We can be certain that the radiation did not change appreciably during the last 500 million years; because during all this time life existed on earth, which means that the temperature of the earth during the whole period must have been very nearly what it is today. This temperature is determined by the sun's radiation.

— Hans Albrecht Bethe (1906-000), The Sky, December 1940.

More recently, advances in physics have given us methods to put absolute dates, in millions of years, on rocks and the fossils that they contain. These methods depend on the fact that particular radioactive elements decay at precisely known rates. It is as though precision-made miniature stopwatches had been conveniently buried in the rocks. Each stopwatch was started at the moment that it was laid down. All that the palaeontologist has to do is dig it up and read off the time on the dial.

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin, 1986.

 

Slate blocks, Norway.

According to this view of the matter, there is nothing casual in the formation of Metamorphic Rocks. All strata, once buried deep enough, (and due TIME allowed!!!) must assume that state,—none can escape. All records of former worlds must ultimately perish.

— Sir John Herschel, Letter to Mr Murchison, quoted in the Appendix to Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (1838), 240.

Fossils

… implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

— Charles Dickens, Bleak House, London, 1852, page 1.

Life has come to be regarded by the majority of biologists as forming one vast genealogical tree, the roots of which are buried deep down in the lowest fossiliferous strata, and the tops of whose branches, constituting the life that now exists on the globe, are alone seen above the surface.

— John Gibson, 'Fossil fishes of Scotland' in Science Gleanings in Many Fields (1884).

Fossils in marble, Sydney.

We are lucky to have fossils at all. It is a remarkably fortunate fact of geology that bones, shells and other hard parts of animals, before they decay, can occasionally leave an imprint which later acts as a mould, which shapes hardening rock into a permanent memory of the animal. We don't know what proportion of animals are fossilized after their death — I personally would consider it a very great honour to be fossilized — but it is certainly very small indeed.

— Richard Dawkins (1941 – ), The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 225.

David Davies, a Welsh mine foreman, was the first to make really large collections of plant material from different coal seams. He showed that even when the plants did not differ very much, there were differences in the proportions of different kinds, just as in one meadow you will find a great deal of clover among the grass, in another very little.
J.B.S.Haldane (1892-1964) Everything Has a History, Allen and Unwin 1951, page 50.

 

Fossils in a limy sandstone, W.A.

If a single well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million years-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed. Incidentally, this is sufficient answer to the canard, put about by creationists and their journalistic fellow travellers, that the whole theory of evolution is an 'unfalsifiable' tautology. Ironically, it is also why creationists are so keen on the fake human footprints, which were carved during the depression to fool tourists, in the dinosaur beds of Texas.

— Richard Dawkins (1941 – ), The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, page 225.

Soil

Erosion in a spoil heap, South Australia.

In the agricultural sense soils are the superficial layers, usually less than a foot in thickness, of disintegrated and decomposed rock material, which is mingled with organic matter, and furnishes the necessary conditions and materials for plant growth.

— G. W. Tyrrell, The Principles of Petrology, Methuen, 1929, p. 184.

As to the ground or soil, it is in general but very indifft — in some parts nothing but hard, solid rock, in others a black sand full of ant hills.  In some spots, however, it is better, in one place especially we have found some good strong clay of wh they have already begun to make bricks wh are said to be very good.

The Governor has taken several excursions inland many miles into the Country.  First a little to the Northward — here the ground and country are most wretched, nothing to be seen but impassable Rocks, thickets, & swamps.  Next he went more towards the S.W.  Here he met with better ground — also with blue shale, a thing likely to be of great service to the Settlement.  The wood is in general very ordinary & bad for building.

— George Mackaness (ed.), Some Letters of Rev. Richard Johnson, B.A., First Chaplain of New South Wales, 2 parts: Australian Historical Monographs, new series vols XX and XXI, Sydney: D.S.Ford, 1954, part I, page 19 (letter dated May 8, 1788). 

Some idea may be formed of the appearance of the country by what is seen on the South Head Road, near the Light House. At the distance of a mile from the Heads, the spectator comes to a spot from which he can behold nothing but rock blackened, with the effects of fire. Every tree, shrub, flower, or atom of grass, has been burnt to the very root; and accustomed as the eye is here to look with indifference upon large tracts of land around, with scorched and half consumed trees, one cannot contemplate the scenes we allude to without becoming sensible of an extraordinary sensation, produced by the air of desolation with which one is surrounded.

Cattle at this season are much distressed for want of water. The stockmen are obliged to drive them to the distance of many miles, even for the scanty supply which a small creek or rivulet affords.

— The Australian (Sydney), 9 December 1826, 3.

Simulating sedimentation.

We are wealthy and wasteful but this can't go on. If we don't eat dog biscuits, we could end up eating our dog instead.

— Magnus Pyke (1908 – 1992)

Now I submit that we cannot say much which is sympathetic to our time unless we have assimilated our immediate tradition, which for this country is the conquest of soil and climate. Accordingly, it is a function of Biology in the University to provide this ingredient in education.

— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.

Climate and weather

In parts of Siberia the southern boundary of permanently frozen ground is receding poleward several dozen yards per annum.

— George Kimble, Scientific American, 1950.

While all the evidence goes to show that carbonic acid is now an almost invariable constituent of the air, it is one that requires least change in the physical conditions under which the earth exists to effect a change in its proportion. Minute as the proportion is, the delicacy of its relation to animal and vegetable life on the earth makes the maintenance of the apparently unstable equilibrium a matter of serious concern to mankind.

— Scientific American, October 1883, quoted in Scientific American, October 1983, p. 11

Occasional droughts occur throughout the colony at periods varying from ten to fifteen years: and periodical floods of a destructive character have at various times caused a serious loss of life and property.

— George French Angas, Australia: a Popular Account, 1866, 140.

We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element of air, which by unquestioned experiments is known to have weight, and so much, indeed, that near the surface of the earth, where it is most dense it weighs about one four-hundredth of the weight of water [actually more like 1/775]. Those who have written about twilight, moreover, have observed that the vaporous and visible air rises above us to about [80 kilometres]; I do not believe its height to be so great, since if it were, I could show that the vacuum would be able to offer much greater resistance than it does…

— Evangelista Torricelli, in a letter to Michelangelo Ricci, 1644.

Not that there is anything very mysterious ... if it is remembered that a barometer is merely a weighing balance under another name. Instead of weighing a letter or a parcel against a series of standardised weights, it weighs the whole mass of air above it, right to the top of the atmosphere, against a column of mercury. An area of high pressure … is the outward and ground-level sign of a mountain of air above. The mountain of air is heavy. So the mercury has to rise higher…

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937.

Attributed bits, lacking sources.

I could more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.

— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in 1807.

I agree. But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been circling the earth.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), on being told how foolish the ancients were for accepting the Ptolemaic system.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

— J. B. S. Haldane (1892 – 1964)

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

— Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

A potted history of climate change

I was searching for a reference that I knew was in my files, and I tracked it down, so here is some surprising news: we knew that "global warming" was happening, way back in 1950!

What is different now is that most reputable atmospheric scientists believe human activity is driving the modern slow warming of our climate. All the same, now we know that global warming is a bad description, so we call it ‘climate change’. Under any name, it’s the same beast, and the same looming disaster, and it was happening 66 years ago.

Oddly, the suspicion that humans are to blame may be even older. The problem before was that there was not a lot of hard science in the arguments, which come down to logic, reason, careful modelling — and interpretation that is likely to be biased by a generous serving of self-interest. That has changed in the last ten years.

Nobody denies that the Earth is getting warmer, because the evidence is there, and it was apparent in 1950, when George Kimble reported in Scientific American that the northern limit of wheat-growing in Canada had moved northward some 2 – 300 miles (call it 400 kilometres), adding that farmers in southern Ontario were experimenting with cotton. While that industry seems not to have taken off, he reported another trend that continues to this day, the northward retreat of the permafrost:

“In parts of Siberia the southern boundary of permanently frozen ground is receding poleward several dozen yards per annum.”

The matter open to question back then was the cause. Kimble noted that the Domesday Book featured 38 vineyards in England in 1086, in addition to those of the Crown. He pointed also to the Greenland colony which was frozen out, back around the mid-1400s and other evidence that climates change. He also looked at Biblical evidence on the distribution of date palms to suggest that conditions in 1950 were much those of Biblical times, providing a picture of a climate that fluctuates around a mean. Maybe it was just one of those cycles.

That was a time before ‘global warming’ when climate change was referred to as the ‘greenhouse effect’. In cold climates, a greenhouse is a glass shed which allows sunlight to shine in, where much of it is absorbed and changed to heat. Glass is less transparent to heat, but a greenhouse does not just trap warmth that way: it also holds a body of warm air around the plants, and protects them from wind-driven evaporation. So while we still speak of ‘greenhouse gases’, it is rare to hear anybody mention the greenhouse effect these days, but even that goes way back.

In the 1820s, Joseph Fourier realised that heat-trapping might occur. Then Svante Arrhenius reminded us in 1896 that both water vapour and carbon dioxide were ‘greenhouse gases’ (escaping that bad analogy is hard) and so water and carbon dioxide would play a role in making the planet get warmer. He also considered changes that might be happening, and consulted Arvid Högbom, who just happened to know all about carbon dioxide sources and sinks.

Carbon dioxide was coming from life forms when they breathed, from volcanoes, and from humans burning fossil and other fuels. The human additions were a very small part of the total in the air already, perhaps one part in a thousand was added by the burning of coal, and there were probably checks and balances. Arrhenius estimated that it would take 3000 years to double the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, if it ever happened, but that such a doubling would raise world average temperatures by 5 to 6°C.

In 1896, the CO₂ level was around 290 parts per million: in 2016, the value was estimated at 396 parts per million: we had travelled one third of the projected distance in just 120 years.

To Europeans back in the 1890s, the warming effect seemed nothing to worry about, because nobody had stopped to consider the cascades, the flow-ons that might be driven by that rise in temperature. Walter Nernst, even wondered if it would be feasible to set fire to uneconomical and low-grade coal seams, so as to release enough carbon dioxide to warm the Earth’s climate deliberately!

Scientists are slow to move to a new model, a new way of understanding, something called a paradigm, and just a few years before the world’s earth scientists were shown irrefutable evidence of plate tectonics, we undergraduates in geology were being told by one of our lecturers “go and watch Carey perform at the conference — he’s mad, and thinks that the continents move!”

Sam Carey wasn’t quite right, but he was closer to the truth than his denigrator. It is, however, a well-kept secret that scientists engage in robust rhetoric and vilification. Sam seized on every scrap of evidence to push his own viewpoint, most of the audience laughed dutifully — and felt rather embarrassed a few years later when palaeomagnetic evidence showed that Carey was largely on the money. In the end, the good science was recognised and accepted.

A decade back, global warming was in much the same position, with some of the scientists arguing furiously, even when they agreed on the main principles, and as in the puzzle of the wandering continents, the key evidence is probably there. Mind you, when I covered the 2002 Spring Conference of then American Geophysical Union, there were no nay-sayers there.

The problem is that so long as people can get away with saying "global warming", we are once again stuck with a bad analogy, just as the early 1960s saw us hung up on “continental drift”.

That aside, the cost of disagreement and bickering is remarkably different. It mattered not at all if people disagreed about plate tectonics (except, perhaps, that it makes tsunamis like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami easier to understand), but global warming is likely to be a major disaster for humanity, and any delay has the potential to cost lives. To understand this, we have to accept some puzzling propositions.

To take one example, the formation of sea ice in the Bering Strait is probably what stops Dublin and New York being iced-in each winter. This is because the sea ice is largely free of salt, and leaves a residue of cold brine that drives a current known as the Conveyor, which in turn drives the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream takes warm water from the Caribbean and swirls it up around the North Atlantic, contributing to fogs and breaking icebergs loose, but keeping many ports warm and open, even in winter.

Just as the prion proteins of mad cow disease have more than one stable form, so do weather patterns, and if the weather once drops into a new pattern, we may not be able to bounce it back to where it started. The good news is that as northern Europe freezes over, the glaciers which are now melting away fast will be replenished, lowering sea levels. The increased snow cover will also increase the reflectivity of the northern hemisphere, and that may cool the planet down a little. We just have to hope it does not trigger a new stable pattern that happens to be an ice age.

The actual changes that might follow the breaking point are hard to predict. They are unlikely to be spectacular and major, and probably they will do their harm stealthily, when infrastructure, port facilities and cities are flooded, or when agricultural land is lost, either by being covered by the sea or as a result of drastically changed rainfall patterns. If rock is exposed in Antarctica, this could lead to a low pressure zone over the icy continent that could change weather patterns around the world.

It hasn’t happened yet, but we need to learn from history. Ten years ago, no politician would take a long-term view and force the changes needed in the next thirty to forty years, when most of them are elected for a mere three to four years, and then face the voters again. It is easier to bleat plaintively that there is no real agreement among the scientists yet (there is), or that some eminent scientists (they aren’t: just look at where their funding comes from) believe that there are other explanations.

That load of bollocks saves the politicians from having to act — and the honesty of scientists in saying that they cannot be sure just how things will go wrong allows devious short-term opportunists to prate that “the scientists aren’t sure…”.

Politics is a marvellous human discovery. It is a pity that politicians still have to discover humanity and consider its prospects. It is likely that politics, dithering, duck-shoving and shilly-shallying will make this disaster happen.

Does thermodynamics matter?

To put it another way, do ordinary folk need thermodynamics, or an understanding of it? C. P. Snow, later Lord Snow, certainly thought they did, because, as he saw it,  thermodynamics is an area that matters intensely.

As a scientist who also wrote literary novels (as did his wife, Pamela Hansford Johnson), Snow was very aware of how ‘the other side’ saw science, and vice versa. Here, Snow is characterising the attitude of scientists to the ‘arts culture’, in his first entry into this arena, his lecture called The Two Cultures:

…the whole literature of the traditional culture doesn’t seem relevant…They are of course, dead wrong. As a result, their imaginative understanding is less than it could be. They are self-impoverished.

But what about the other side? They are impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences…

As with the tone-deaf, they don’t know what they miss. they give a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance is just as startling. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought to be highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists.

Once or twice I have been provoked and asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking them something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.

Sir Arthur Eddington thought thermodynamics mattered very much to scientists:

Eddington was always at his best when he was having fun with science: “Electrical force is defined as something which causes motion of an electric charge; an electrical charge is something which exerts an electrical force.”

That, however, was bettered by this comment, also from his book, The Nature of the Physical World:

The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If [your pet theory of the universe] is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

So, yes, thermodynamics matter. It would be worth asking a climate change denier who babbles (as they all do) some drivel about the uncertainty of science, one of Snow's questions.

Oh, and if you aren't sure what the second law says, try this: In any spontaneous process, there is always an increase in the entropy of the universe.

Another way of saying this is to assert that there can never be a 100% efficient (or perfect) heat engine. Another form of the law states that heat flows spontaneously from a hot object to a cold object. Heat will not flow spontaneously from a cold object to a hot object.

If you understand thermodynamics, you can answer this:

You have a perfectly insulated room, and inside it, there is a refrigerator. It has been switch on, and the door had been wedged open. Now:

• Does the room get cooler? or
• Does the room get hotter? or
• Does the temperature stay the same?

This one tricks a lot of people, and the odds are that it will fool climate change deniers as well.  Nobody who is unable to answer this should speak about climate matters.

A merry Christmas to all my readers

 To begin on a cheery note to expunge the sugar-frosted saccharine:

Gruesome enough?  You want more?  OK, here's something I just threw into the Facebook mix:

Carpe fortuna*

The finest perfumes in the land

Will make some noses runny;

The dinner that the hawk has planned

Is bad news for the bunny.

Fortune can be cool or hot,

When there's a chance, just grab it.

Your lucky rabbit's foot was not

So lucky for the rabbit.

* That's Latin for the lucky fish, I think. 

OK, enough grue.  A couple of years back, I offered an insight into Christmas in Australia, one that went to air about 20 years ago, but here's one in verse. If you are from the northern hemisphere, you may understand it better if you look at the link first.

Christmas breakfast 2010

Christmas breakfast

The Christmas morning track,

Has birds that whirl and screech;

It winds around the hill,

And plummets to the beach.

White Christmas doesn't suit us,

But summer Yule is neat,

When we go dressed for summer,

In sunhats and bare feet.

No snow, no sleet no gales,

water dragon

No dreadful raging blizzards —

We wish to wander bushland,

Filled full with birds and lizards.

With water dragons sunning

And goannas shyly hiding,

The butcherbirds in song

And kookaburras gliding.

We dabble in the shallows

And eat and drink our fill

If I could have my druthers,

I think we'd be there still.

Our Christmas skies are blue skies

kookaburra

They're never, ever, grey,

But walking up the bush track

It feels like Christmas day.

The Christmas morning track,

Brings simple things in reach

It winds around the hill,

But my heart's back on the beach.

* * * * * * *

As my favourite Australian carol, one that I quoted in that radio talk, has it:

The north wind is tossing the leaves,

Sydney, 8 am, a few years back

The red dust is over the town;

The sparrows are under the eaves,

And the grass in the paddock is brown.

If you Google the first line, you can find one rather awful version on Youtube.

Afterthought: or if you are lucky, you may hit upon this version, which my good friend, Robin Carroll-Mann found for me. Thanks, Robin!

Merry Christmas all, and if you are tucking into venison, please check its provenance.