Atomic Nerds

I’ve ranted before on the topic energy issues and that place where the sun don’t shine that the environmental, economic, and political issues meet. If you’ll recall, it was partly on the subject of “alternative fuels” and why most of the proposed alternatives are entirely unworkable, with the rest being suited to a supplementary role at best. Alternative energy sources usually have one of two problems: they are either hopelessly local in nature due to suffering specific problems of storage, transportation, and distribution, or else they do not actually yield more energy than humans have to sink into it* in the process of production, refinement, and distribution.

Amid article number who-can-even-count-anymore on a new source for biofuels that would potentially reduce one feature or another that makes them unsustainable (but leaves all the others firmly in place, rendering the exercise moot), we have one on something that actually looks like it *might* not be pointless straight out the gate: engineered cyanobacteria. Making me adore the journal eternally for it, you can get your “not filtered through journalism-telephone” full published article here: Direct photosynthetic recycling of carbon dioxide to isobutyraldehyde.

The upshot of the article is that the critters in question have been re-tuned to consume CO2 as their primary food (remember, food is what you get your carbon for making more of you from, your fuel is what you to power your chemistry), using photosynthesis as fuel, and producing a chemical product that can be readily and cheaply converted to a close analogue of gasoline and a number of other useful petroleum products as well. This isn’t as weird a trick as it sounds; the species used enjoy renown among the people who study this kind of stuff as being incredible little metabolic Swiss Army Knives with multiple metabolic paths and the ability to switch to the most useful one on short notice, all with extreme energy efficiency and multiple resource-creation abilities. (Plants just don’t evolve fast enough to get this good at energy conversion and resource management.)

It bypasses several traditional problems of biofuels as a general class at once- no need to clear land and sink huge energy resources useful for other things just to grow the organism the way you do for switchgrass or ethanol corn, no massive expensive refinement stage, the end product can be used for other roles oil currently provides the only real base for, and thanks to the efficiency of the organism, energy productivity as compared to that sunk is high. I’m sure it will prove to have several other problems, and it might yet be a disaster in other ways- for example I wonder if it could survive in the wild, and if it would run in this metabolic mode if it escaped- but it doesn’t have truly crippling inherent flaws straight out the gate, which is the usual mode in these kinds of avenues. The fact that it consumes CO2 will give it good political support, too.

A nice start. Be interesting to see where, and if, this goes.

*Stingray points out to me the way I originally had this worded suggests I don’t believe in the laws of thermodynamics. To clarify: everything costs more energy to make than it yields in consumption. It’s a question of what in terms of energy resources WE have to use is economical, not the actual physics equation balance. Oil, for example, is energy created via a process we were not involved in and the energy cost is its extraction, not creation.

So, the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have been news for awhile now and I haven’t said a damn thing about it. Partly it’s because I don’t like talking about the subject very much because it’s a big complicated ball of snakes, of scientific, cultural, economic, and political varieties and it gives me a headache, and partly it was because I wanted to see how reactions went and what would emerge as people more industrious than me dug into the data; either way I didn’t want to comment at the time.

There was a Vicious Circle on the subject (yes, I know, a finer panel of expertise has never been assembled), in which Unix-Jedi mentioned that I had been wrong about one thing, which was that at the time we talked about it, I thought it would amount to roughly nothing. I figured it didn’t really fit well into the media’s narrative- and while various media outlets are definitely biased in their respective partisan ways, nothing can get one to ignore a story faster and more thoroughly than not fitting well into established narrative- and scientists would shrug it off, because detractors would pick up on all the wrong things in the e-mails and make stupid points. As it turned out, I was about half right, but definitely wrong about it turning out to be a nonevent. So since I don’t have much of a narrative myself beyond, a few bits and pieces.

1. The damning thing in the e-mails isn’t the language, like “trick”- it doesn’t really mean the same thing within that kind of scientific circles as it does in, say, running the con game. And it isn’t that it catches a bunch of senior scientists behaving like catty sorority sisters, either; despite the white idealistic edifice of Science, there are a lot of rivalries and bitter enmities within disciplines, and people defintely have their own agendas. If anything, this prevents huge conspiracies from being formed; nobody would be able to resist the temptation of showing up that bastard Doctor Brandx well enough to maintain them. And the peer-review process is sadly political, though it usually doesn’t go to quite the lengths described. I say this not to defend that sad reality, but to say it’s not really that extraordinary. The lengths gone to in the e-mails are unusual, they’re just not fantastical.

2. The damning thing *is* the deletion of the raw data. The space-saving excuse is just unfiltered bullshit; you just don’t dump your raw data like that. Especially not when it’s as critical to the other people working in your field as it is.

3. The damning thing is also the code for the modelling and the data it was based on found, which is a complete spaghetti mess. The now-infamous in programming circles HARRY_READ_ME file is a rather poignant account of a programmer faced with producing project-dependent results from buggy, poorly documented code with sometimes-missing and sometimes-invalid data. If you’re going to rely heavily on computer modeling.. it should fucking well be a well-constructed model.

4. The general response from the scientific community as a whole has been a giant scoff, pointing out that just because this one dataset (though it was a dataset from which a great deal of work has been done) is compromised doesn’t mean the earth isn’t warming. And the thing that a lot of skeptics are missing is, they are absolutely right. Recent warming over the past century HAS been corroborated by a vast number of other data sources, both direct and proxies like melting ice. Saying that global warming is a sham based on Climategate is like saying evolution is bullshit because of Piltdown man. (Which doesn’t stop a ton of creationists from doing just this, but never mind.)

But here’s the other thing: that’s not the issue. If I were continuing to use evolution as an analogy, let’s say that I was a scientist in an alternate universe where Charles Darwin went into the clergy and Alfred Russel Wallace was fatally bitten by a viper and no naturalist with any real observational skill to speak of had ever followed them. Say I were a naturalist who had observed what I believed to evidence of species changing over time, and that ever since my mother was raped during an itinerant carnival when I was small, I had a tendency to relate everything surprising or bad in my life to clowns in some fashion. I develop a complex theory statistically relating the practice of dressing up in makeup for entertainment over the course of history to change in species over time and show their relationship, and arguing that societies being able to afford more luxuries to support more full-time clowning as they became richer would lead to catastrophic and grotesque mutation in the species.

At that point, if you were seeking to support or refute the Theory of Clown Corruption of The Kinds, you would have deep and multiple wells of data supporting the idea that species changed over time, and you would probably also be able to find a higher rate of mutants near sources of industrial (rich-society) waste- but the actual relevant point you would need to attack or defend would be their link to clowns and the strength of the statistics supporting a direct causal relationship between clowns and change in species.

The argument between serious people isn’t about whether the world is warming or whether climate modellers tried to “hide” the recent slowdown in warming- which climate scientists themselves readily accept is due to solar activity at this point. It’s not even about whether human-generated CO2 causes warming; both of these things are, in fact, “settled science”. What it’s about is how much warming it can cause, and what drives natural variations in climate, and whether the current warming trend is being *dominated* by human sources or natural variation. That’s what makes the models important: they help us tease out the variables involved in something that doesn’t offer historical data as nicely as the fossil record does for vertebrate evolution. And that’s what makes the integrity of the modelers- and how well they’re looking after that historical data that we do have- important, and why this IS a big deal, even if a lot of people who should really know much better are playing see-no-evil, speak-no-evil.

5. On that last point: again, they’re not doing it because there’s a conspiracy. Some climate researchers have a lot to gain in grants from the catastrophic anthropogenic scenario, but a lot of others could make an insta-reputation tearing it apart, and a lot more than that work in some other physical science altogether. They act like they do because virtually to a man, CAGW opponents act like just about every other variety of anti-science loon there is. In a great many cases they’re even the same people. They use the same kind of arguments, the same kind of paranoia-mongering, the same kind of ignorance of basic facts well-known within physical science, and generally look, act, flap, and quack just crackpot ducks. Shrugging off this breed is reflex at this point.

6. I should reiterate: “the establishment” of whitecoats is right in that this doesn’t actually invalidate anything or prove any kind of conspiracy; what it DOES is suggest that the various organizations and major researchers involved need to voluntarily commit to transparency at all levels if we want to get data we can trust to both demonstrate what is happening and plausibly demonstrate why. And so far they seem more interested in denial games.

I’d finish this off and say THAT’S the damning part, but I can’t feel any sense of triumph or vindication over this. Because there’s still the chance they might be right anyway, as a thousand jackasses before them were right for the wrong reasons or behaved badly with their information. That’s the tragic part.

I have made prior efforts to comment on environmental issues and politics intelligently, or at least in a fashion that tries to be reasonable and make some kind of productive point.

This will not be one of those posts. This one was born of frustration and fed on a very large dose of the blackest metal in my collection. This is a rant. If you want informative and productive, read the linked posts. For wandering, non-cohesive, and angry, read this.

There are days when I really wish I were the kind of person that Dennis Leary wrote an anthem for in “Asshole” and truly just didn’t give a shit about the environment, because at least then I’d have a side, and I could just get down and roll in the sheer massive unadulterated schadenfreude there is to be enjoyed in ripping apart the cult of rosary-stroking and heretic-bashing that has become synonymous with the modern “green consciousness”.

And heaven knows, there is meat to be had there, a vast banquet of it. Take your pick; whether it’s “Save The Earth” concerts that blow the entire energy and carbon-emission production of the poor African nations it was fashionable to have a party to “save” twenty years ago completely out of the water, Al Gore flying in his private jet from his mansion housing a family of four to accept a Nobel peace prize for alerting people to the CO-2 emission crisis that will, if he’s right, make the last two hundred years seem like a golden age of world peace, or mind-blowingly wealthy songstresses telling us to tighten our belts one more planet-kissing notch by only using one square of toilet paper, these people don’t need me to make them look ludicrous or hypocritical. They have beclowned themselves far more effectively than me or Dennis Leary ever could on our meanest, most rage-and-chemical-fueled day.

But the problem is that I’m not on the other team, either. I can’t look at the world as it is and think environmental problems are just a hilarious dog-and-pony show, the newest religion to come down the pike ever since singing for Jesus became so painfully uncool. We’re gutting our oceans, and with every new fish that becomes fashionable as the old standbys become too expensive or too rare collapses in sequence- we have moved from reaping each trophic layer from the top on down, to the point where the predators we used to gorge on and are now finally thinking to protect may not have anything to feed on as we haul the base of the whole thing up bait ball by bait ball. We fret about the energy-balance and carbon-emission implications of meat, while the agricultural runoff from the massive base of grain we’ll supposedly replace the calories with washes into our gulfs and deadens yet more entire zones of previously rich ocean life. Economic prosperity is swell and it’s fucking great that more and more people can afford a home, but every new zone of human habitation is another zone that breaks up the big corridors of wilderness that lets America retain the amazingly robust variety and population of wildlife that it has. With every person that moves out to that nice lovely emptiness, another few follow, until the cougars and wolves that roam the purple mountains’ majesty have to be shot because they’re eating the kindergarteners in the new school district it only made sense to create. It pisses me off even more that I’d really like to be one of those people that got there first, and would probably want to leave again as soon as I were followed.

But I’m sure as fuck not on the other team, either. Can’t stop to worry about soil salinization, because the end of the fucking world is coming and it’s all going to end in a giant lethal cloud of a crucial portion of the carbon cycle that none of us can help emitting because we’ve got an aerobic fucking metabolism just like almost everything living on the entire planet! And the same carbon we combust every time we take a deep breath is what’s emitted every other time we combust carbon to get energy, even when producing food or cleaning water! So let’s rub our rosaries and come up with a plan to reduce our carbon footprint, because it gets bigger and bigger the more we live and the more we do with our lives. Produce high levels of technology? Tons of carbon. Have children? Good god, you’re introducing MORE of the damn aerobic organisms, and big mammals at that? Have a dog? Christ, you might as well have an SUV. The author of the first article I linked there allows as to how the residents of Burkina Faso can mayhap be forgiven for reproducing so goddamn much, because their carbon footprint is tiny anyway- because Burkina Faso is a land of grinding poverty, short lifespans, minimal literacy, and rampant infectious disease. GOOD FOR THEM, THEY’RE NOT PRODUCING HARDLY ANYTHING BUT PEOPLE WHO EAT FOR A LITTLE WHILE, THEN DIE! HOW CARBON-NEUTRAL!

What’s almost never mentioned in any of the awareness-raising and rosary-stroking of “reducing your footprint” is that it won’t work. The only way to be “carbon-neutral” as a planet is for most of our population to die and for the rest to live as minimally- which is to say, desperately- as the Burkinans, and people will not fucking volunteer for that. The issue is that in order to really make an impact on the planet according to the broadly accepted warming scenarios, it doesn’t make sweet fuckall worth of difference how many squares of toilet paper we hoggish Westerners use, because by the most wildly optimistic calculations we’d have to cut back to the point where costs of carbon abatement would amount to half the fucking global economy. That doesn’t fit into a slogan, and there wee problem there is nobody is going to do it. It’s not because they’re greedy capitalist pigs, it’s because they CAN’T; if you think people are upset about the current recession, try telling them they’ve got to accept a lifestyle sustainable by standards of five hundred years ago, because otherwise the planet is going to get warmer.

Every single scenario I have ever seen put forth by the catastrophists for how we’re actually going to do something involves instituting a heavily statist global authority that decides what everyone’s “fair share” in carbon use is and controls the entire world’s carbon emissions. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream- everyone who has ever longed for a system in which the right people have total control and could just make the whole steaming chaotic mess of humanity behave in a rational fashion for everyone’s good would like roughly the same thing. The problem isn’t even that it’s not going to work for the same reasons just about every technocratic solution doesn’t work, but because the entire world isn’t going to band together to put the power in the hands of the Right People who’ve just been waiting for their chance. Faced with increasing economic consequences, people are going to be fucking angry, and even if their governments were suicidal enough to tell them “Everything will be fine, you just have to accept a less than third-world lifestyle and let the smart Westerners with the calculators, who also happen to be your historical imperial masters, tell you what to do from there”, they’re not going to accept it. They’re going to do what every nation with a pissed off population does- either break down for find another target to beat the shit out of in order to satisfy the perceived problem is, which is going to be what it almost always is- those other fuckers are taking more than their fair share. Whether you call it a French revolution, a Third Reich, a Rwandan genocide, a great leap forward, or a reduction in the carbon footprint, a whole lot of people will stop breathing. And the rest of the environment that we’re supposedly trying to save in the first place is going to look like battlefields always do- torn to shit and of benefit to nothing living but the carrion birds.

The problem is that the real problems not only have no good solutions that aren’t complete fantasy, we can’t even tell what the real problem is, what it’s shaped like, and how much of a problem it is. Climate science is still incredibly young as sciences go, and in terms of ambition and scale, it makes a unified physical theory of the universe look like something somebody’s going to work out over their ham sandwich at lunch. It’s about how EVERYTHING, physical and biological and chemical, affects EVERYTHING ELSE on earth. It’s a global ecology combined with global physics, and if we’re going to take some metaphors to mix to hell, it’s like trying to calculate the effect on the weather of a billion butterflies all flapping at cross-purposes. We can tell CO2 does certain things, but we also know it has a diminishing-returns effect*, so we know that none of our models adequately explain either historical or ongoing data. We had to start looking into positive feedback effects to explain why the world had gotten so much warmer than would be explained by carbon alone, then we had to postulate other effects in order to explain why it apparently has stopped getting warmer for the last ten years or so, and meanwhile the ice caps and the levels of dissolved carbon in the ocean and solar radiation are doing all sorts of fucking crazy things, and it all amounts to the kind of complex and developing science that invariably gets reported in the news as though the God Oracle Science had spoken and informed us that it had seen its shadow and we’re going to have six more weeks of winter this year.

What people are fighting over isn’t science, it’s politics; what exactly climate change is and what really drives it the most and what it’s going to look like is science, but what we’re going to fucking do about it is all politics, and that’s what we’re really fighting over. If you look at the actual scientific contents of any given year of an IPCC report and then the policy recommendations, the two documents might as well be from two separate universes, because what the panel wants politically and what it found scientifically (which usually turns out to be a lot more of “here’s what we know so far, here’s the new stuff we learned, outlook hazy”, as science usually is) are two completely different things. Meanwhile, the skeptics are going to pounce on absolutely everything any scientist who has ever mentioned climate in passing has said that disagrees with that political agenda as though it were the groundswell of a new dissident revolution- while the scientists quoted ask them to please stop quoting them now. It looks an awful lot like how “intelligent design” proponents go after all signs of dissension between evolutionary theorists, which confuses and annoys the theorists because they’re certainly in a position to know that they all fight like cats in a sack over the details of evolutionary theory all the time anyway. It’s not a coincidence that very often they’re the same people anyway- if those who fret about the end of the world have their God Oracle Science (that has very little to do with lowercase science as it is actually practiced), then inevitably the same mythical figure is a treacherous, deceitful demon for someone else.

People point out, from either side, that the other has more to do with politics and ideology than reality, and they’re both right, and it doesn’t actually have any effect on the argument. Politics are how things actually get done on a societal scale in reality, and any human that isn’t mentally handicapped is political, including the scientists and the journalists, no matter how much their professional ideals are to be objective. Pointing out that they’re not ENTIRELY objective isn’t an argument-ender, it’s reporting that the sky continues to be blue; the idea that science or journalism ever had some sort of golden age where politics weren’t heavily involved is every bit as mythical as the One Fair World- or, for that matter, the world where the free market fixes everything and we don’t have to worry about any of it because enlightened self-interest will obviously arrive at organic economic solutions that let us keep our wildernesses and our cheerful consumerism entirely intact, or the world where ancient humans had their ancient wisdom that let them live entirely sustainably and without impact until Demon Civilization came along. (Eden is SUCH an appealing idea even some atheists love to embrace it, apparently.)

The real problems are complex and mysterious and its potential solutions equally so, so people do what they always do when confronted with “way beyond me”- they grab a totem and wrench the whole thing down to something that fits in it, so they can have some continuing idea of what to do. The alternative is just to throw up your hands and remain the passive victim of fate, and the killer is, what ethical or sensible human would possibly want to do that?

But in the meantime, I’d kind of appreciate it if we didn’t dismantle our high-tech, wasteful means of continuing to investigate the big, real problems (i.e., highly developed societies) in the name of slaying the shadows they cast.

*If you want a less profane and more informative explanation, check the second of my posts linked from the top described as “me trying to be productive rather than ranty”.

Unfortunately, it’s not for the circus, but for the Senate, although Congress and a circus are rapidly becoming completely indistinguishable from one another.

So the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill has passed the House and is in the Senate. I don’t need to tell most of you it’s a mess; the White House and the Democrats alike both claim forcefully, hands over hearts, that it is NOT A TAX, but the small problem with that is that instead of calling what they’ll charge energy producers a “tax”, they’re calling “climate revenue” and counting as straight income to balance the predicted massive loss of jobs. The other problem with that is that it contains the assumption that energy producers will not pass these extra costs along to consumers, which would be entirely contrary to all of history, basic economics, and the laugh test. It’s a tax- a flat tax that will ultimately be experienced by all citizens, especially those at income levels to whom a spike in energy prices is the difference between being able to get to work and not, between making it through the winter or freezing.

But the climate! We’re frying ourselves! We have to make sacrifices!

The EPA thinks Waxman-Markey will have no impact whatsoever on the climate without massive sacrifices from China and India, which they have already said quite forcefully they have no intention whatsoever of making. Why should they? They’re both developing nations just experiencing for the first time what it’s like not to be dirt-poor or a fiefdom of various Western nations, and especially in China’s case, there’s also the small problem of being a nasty totalitarian regime with a lot of young people. If they were to take a massive economic hit and leave a billion plus people with the realization that they don’t even have what small measure of a life their government had allowed them before anymore, China’s regime is fucked, and they know that very well. India is in better shape, but still in no position to torpedo their own economy in order to satisfy Western sensibilities about carbon emissions. The Obama administration’s secretary of energy says he “disagrees” with the EPA’s analysis, but has apparently declined to elaborate beyond “because”.

So basically, the plan is to pass a carbon-credit scheme that is incredibly vulnerable to lobbying, special pleading, and other political wankery, that will slam every single citizen in a direct and personal way when the costs are passed along, and that models a system that has been strikingly unsuccessful elsewhere in the developed world. And it won’t even slightly do what its only possible justification is- have a measurable impact on climate.

Look, I believe conservation and the environment are a public good that must be handled at least in part in a public fashion. As silly, ineffectual, and ham-fisted as our government is, it’s actually achieved some notable successes in this arena. But fellow greenies- is this REALLY what we should spend political capital on? REALLY?

Of course, this might just not be about climate at all and might really be yet another in a series of power grabs for more political control over private industry… with all the lobbying, pork-churning, and back-scratching that implies… but that would just be crazy.

From last year’s Earth Hour: Punter vs. Earth, neighbor, pizza guy.

This carries a level IV drink warning. Seriously, if you have food or beverage, either put it aside or finish it before you read this, before you kill yourself choking.

(Do I even need to say it? I don’t hate the earth, but I really fucking hate sanctimonious do-nothing “I CAAAAAAAARE” stunts designed to stroke egos without actually accomplishing anything or requiring effort. Fuck Earth Hour right in the ear.)

Playing catch-up with all the interesting science stuff that went by while I was still chained to the election, and then attempting to recover from the election, we come to this Querencia post mentioning, in the course of describing the idea of “re-wilding” (which I’m in two minds about but follow quietly), the growing evidence that the general reliance of orcas- “killer whales”- on seals and other smaller prey (such as otters, on which they’re wreaking havoc) may not be all that natural to them, but rather a reaction to the decimation of their original primary prey- great whales.

The idea was hugely controversial when Estes and Springer published it, and remains controversial to a degree, but the evidence seems to be on their side- as populations of truly large whales slowly recover, more and more witnessed attacks of coordinated pods of orcas attacking one or more great whales- successfully, I might add- are recorded. If you’ve seen the fabulous documentary series Blue Planet, then you’ve probably seen the sobering footage they got of a pod of fifteen orcas taking six hours to kill a gray whale calf, of which they only ate the tongue and lower jaw. (They are, apparently, gourmands, a trait they share with another extremely intelligent and inventively nasty generalist predator I know.) This is perhaps among the least impressive of their witnessed accomplishments, which include successfully killing off an apparent entire group of sperm whales. Estes and Springer’s work is described in the rather wonderful book Where the Wild Things Were (among the ones I’m slowly making my way through right now), whose entire premise is the massive ripples in ecology caused by the disappearance of top predators and of the megafauna in general.

If we think of it, the idea that was apparently the orthodox among marine mammal biologists- that the great whales had not had any significant predators at all since the disappearance of Megalodon and then the rise of industrial whaling- is a slightly odd one. Sure, elephants are currently unmolested once they get out of vulnerable calfhood, but that wasn’t true until humans strolled along and extincted the hell out of most of the Pleistocene megafauna. (Of which Megalodon was a part, actually, but we probably had a lot less to do with that one.) Such massive sources of pure, concentrated, fatty and delicious energy are an incredible resource to go unexploited for so long, and as filter feeders, they are significantly less limited than elephants in their foraging and range capacity. Before whalers got around to making whales into Earth’s first pre-fossil fuel, great whale populations amounted to a seriously nontrivial amount of seafood whose only major defense was sheer size.

It makes a great deal of sense to me that orcas might have relied more on these traveling meat lockers than on such relatively light snack food as seals and sea otters; not only does it fit better with their size, but also with their anatomy and social lives. Orcas are, famously, social hunters that travel in groups; this is a strategy normally adopted by predators that are significantly smaller than their prey- the advantage of numbers and intelligence to take on a dangerously large and formidable animal. Lions use it to take out Cape Buffalo. Wolves use it to take out moose and sometimes even musk oxen, hyenas will sometimes try for hippo. In all cases, social predators at such a significant size disadvantage to their prize prey use the same strategy- they steadily rip pieces off it until shock and blood loss mount up enough for it to slow down and stop thrashing enough to be eaten. This is the famous “cruelty” of the orcas, wolves, and hyenas: only predators that can manageably lock down their prey well enough to deliver a lethal stroke without serious risk can afford such “mercy” as killing something before they start to eat it.

Animals that hunt that way see this reflected in their teeth and jaws- designed for slashing and tearing rather than gripping. The jaws of a modern cat, that delivers a killing bite, are short, strong, and grippy- a wolf’s jaws are longer and have better leverage for a long slash. (Hyena jaws are short, but this is for a different reason- they crush bones for marrow and need that strength.) And then there’s these teeth:

This skull is immediately recognizable as one of the Smilodon- “saber-toothed tiger”- skulls pulled out of the La Brea Tarpits. Knowing that Smilodon are believed to have hunted mammoths and others of the massive herbivorous megafauna, the popular imagination scales them up to fit, giving them the same general size relative to their prey as lions to zebras or wildebeest; for exhibit A, see this screencap from cinematic cheeseburger 10,000 B.C.:

In truth, though, even the very largest of the sabre-toothed cats, Smilodon populator, was only the size of a largish lion. It DID prey on the mammoth and the giant sloth and the other giants- but rather than using those huge sabers to stab prey to death, which would be a very quick way to snap its teeth off, it much more likely used them to slash out huge chunks of flesh, probably from the belly area if they could get at it… and allow them to bleed slowly to death in the same fashion as the wolves and the hyenas. Big slashing teeth are extremely well-suited to this tactic. And, yes- all three Smilodon species are believed to have lived and hunted in groups.

Except for the orcas (whose teeth have been compared to the Tyrannosaur’s, the largest carnivorous dinosaur and which may have used the same general strategy against its own huge herbivores), nothing I have written so far is terribly controversial. The sabretoothed strategy outlined is (so far as I know) currently the accepted one among those who study these cats, and all you need to do to see how a wolf kills a musk ox is to drive somewhere likely to be very cold and unpleasant and wait awhile. But when I read of the orcas, another species, whose habits are only very recently being researched in any depth, who also has slashing teeth and treats its largest known prey by slashing big chunks out of it and leaving it to bleed out, and who has recently been discovered to have some degree of a complex social life popped into my head:

Ever since the enaction of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, or as I like to think of it, the Seals-For-Meals shark protection act, the image of the great white shark- and the degree to which it’s studied by interested researchers- has been changing radically. Now that we’ve shed some of our mammalian chauvinism and stopped assuming that the “lower” phyla are something like behavioral automatons, we’ve discovered that many species of fish- unsurprisingly, the same sorts that fill roles associated in terrestrial ecosystems with high intelligence and complex behavior- are far more than swimming/eating/mating machines, and that many species of shark are particularly clever. White sharks, as it turns out, are social animals: they have a wide variety of recognized gestures for communication (and there are likely to be more, as we find those that are more subtle), they have a social order and pecking system, and, most surprisingly of all…. they travel from rich feeding ground to rich feeding ground in “clans” of associated individuals, although they don’t appear to hunt together.

If you read the article, you’ll note how deeply dependent white sharks are on fatty foods to maintain their size, their pseudo-“warm-bloodedness”, and their (for fish) voracious metabolisms. They do mention whales- in that they mention that whale blubber could be such a valuable meal for a white shark that one found carcass could sustain the shark for as much as a month and a half with no meals in between. Whale carcasses in general represent one of the biggest “jackpots” for all trophic levels in the ocean- a whale comes down with a fatal case of the sniffles, and everything from great whites to lobsters and hagfish eat like kings for weeks or more.

If you’ve seen Discovery’s documentary Air Jaws- a retarded sensationalist title for what was actually a well-produced and interesting program (with Discovery’s required pauses for irrelevant information or experiments they predict will look cool)- you’ve seen the footage of the large groups of white sharks feeding on a whale carcass. The carcass itself is from a beached whale, and was towed out to hot restaurant spot Seal Island on a more or less “this could be cool, let’s see what happens” basis. The most interesting thing they found was something never before observed in whites- mating behavior. You can see a clip here- but turn down your speakers first, I don’t know if I was just lucky, but there’s an INCREDIBLY annoying banner ad up there. After a good gorge on the whale, the sharks are apparently experiencing not only a serious down-dialing of aggression, but, uh, the Great White Hardon for the males. What makes this so very interesting is that white sharks mating has never, ever been observed.

The way the narrator sells it- as a “white shark orgy occasion”, I believe the phrasing was- is a bit absurd. The evidence they have there isn’t quite enough to suggest that this is the context for white shark mating, especially given that a species structuring its mating strategy around found whale carcasses is rather an absurd one. However, the idea that successsful whale hunts could be- or possibly, had been- a major mating occasion is a lot more plausible, at least in terms of being a hypothetical good mating strategy. It makes getting both sexes together easy, it provides the mother a massive guaranteed meal that will fuel her for months to feed the pups (white sharks are viviparous- think pregnancy without the placenta), and if there’s really a significant aggression-reduction effect, that could be a large advantage for the female; one distressingly common feature of shark mating is a lot of biting of the female by the males.

I haven’t exactly provided compelling proof so much as a lot of suggestion, but here’s a few more things for you to chew on before you dismiss the idea that white sharks, like orcas, may be social predators evolved to take on high-value prey much larger than themselves. First, if white sharks are traveling together in clans, why have the social group at all, if they hunt separately? It makes keeping a potential mate on hand a little easier, but we’ve never observed that they do mate within their own clan, and other large predators that hunt separately have other ways to get around that. You could propose that the complex social behavior the sharks exhibit makes sorting out kills easier in cases like the whale carcass, but in that case, why not have a much simpler social system, and why the traveling clans at all?

The pattern I’m proposing- we only see white sharks hunting individually (but associating anyway) now because of the damage done to whale populations- isn’t a new one. Coyotes are one generalist predatory species that changes its social order both on the number of dominant predators in the area and available prey; while they are relatively solitary in most places (under very heavy hunting pressure and pressure from other predators), when they aren’t heavily harassed and don’t have competition from wolves and bears… they form packs and take deer and even elk. We’ve only begun to observe this in places like Yellowstone before the wolf re-introduction, and the East coast after the coyotes colonized it (where, unlike Westerners, they don’t have a cultural tradition of zealously pursuiing the coyotes as “varmints”)- the strategy requires a special set of circumstances to emerge.

With the orcas, we have the convincing evidence that the more the orcas and the whales bounce back, the more observations we have of this actually happening, and even then the complaint is that there’s not enough observations to warrant making the conclusion that this is not remotely unusual or unnatural behavior for them. As Estes and Springer have pointed out, this is a LOT of observations for what amounts to a jackpot kill for the orcas and given that the ocean is not exactly humans’ natural environment- in order to make the observation, the orcas must perform their equivalent of a big-occasion hunt, and there has to be a boat with observers on it there to see it. And orcas are mammals- they are truly warm-blooded animals, wrapped in vast fatty (expensive) layers, and their appetites are absolutely enormous.

White sharks are fish, with fast metabolisms only relative to other fish- remember, sixty-five pounds of blubber is enough food for more than a month for one of them. More than that, they don’t have six-foot dorsal fins making them easy to track through the water (you’ll only see their fins from the surface if they’re mid-kill), and people don’t follow them around specifically hoping to get a glimpse of them. We had barely bothered to observe them at all until the last twenty years or so- and this is when they’re in deep trouble from being a favorite target of sport fishermen, being finned for shark’s fin soup, being caught and killed in anti-shark nets, and having their available pool of prey- which may also have been sharply reduced, as the orcas’ was- absolutely massacred.

If the ecological landscape has such profound effects on the hunting behaviors of coyotes- and for that matter on wolves, which kill rabbits during lean times- why not the white shark? How would we know what we had missed, when we only thought to look after we’d torn the place to bits?

There’s this thing I’ve noticed whenever I see people debating about wolf “predator control” in Alaska. After the anti-wolf-shooters finish making their melting case about the intelligence, devotion, and family bonds of the wolf packs heartlessly and helplessly gunned down from above, the pro-wolf-shooters point out the hopeless emotionalism and mawkish sentimentality of basing their argument on this. As they should… but then they go right on, sometimes in the same goddamn breath, to describe the wolves as vicious savage nasty predators that target baby cawiboo and eat them alive oh noes! They rip out their intestines! They care not a fig for putting them out of their misery before eating them! Did I mention they eat BABIES?!

Either argument can be summed up completely and entirely in both their maturity and utility by the following shamelessly stolen emoticon:

Stop. Just STOP. I don’t have a firm opinion on this one way or the other partly because I feel I’m not informed adequately and partly because this absolutely inevitable exchange of utterly useless self-righteous drippy bullshit makes me want to put my fist through my screen, but PLEASE STOP DOING THIS. Wildlife conservation and wildlife management are issues for adults, and neither the wolves nor the caribou change based on how traumatized you are by their deaths or their behavior, nor will anything beneficial be accomplished on their behalf if this is the level of discourse. If we want to keep ecosystems intact, human populations relatively safe, and game available to hunt sustainably, we have to talk about it like adults and focus on the long-term impacts to wolves, to caribou, and the degree of impact- and what really constitutes a sustainable take, for both populations, by human hunters. Yes, we can talk about how humane aerial shooting is, but this is really a side issue to the entire wolf conservation/reintroduction debate.

Oh, and you know what else? Whether or not the wolf might eat your dog is not relevant to the discussion EITHER. GROW UP ALREADY, PEOPLE!

Rigor Vitae has more on the Komodo dragon thing. As I’m sure you’ll be absolutely SHOCKED to know, the situation is a lot more complex than the Wall Street Journal made out, and the Nature Conservancy don’t come out of it quite as tone-deaf and boobish. I do think my original central point about assuming that total separation of humans and wildlife is the “natural” order of things on a small island being a bad idea stands, though, and I’d really like to know if the dogs had been doing any significant damage, and if they really were previously effective in helping to keep the dragons out of the villages.

Conservation of a top predator that’s willing to attack humans is always an ethically challenging one; how do you tell a native population that it needs to leave a creature that eats its children alone and NOT come off as a Western asshat of the first water? David Quammen has written a formidable tome on this central dilemma of humans coexisting with creatures that view them as food.

Through one of Steve Bodio’s excellent link roundups, I found this article through Never Yet Melted.

The upshot of the article is that after the Indonesian nature park on Komodo island invited the Nature Conservancy to help them manage their park, the Nature Conservancy deemed that the villagers put an end to a number of the traditional practices that had allowed them to co-exist with the Komodo dragons of the island for the last several centuries. (The dragons have gone extinct on the few other human-populated islands it was native to.) End result? The dragons have turned maneater, killing livestock and occasionally children.

Here’s the money quote from the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian policy wonk, who may well have been behind the original policy changes:

“We don’t want the Komodo dragon to be domesticated. It’s against natural balance,” says Widodo Ramono, policy director of the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian branch and a former director of the country’s national park service. “We have to keep this conservation area for the purpose of wildlife. It is not for human beings.”

What is very interesting about this statement is that it displays an astonishing lack of thought and reflection this puts first into what is natural for Komodo dragons, and second what is natural for the island.

For background, the major pillars of the policy change that has resulted in such disaster: first of all, the villagers are no longer allowed to hunt deer in the forest. The reason given was that on other islands, poaching decimated small and fragile populations of deer and hastened the exit of their dragons. The practice had actually been prohibited by the Indonesians before the Nature Conservancy ever got there, but they were responsible for making sure it was actually enforced. However, the deer populations are and presumably had been stable. (If they had not been, the Nature Conservancy would no doubt have said so rather than citing what happened on another island.) Note that it had been traditional for the natives participating in the hunt to leave a substantial chunk of any deer taken for the dragons- which very well might not have been traditional on the other, less fortunate island.

The second major policy change was that the locals were no longer allowed another traditional practice, that of feeding the dragons in ritual livestock sacrifices- which had become popular with tourists looking for photo ops. The third major change was that dogs were declared an alien species and therefore banned- when previously, village dogs did most of the work in keeping the dragons away from the villages.

Now, the dragons aren’t staying in the preserve and eating deer, they’re coming into the villages and eating the easier-to-catch livestock- and, opportunistically as large generalized predators will, children. The villagers have requested dragon-proof fencing, but as it would cost roughly five thousand per village to do so, the park has dragged its feet on actually fulfilling the request, though they are outwardly sympathetic.

This much is completely natural behavior for a Komodo dragon, or for that matter a saltwater crocodile, another large reptilian top predator: to expend as little of its energy as possible (and they don’t have as much as a hyper-metabolism-fueled mammalian predator) hunting, and to grab whatever’s in reach whenever they’re hungry. For centuries, the easiest way to hunt was to accept goats and deer from the villagers and do some hunting for themselves, and avoid the loud, fast, and pesky dogs that would make coming in and taking livestock too much of a hassle*. Even hunting themselves was a relatively low-effort enterprise, compared to the athletic efforts of a wolf pack or big cat: they have an extraordinary bacterial stew in their mouths that makes any bite suffered by the prey nearly certain to become lethally infected, so that after the first bite, all the dragon had to do was track the scent and take the victim at their leisure. Or grab someone else’s sick and dying victim- living on a small island with a bunch of other predators is nice that way.

Now, the easiest thing to do is to go into the dog-free villages and take livestock (or unfortunate children) themselves. The cultural mechanism of symbiosis with the dragons the native Komodo villagers had developed would almost certainly never work in a place that wasn’t a small island, or where the native top predator was not a reptile with a need for food much smaller than a mammalian predator like a grizzly bear or tiger (which is why sane park policy almost everywhere else is completely right to forbid feeding the predators); however, it is a small island, the dragons are reptiles, and it appears to have worked- until now.

It’s easy to see why the Nature Conservancy made policy the way it did; ordinarily, feeding top predators CREATES this situation, leading the animals to associate humans with food and actively seek them out- taking food when it’s not offered, one way or another. Ordinarily, dogs are a very destructive element on an island, being (like humans ourselves, and like rats and pigs, two other island-killing alien species) omnivorous, efficient generalized predators. Ordinarily, poaching will be the swift death of an island population, which tend to be quite fragile and unable to withstand the large oscillations that are normal ecology for mainland populations of predator and prey.

However, it appears that very little about this island, these dragons, and these villagers was ordinary. The villagers were not new immigrants, they had been there, sharing the island with a top predator perfectly prepared to see humans as food, for centuries if not longer- as had, quite possibly, their dogs, as the Indonesian islands are part of the general pattern of southward dispersal of humans and dogs together out from Asia and down all the way to Australia- thousands of years ago. (Where the end result was Aborigines and dingos.) I can’t find any specific information on how long the dogs have been there, but there’s no reason to assume they are recent aliens- and how long does a population have to be somewhere before they are integrated into the local ecology, and considered natives?

The original Nature Conservancy policy wonk’s quote, however, does inspire some deeper questions. In the discussion over at Querencia response to “We don’t want the Komodo dragon to be domesticated. It’s against natural balance… We have to keep this conservation area for the purpose of wildlife. It is not for human beings.”, Matt Mullenix- one of the blog’s authors- mused:

“Yet so many today would make a place where the separation is complete—where all the people somehow live in cities and all the wilderness surrounds them. Where no animal is tame and no people are wild.”

It’s one of Matt’s favorite themes, and it’s one that I thoroughly agree with: it’s a dichotomy as poisonously false as could be. It’s wrong when it’s scared urban dwellers who assume that all wildlife is toting a flamethrower and a machete and craving human blood (or the opposite misconception, that wild land is like a nature-themed Disney park and wildlife is as portrayed in “Bambi”), it’s wrong when a certain strain of environmentalists assume the only way for humans to live in the world is to interact with it as little as possible, with the presumable ideal end goal being humans living in Jetsons- like bubble worlds with no impact whatsoever on the rest of the world around us- preferably on some other planet with no native life of its own, one gets the hint. It’s wrong when people assume they are the Godly-ordained masters of the planet, to take what we can as we please and the other slimy and furry and toothy critters can go hang, the ideal life is in an air-conditioned house eating factory-farm-raised beef.

It’s a fantasy. Humans are animals, and thus we are part of nature. We may be a particularly self-aware, intelligent, creative, and sometimes destructive one, but we use nothing that we did not derive in some way from natural materials and natural law, we do nothing that some part of our natural inheritance of intelligence and emotion does not allow us to, and nothing we produce is truly outside of nature. Even New York City has a thriving ecosystem of urbanized animals of its own; from the pigeons (or Rock Dove, as the wild species that found cities so inviting and abandoned the wilderness for them was once known) to the rats to, now, the hawks and falcons that have followed their smaller prey and figured out how to nest in steel and concrete. San Francisco- and many other cities- have urbanized parrots, where previously they had become extinct in North America. Countless others have fully urbanized coyotes, foxes, and raccoons. You may consider them “alien” in some way, but they have moved in, found a living, and would not be there if it were truly unnatural- adapting to new food sources and advantageous new environments is what made them successful species in the first place, the same way it did for us.

People scream about “genetically modified organisms”- and especially GMOs meant to be food- but we have been genetically modifying organisms since the Neolithic, as soon as we became anatomically modern. We began with dogs, moved on to cereals, pigs, chickens, and cows, and eventually to fruit and vegetables. Since more and more evidence points to show that Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, which domesticated nothing, suffered no gap in intelligence or technology with the contemporary Homo sapiens sapiens (anatomically modern humans), and there seems to be little to no evidence of direct conflict or interbreeding, some anthropologists even theorize that it was this ability to relate to and change other species that gave our subspecies the competitive advantage. If true- and it has some truth even so- this would make domestication (or, if you will, simply changing other species and adapting them to us- as we also adapt to them) not only natural to us, but what may have CREATED us as our capabilities are today.

If we somehow remove ourselves from nature by building cities, what does that make a termite, whose mounds are such enduring and elaborate marvels of natural engineering that they can be a bigger and more permanent feature of the African landscape than trees? Because we domesticate plants and animals? Insects have found farming fungus for food so lucrative it seems to have independently evolved in several different lineages, across ants and termites and beetles. Some ants will “dairy”, keeping aphids for regular “milking”. Because we can cause massive ecological change? Elephants are why Africa is famous for its plains rather than its dense forest and jungle. Bison (and a number of other large herbivores we drove extinct when humans first wandered across the Bering Land Bridge) are why North America has its own Great Plains.

Because we’re better at all these things? Because we know we’re special, and can conceive of being so special that we left it all behind? When thousands of us are still regularly killed off by hurricanes, tsunamis, and insect-borne diseases, how can we truly believe that?

The Garden of Eden that we left to become humans-as-we-know them is not a metaphor that describes our departure from nature, it is a metaphor that describes our departure from innocence- and our gain of knowledge of ourselves and of the world that we are very much a part of, as much of a piece as the dogs or the dragons- or the apples.

*The dragons, like crocodilians, are perfectly happy to take dogs as prey when the opportunity lands in their lap, but again, we’re talking about the easiest option. One reason dogs are the oldest domesticated animal is that, like humans, they band together for safety as well as offensive ability…

The nanonuke market is getting better and better. Hyperion Power Generation is a Santa Fe company working closely with Los Alamos National Labs to produce an even smaller nuclear battery than the Toshiba 4S I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Billed at roughly the size of a hot tub, these tiny little powerhouses will pump out about 27MW. Throw two in my back yard, and we should be able to power all of Los Alamos and White Rock combined. These need to be refueled every five years instead of every 30 or so, as with the 4S, but still.

My offer still stands: In My Back Yard. Please. Just, uh, hire someone else to handle the digging part. Those basalt boulders in the northwest corner are a bitch.