Topic Tuesday #53 2013/07/23 - "Climate Cycles"

Topic Tuesday #53 2013/07/23 - "Climate Cycles"

If we are to be skeptical and honest with ourselves about the world we live in, we need facts. LOTS of facts.
I am going to highlight some facts that are not often brought to the table when discussing climate change. I am only going to present the items. In general this is all from the field of applied mathematics and earth sciences known as Geodesy.

Earth's Path

The earth's orbit is not circular. It is elliptical, an oval.
We are closest to the Sun around January at a distance of 147,098,290 kilometres (91,402,640 mi) [0.98329134 AU] and farthest from the Sun around July at 152,098,232 kilometres (94,509,460 mi) [1.01671388 AU] Nearly 3 million miles difference.

The reason we have seasons is due to the Earth's axial tilt. The Earth wobbles a little. Over 41,000 years, the tilt fluctuates from 22 to 24.4. The average tilt today is about 23.5 degrees, roughly in the middle of a diminishing tilt trend. The more perpendicular the planet to the Sun, the more uniform the heating, and the higher the average temperatures. Based on the current figures, the Earth will be at 22.6 degrees tilt in 8,800 years.
Rotation (green), precession (blue) and nutation in obliquity (red)
The tilt undergoes an irregular motion known as nutation with a period of 18.6 years.
The orientation (rather than the angle)of the axis changes over time following a circle with a cycle of 25,800 years. This is the determining factor between sidereal and tropical years.
These changes are known as Axial precession.

The poles also migrate (Polar Motion).  The collective term for all the factors in its movement is "quasiperiodic motion". There are several periodic affects. A circular motion occurs annually while others have longer periods, one of which is the Chandler wobble with a 14 year cycle but a period of 435 days.
The rotational velocity along the axis is variable. The phenomenon is known as the length-of-day variation. Think of an ice skater, spinning with their arms in tight and then to stop they put their arms out. As the earth bulges out in the middle more, be it from continental drift or from glacier melt raising the sea level, the planet will spin slower, increasing the day.

Temporal Changes - Surface changes, and things over time.
  • Plate Tectonics
  • Episodic fault-line events.
  • Tidal shifts
  • Postglacial land uplift
  • Temperature cycles: Ice age
Human interaction
  • Material extraction
  • Material relocation
  • Teraforming
  • Directed phase change of material. Fuel consumption
There are thousands, if not millions, of data points that go into climate science, and I don't want to blowup a single thread with all of them. Some of them, nay, most of them are deserving of a day in the sun and I will revisit them in time. Knowledge of your current situation is not enough to determine any kind of model for the future. We must study the rich past.
I hope that this has opened your eyes a little to the nature of our home planet. It is ever changing. Dynamic. Chaotic. Fragile- but only for us. It will go on spinning.  The thing to remember is perspective.

"Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves." - Ian Malcom - Jurassic Park


Topic Tuesday #10 2012/09/25 "Water World - Part 2"

Topic Tuesday #10 2012/09/25 "Water World - Part 2"

We need quite a bit of water to survive on. It needs to be clean...
Last week I discussed the requirements of how much water we need to survive. Today, how do we make it safe?
I am going to quickly give some ways to clean up water so you don't die. 
There are 4 categories; Separation, Chemical, Filtration, Oxidation.
SEPARATION: (HEAT, LIGHT & GRAVITY)
  • SEDIMENTATION gravitationally settles heavy suspended material. 
  • BOILING WATER for 15 to 20 minutes kills 99.9% of all living things and vaporizes most chemicals.  Minerals, metals, solids and the contamination from the cooking container become more concentrated. 
  • DISTILLATION boils and re-condenses the water, but many chemicals vaporize and recondense in concentration in the output water. It is also expensive to boil & cool water. 
  • ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT is a good bactericide, but has no residual kill, and works only in clearly filtered water. Still in its infancy stage is a new technology involving super white light.
CHEMICALS
  • CHLORINE is common, cheap, but extremely toxic. It does not decrease physical or chemical contamination, it does increase colesterol formations, is a carcinogen, amd causes heart disease. 
  • IODINE is not practical, and is mostly used by campers. 
  • HYDROGEN PEROXIDE kills bacteria with oxygen, is chemically made and is very toxic. It is used in emergencies. 
  • COAGULATION-FLOCCULATION adds chemicals which lump together suspended particles for filtration or separation. 
  • ION EXCHANGE exchanges sodium from salt for calcium or magnesium, using either glauconite (greensand), precipitated synthetic organic resins, or gel zeolite, thus softening the water. Minerals, metals, chemicals or odors are not affected, and the water is salty to drink. 
FILTRATION
  • SLOW SAND of 1 cubic meter passes about 2 liters/min, and does a limited bacteria removal. 
  • HIGH PRESSURE/RAPID SAND of 1 cubic meter passes about 40gpm and must be backwashed daily. 
  • DIATOMACEOUS EARTH removes small suspended particles at high flow rates, must be back-washed daily and is expensive.
  • PAPER or CLOTH filters are disposable and filter to one micron, but do not have much capacity. 
  • CHARCOAL: 
    • -COMPRESSED CHARCOAL/CARBON BLOCK is the best type of charcoal filter, can remove chemicals and lead, but is easily clogged, so should be used with a sediment prefilter. 
    • -GRANULAR CHARCOAL is cheaper, but water can flow around the granules without being treated. 
    • -POWDERED CHARCOAL is a very fine dust useful for spot cleaning larger bodies of water, but is messy and can pass through some filters and be consumed. 
  • REVERSE OSMOSIS uses a membrane with microscopic holes that require 4 to 8 times the volume of water processed to wash it in order to remove minerals and salt, but not necessarily chemicals and bacteria.
OXIDATION - These are most often used in big water treatment facilities. These techniques attempt to mimic what mother nature does with rivers. See THE SELF-PURIFICATION OF RIVERS AND STREAMS, from 1919. You can read a great deal about it to understand how it is supposed to work.
  • AERATION sprays water into the air to raise the oxygen content, to break down odors, and to balance the dissolved gases. However, it takes space, is expensive, and picks up contaminants from the air. 
  • OZONE is a very good bactericide, using highly charged oxygen molecules to kill microorganisms on contact, and to flocculate iron and manganese for post filtration and backwashing. 
  • ELECTRONIC PURIFICATION and DISSOLVED OXYGEN GENERATION creates super oxygenated water in a dissolved state that lowers the surface tension of the water and effectively treats all three types of contamination: physical, chemical and biological.
The easiest for you and me to go through is likely to be the separation method. An issue to remember here, and one that has caught entire villages with a bad case of the runs, is proper storage of the water once you have sterilized it. There are many methods to do that, but that will be another topic. Look for "Food Safety" later on.

Now for your consideration: 

  1. What are your plans on keeping a supply of available, CLEAN, water on hand? 
  2. What would be the best method for scaling up for family clusters, to villages, to towns, etc? 
  3. Are you going to try any of these methods?

Topic Tuesday #8 2012/09/11 "Tomorrow Land"

Topic Tuesday #8 2012/09/11 "Tomorrow Land"

If you have been reading some my previous Topic Tuesdays, you have probably figured out, I am a bit of a futurist. I try to look at the big picture and see where will be in the years ahead. There are a lot of variables here and no one can pretend to be able to see the future with any certainty. Regardless of those obvious shortcomings, I look to the future. Today's topic is future related as well, but rooted in the present. With a simple query, I pulled up the estimated population of earth. Wolfram Alpha and Apple were kind enough to furnish the graphic.  http://www.worldometers.info/ Has live counters for much of this information aggregated from the sources that keep track. Simply put, we have approximately 7 billion people onboard spaceship Earth. Estimates have that number rising to around 10 billion by 2050. That estimate doesn't take things like medical improvements and social infrastructure proliferation, which will make the number larger. What's the point to all this? What are we supposed to do with that many human beings on the planet? How will we feed them? Where will they live? What will they do to work? How will they entertain themselves?
Now think about this... I just gave you a bunch of numbers and here is the one that matters: 38.
The scenario played out is only 38 years away. This is within most of our lifetimes. It's not Star Trek future; it's 401k retirement future. This is just not that far away... In America, we do not face the over crowding issues of nations like China, India and Japan. That doesn't mean America won't have to in the near future. Scenarios like overcrowding, famine, water shortages always highlight science for me. I saw a recent NASA estimate that terraforming Mars, will take a whopping 480 years and 5 trillion dollars (that's the complete deal, no suit required, go play fetch with fido in the park, time frame). 480 years, call it 500 years, is 400 years too late to handle the issues we will have here, but in doing research towards those ends, we will discover amazing things that we can use here. Imagine, the problems that come with restarting an entire planets biosphere to make it habitable for you and me. I think we might find a few way to clean up this planet  in the process. One day, people may realize, its about all of us, and not just about getting a better rate of return on your 401k. Our legacy, is our future as it is being written now. Will we live in enormous arcologies?
Will we resort to blood sport and de-humanize ourselves to control population? It's only a few decades away. What do you think?

Topic Recap: in 38 years, the population of Earth will rise by 3 billion people to 10 billion+. How will we handle that? And what about the future beyond that? How/where will we live with this many people in the year 2100?