NNadir
NNadir's JournalBefore the play I saw last night started, management made a brief statement of support for Ukraine.
The play was Ride the Cyclone.
The play contained a character from Ukraine who was played as an drunk, drunkenness' being portrayed as an element of Ukrainian culture. The play makes reference to the Ukrainian character having lost his mother to radiation from Chernobyl.
It was set in a town called Uranium is Saskatchewan. It's portrayed as a backwater province, more ridiculous than anything else.
I went with my whole family, including my son, who is entering a Ph.D program in nuclear engineering, with the idea of participating in a last chance bid to save the world.
One has to have a sense of humor.
I have to say, the offensive stuff aside, the play was very enjoyable, with very talented performers, a rather witty funny mocking script and outstanding production values.
My whole family was needling me on the ride home about "Uranium, Saskatchewan."
Witty, really.
New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 421.46 ppm.
As I've indicated repeatedly in my DU writings, somewhat obsessively I keep a spreadsheet of the weekly data at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, which I use to do calculations to record the dying of our atmosphere, a triumph of fear, dogma and ignorance that did not have to be, but nonetheless is, a fact.
Facts matter.
When writing these depressing repeating posts about new records being set, reminiscent, over the years, to the ticking of a clock at a deathwatch, I often repeat some of the language from a previous post on this awful series, as I am doing here. It saves time.
As I pointed out in several previous threads, 2020 was an unusual year for worldwide energy consumption, inasmuch as for the first time in history, it was a year in which the worldwide use of energy - which remains, and is increasingly dependent on the use of dangerous fossil fuels - declined, from 613 EJ in 2019, to 589 EJ in 2020. This was not, of course, the result of the world embracing the nonsense ideology of the anti-nuke Amory Lovins about how energy conservation in the suburbia dominated bourgeois world would save the whole world, including places about which he couldn't care less, say Antarctica for example. It was the result of the spread of a terrible highly contagious disease, the resulting lockdowns associated with that disease. (It is interesting however that the disease never killed as many people as air pollution kills without much of a public whimper.)
The data from the 2021 IEA World Energy Outlook I've taken to posting lately in several threads:
Nevertheless despite the brief and almost certainly unsustainable decline in the use of dangerous fossil fuels, the concentrations of the deadly dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide continues to rise, because 589 EJ is nothing at which to sneeze, and because land use changes and feedback loops persist. As I track these things, I have made a habit of posting threads each year when new records are set, as they are each Northern Hemisphere late winter or early spring. (CO2 concentrations decline each summer because of the vegetation is mostly located in the Northern Hemisphere. Annual peaks are usually observed in April or May.)
Last year's record setting peak was 420.01 ppm, recorded in week 16 of 2021, the week beginning April 25, 2021.
In all the years of tracking the weekly readings at Mauna Loa's CO2 observatory, I have had the impression that 2022 has thus far been a relatively mild year for increases in the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 in the atmosphere. There have been, for example, five weeks wherein the increases have been less than 1.00 ppm when compared to the same week of the previous year, the lowest having been the value recorded last week, the week beginning May 1, 2022, when the increase was "only" 0.37 ppm. This is very, very unusual. Overall the average week to week increase in carbon dioxide concentrations in 2022 has been 2.17 ppm/year, compared to the pre-Covid year of 2019, where this same average was 2.90 ppm/year.
One may speculate - I do, given the lockdowns in China, which is the largest overall contributor of climate change gases to the atmosphere, but distantly trails the US in per capita emissions - that Covid and not the outbreak of a so called "renewable energy" nirvana is responsible for the "mild" year 2022 seems to be in the first half.
Nevertheless, a new record has been set for a weekly reading has been set:
This past week, the week beginning May 22, 2022 we exceeded that figure, with a reading of 421.46 ppm:
Week beginning on May 22, 2022: 421.46 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.76 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 396.40 ppm
Last updated: May 29, 2022
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (Accessed 05/15/22)
Last year's record was the first to exceed 420 ppm, set less than ten years after we first saw measurements greater than 400 pm, in the week of 5/23/2013, the record for 2013, 400.03 ppm.
The daily data, from which the weekly averages are composed as described on the observatory is also reported at Mauna Loa, although I do not keep a record of this somewhat noisy data in spreadsheets. It is nonetheless disturbing:
May 28: Unavailable
May 27: 421.99 ppm
May 26: 421.37 ppm
May 25: 421.56 ppm
May 24: 421.27 ppm
Last Updated: May 29, 2022
Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2
There are 1960 ten year week to week comparators in my spreadsheet. The current one, for the week beginning May 22, 2022, the 20th week of the year, comparing the value with the 20th week of 2012, shows an increase of 25.06 ppm. This is the 25th highest out of 1960 such data points. Of the top 50 of these data points, all of them have occurred since the beginning of 2019. The 52 week running average of such ten year comparators is now 24.43 ppm/10 years, 2.44 ppm/year.
As 2022 has been a "mild" year for increases, I'm not sure that we will see weekly average readings as high as 422 ppm, but it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility. Most often the new records in the sinusoidal measurements imposed on a monotonically increasing quasi-linear axis are established in May, less frequently in April. The increase measured here, "only" 1.45 ppm higher than last year's record, may be "it." I don't know. The last time a new weekly record for atmospheric concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 was established in June was 1980, for the week beginning June, 1, 1980, 42 years ago, when the reading was 341.61 ppm, roughly 80 ppm less than we saw this week.
One may speculate as whether the reduced yields of agricultural crops from the extreme temperatures now being observed in the Indian subcontinent coupled with water shortages will lead to a late annual peak. I'm not prescient like say, um, um, Amory Lovins has made a career, since 1976, claiming to be. The results of his soothsaying and antinuke rhetoric are in.
In any case, speaking of 1980, a year in which I was quite alive but still young, it was the heyday of the oft repeated statement that nuclear energy is "too dangerous." I was a dumb shit then, and I took up that idiotic cry myself. My change of attitude about nuclear energy took place following 1986, when the Chernobyl reactor exploded and the result was not wiping out the then Soviet city of Kyiv, which I had been trained to take as a "given."
The irony of all this is that more people in Kyiv have been killed by weapons powered by dangerous fossil fuels - weapons largely financed by the Russian export of coal, oil and gas to the officially anti-nuke country of Germany - than were killed by radiation released by an exploded reactor less than 100 km away from it.
The data as to whether nuclear energy is "too dangerous" speaks for itself.
German carbon intensity.
French carbon intensity.
One can access the current data at these links at any time of day on any day during any week and see which country is burning more coal in 2022.
Coal plants kill people whenever they operate normally.
Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.
Here's table 2: 
Go figure.
If any of this disturbs you, don't worry, be happy. I've been hearing my whole life that so called "renewable energy" would save the world. It didn't happen, it isn't happening, and I firmly believe it won't happen, but you don't have to believe me. There are all sorts of webpages all over the internet with happy talk about wind turbines, solar cells, and electric cars, including those made by that cowboy hero, Elon Musk, who wants you to believe that we can all ride on his rocket ships to Mars once we've completed destroying this planet, and wreck another one. Take a ride to Mars in his swell Tesla electric car, and if you can't do that, head over to one of those multitudinous websites about wind, solar, and electric cars. Then you can happily ignore all the facts herein.
Facts, nonetheless, matter.
Have a nice Sunday.
Interactive Wet Bulb Temperature Map to Discern Where Ambient Temperatures Are Fatal.
Recently, I referenced in this space a paper describing the probability of ambient of combinations of humidity and temperature at which sweat cannot cool the body, leading to organ failure and death: Some Irony: Most Likely Early Sites for Fatal Wet Bulb Extreme Temperatures are in the Persian Gulf.
The "wet bulb temperature" that is definitely fatal is 35°C, but as I noted in that post, lower wet bulb temperatures can result in massive fatalities; a wet bulb temperature of 28°C in Europe is said to have resulted in 70,000 deaths in 2003:
Jean-Marie Robine, Siu Lan K. Cheung, Sophie Le Roy, Herman Van Oyen, Clare Griffiths, Jean-Pierre Michel, François Richard Herrmann, Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003, Comptes Rendus Biologies, Volume 331, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 171-178.
There is now, courtesy of Columbia University, an interactive map of wet bulb temperatures around the world:
Interactive Wet Bulb Temperature Map.
As of this writing (4:49 PM EST (US) 5/28/22), wet bulb temperatures above 35°C seem to present in a number of places, 36.5°C along the coast of the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia, 36.3°C near the "tip" of the UAE, 36.2°C in central Pakistan, 35.2°C in Northern India, 36.0°C on the Saudi coast of the Red Sea.
There seem to be a few spots in Mexico that are seeing 35°C wet bulb temperatures.
It's pretty scary, I think.
Very, very weird. I found myself agreeing with Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo).
I turned on CSPAN to watch the ceremony for the bicentennial of Ulysses S. Grant at the US Capitol, in front of the Grant Monument, which has been recently restored. To my surprise, one of the speakers was Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo) where the R now clearly stands for "racist" party.
To my surprise, the senator from the racist party, which formally hates African Americans almost as much as it hates women, spoke highly of President Grant for - get this - his actions in Reconstruction, Grant being the last President to work on behalf of African Americans until Lyndon Johnson.
I agreed with Blunt's statement that Grant was one of the greatest Presidents ever to occupy the office. Of course, Blunt took pot shots at the long ago racist Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, but, but, really? Grant? For his work on behalf of African Americans?
Since Blunt is in the position of worshipping the worst racist President since Wilson, the White Supremacist Donald Trump, I can only assume he's lying about his opinion of Grant. A Republican Senator of course, could be referred to as Sen. Roy Blunt (L-Mo) for liar party, or (H-MO) for hypocrite party. He actually criticized the "lost cause" rhetoric that has attached itself to Grant's Presidential reputation, which for a long time has stood below other Presidents.
I'm sure he doesn't take criticism of the "Lost Cause" seriously. He's endorsed racism.
I personally regard, even when he's praised by a racist which Blunt surely is, Grant has having been the second greatest President of the 19th century, since he was one of the first to live up to the American ideals that Lincoln struggled to bring to this country.
A brief comment on scale: The total carbon "waste" biomass in Canada.
I'm catching up on reading in a journal for which I am way behind, Energy and Fuels.
I came across this fun paper, which I found interesting even though I'm no longer an NMR kind of guy - I'm a Mass Spec kind of guy - I had a certain fondness for NMR in my youth, and it's nice to remember being young:
Factors Affecting the Sensitivity of Hydroxyl Group Content Analysis of Biocrude Products via Phosphitylation and 31P NMR Spectroscopy Matthew Kusinski, Rafal Gieleciak, Lindsay J. Hounjet, and Jinwen Chen Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (24), 20142-20150.
I am, in general, opposed to biofuels where they impact access to food, or lead to the destruction of important ecological regions, for example the Gulf of Mexico, the SE Asian rainforests, and the South American Pantanal, the world's largest wet lands.
The diversion of agricultural land for biofuels is also a dubious enterprise, and in any case, as we are seeing in India and Pakistan, the absolute failure of the so called "renewable energy" scheme to address climate change will certainly impact the ability of crops to survive a lack of access to water as well as extreme temperatures.
But there's always the issue of "waste" biomass, wheat straw, corn stover, forest litter, etc.
Besides the esoteric technical issues in the paper cited, what caught my eye in this paper was a discussion of scale, the thing that is almost overlooked while we spin our fantasies connected with "solar breakthroughs" off shore wind farms, and - quite possibly the worst of all - batteries along other denialist/unrealistic horseshit.
Here's the comment from the paper, about all the waste biomass in Canada.
There's that good old "percent talk" that advocates of so called "renewable energy" routinely lapse into in a rhetorical effort to disguise its uselessness.
And the data about all the uselessness of all this endless talk - still going on - about how "renewable energy" will save the world is clear and unambiguous after more than half a century of such talk. As of yesterday:
May 27: 421.99 ppm
May 26: 421.37 ppm
May 25: 421.56 ppm
May 24: 421.27 ppm
May 23: 421.72 ppm
Last Updated: May 28, 2022
Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2
The world dumps roughly 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary atmosphere. The carbon content of carbon dioxide is roughly 27.3%, suggesting that we dump roughly 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year.
All of the biomass in Canada, if the energy could be found to 1) collect it, 2) transport it, 3) pyrolyze it, and (to appeal to the purpose under discussion in this paper) 4) upgrade it is, thus, at 143 million tons, in "percent talk," 1.5% of the world's annual carbon dumping.
There is no accounting in this brief excerpt of text, of the energy investment required to "recover" the 5.1 EJ claimed for all of Canada's "waste" biomass, but in 2020, somewhat restrained by Covid lockdowns, the world consumed 589 EJ of energy. Thus all the "waste" biomass, were it possible to collect it, transport it, pyrolyze it without destroying essential biomineral flows, would yield 0.8% of world energy demand, again at an energy cost.
It's a little late to wake up to the ongoing tragedy of climate change, which is now full blown.
This late in the game, we still have assholes wondering if the shelling of a nuclear plant in Ukraine will be the end of the world, as if that is the only potential tragedy that mattered either in a country being destroyed by dangerous fossil fuel powered weapons financed by the sale of dangerous fossil fuels, or as if the death of food crops in India and Pakistan due to extreme heat pales in comparison to the shelling of the plant.
History will not forgive us, should it continue to exist, nor should it.
A Documentary that Made Me Weep.
Documentary Series: Final Account (2020). I waver at times with this Godwin thing, but one thing that's is clear in this film:
They started with the minds of the children, notably with the schools.
Perhaps we are well past "It can't happen here."
This is about what the attempt to burn books, control what children learn of history, "replacement theory" is intended.
The people in this film were or almost were in their 90's when filmed.
They knew.
I am pleased to consider that at least one of those interviewed is probably no longer breathing the same air I'm breathing.
I watched the film with a two strangers, one a librarian. After it we all felt compelled to comment on Texas and on Buffalo.
Because
Mary Boas.
So I went to my kid's Masters graduation ceremony this weekend and I got to thinking it's probably been a long time since he took a formal math class. He took four semesters of Calculus in high school; the last one, vector calculus not for college credit, and repeated the course in his Freshman year of college.
So I'm thinking to myself, "Self, that kid needs some review and reference for his Ph.D program."
I had a nice book on partial differential equations for physics somewhere around here, but I can't find it. It's been many years since I last saw it; maybe someone borrowed it and never brought it back.
So I decided to buy a nice math review/reference book as a gift. A kind of general reference for this sort of thing - the reviews are mixed from "Love it!" to "Hate it" - is Erwin Kreyszig's Advanced Engineering Mathematics, 10th Edition.
Since there were a subset of people who whined about this book - it's apparently utilized in upper division undergraduate courses - I asked myself, "Self, what else is out there?"
Well, there's Mary Boas's Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences
It's an old book, but a lot of people still like it, apparently. Dr. Boas died in 2010, after having retired from DePaul in 1987. The book dates from the 1960s.
She was a pioneer as this blurb from DePaul indicates: Women’s History at DePaul
An excerpt:
Former DePaul faculty member Dr. Mary Boas, one of the featured physicists in the book, was born in Washington state and received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Washington. Boas’ husband Ralph taught mathematics at numerous universities, including Harvard, MIT, and Northwestern. Mary received her PhD in physics from MIT in 1948. After the family moved to the Chicago area in the 1950s, Mary Boas took a teaching position at DePaul University in 1958...
I'll probably end up buying the Kreyszig book in ebook form, but it was nice to come across a pioneering woman scientist, even if, as the article states, she had to put up with "Puff pieces" about her life.
Climate inaction could cost world USD178 trillion: Deloitte
This article is here: Climate inaction could cost world USD178 trillion: Deloitte
Excerpt:
he Global Turning Point Report from the recently established Deloitte Center for Sustainable Progress (DCSP) was released during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, which is taking place in Davos, Switzerland from 22-26 May. Based on research conducted by the Deloitte Economics Institute, the report analyses 15 geographies in Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Americas.
If global warming reaches around 3°C toward the century's end, the toll on human lives could be significant - disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable and leading to loss of productivity and employment, food and water scarcity, worsening health and well-being, and ushering in an overall lower standard of living globally, Deloitte said. But if the world acts now to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century, the transformation could increase the global economy by USD43 trillion - a boost to global GDP of 3.8% - in 2070 "compared to a climate damaged baseline".
"The time for debate is over. We need swift, bold and widespread action now - across all sectors," Deloitte Global CEO Punit Renjen said. "Will this require a significant investment from the global business community, from governments, from the non-profit sector? Yes. But inaction is a far costlier choice … what we have before us is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to re-orient the global economy and create more sustainable, resilient, and equitable long-term growth. In my mind the question is not why we should make this investment, it's how can we not?"
With global coordination and rapid action, the world can still achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the report says. This will require extensive coordination and global collaboration, with governments needing to collaborate closely with the financial services and technology sectors. During the initial stages, the cost of upfront investments in decarbonisation coupled with the already locked-in damages from climate change would temporarily lower economic activity compared with the current emissions-intensive path, but as the transition progresses a turning point would be reached where the economic benefits of avoided climate damage and the emergence of new sources of growth and job creation start to outweigh the costs.
"It's important that the global economy evolves to meet the challenges of climate change," Pradeep Philip of the Deloitte Economics Institute said. "Our analysis shows that a low-carbon future is not only a societal imperative but an economic one...
This would be a good time for all kinds of bourgeois assholes to pipe in that "Nuclear Energy is too expensive."
The problem with building nuclear reactors is that every reactor built today is designed to operate for well more than half a century. They are thus gifts to future generations, but we are disinterested in making such gifts.
The future will not forgive us, nor should it.
Bioavailability of Phosphorus and Sulfur From Pyrolyzed Sewage Sludge.
A big problem before humanity is the depletion of mined phosphorus, paradoxically coupled with the release of that phosphorus to the ocean and other bodies of water, where it causes eutrophication.
Among our many problems, we need to find ways to close the phosphorus cycle, a non-trivial task.
I won't have much time to discuss a paper across which I just came, but I rather like the work, and feel that it suggests some processes that might help. It's this one: Speciation Evolution of Phosphorus and Sulfur Derived from Sewage Sludge Biochar in Soil: Ageing Effects Hao Sun, Lei Luo, Jiaxiao Wang, Dan Wang, Rixiang Huang, Chenyan Ma, Yong-Guan Zhu, and Zhengang Liu Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (10), 6639-6646.
Of course, dried but otherwise untreated sewage sludge is applied to agricultural fields as fertilizer, but this practice leaves something to to be desired.
From the paper's introduction:
Phosphorus in solid biowaste such as animal manure and SS is gradually transformed into stable Ca-associated compounds like hydroxyapatite during pyrolysis, which can significantly decrease the available fraction of heavy metals in the biowaste through sorption and/or precipitation reactions. (1,4,20,21) Meanwhile, oxidized S in biowaste tends to be reduced and forms stable sulfides with metal cations in the derived biochar. (21,22) Therefore, both P and S play critical roles in immobilizing heavy metals in organic waste during pyrolysis and thus decrease their environmental risks. (21,22) Nevertheless, it has been empirically speculated that the stable Ca-associated phosphate compounds in biochar may increase the availability of P, (20) and sulfides are also liable to be decomposed over time (24) when entering soil environments. In addition, they can affect the solubility and bioavailability of each other in the environment. For example, sulfide can facilitate the release of phosphate bound to iron from SS, (25,26) whereas phosphate can increase available S through competition for sorption sites in SSB-amended soil. (2) It is therefore expected that clarifying the speciation transformation of P and S in SSB induced by soil application will be the key to exploring the immobilization mechanisms of heavy metals and the resource recycling of the nutrients in the environment. (13,21,22) To date, fundamental knowledge on the speciation transformation mechanisms of P and S from SSB in amended soils at the molecular level is still missing (8,20) and thus critically needed...
…The goal of this study was to explore the molecular speciation transformation of P and S derived from SSB as affected by ageing in soil. We hypothesized that the immobilized P and S in SSB stably persist during ageing in soil and thus profoundly affect the availability and reactivity of the nutrients and heavy metals in amended soil. Iron (Fe), as a redox-sensitive element similar to S, can also control the chemical environment of soil and is expected to be closely related to the cycling of P and S in SSB. (12,23) To test these, the speciation of P and S as well as C and Fe from SSB following soil application was investigated based on pot and field experiments.
As chemists of a certain age, when young people did wet chemistry, will know, the sulfides of many heavy metals are relatively insoluble; in fact, the ores of many toxic metals are sulfides. Indeed the ores of many toxic metals are sulfides. Cinnabar, an ore of mercury and galena, an ore of lead, are sulfides. Iron sulfide, found as the mineral pyrite, and iron phosphate are also insoluble.
The authors speculated that on aging, sulfides might liberate the phosphate from iron as a sulfide, and speculated that pyrolyzed sewage sludge might represent a slow release phosphate release agent, fertilizing plants while not producing so much phosphate runoff to produce eutrophication.
Here's some insights to their interesting experimental procedure, at a ton scale:
2.1. Materials
SS was obtained from a municipal wastewater treatment plant in Wangdu, Hebei Province. SSB was produced from dewatered SS via pyrolysis at 500 °C for 45 min in a 20 ton industrial pyrolysis furnace. A pyrolysis temperature of 500 °C and retention time of 45 min were selected as a compromise of multiple factors including yield, functional group composition, phase transition of biochar structure, immobilization of heavy metals, and energy consumption based on previous studies (21,33) and pre-experiments (Text S1 and Table S1). Field ageing experiments were conducted on uncultivated land in Wangdu, Hebei Province. The soil was a fluvo-aquic soil (Calcaric Cambisol) with a clay-loam texture. Surface soils (0–20 cm), collected from the same location, were used for pot experiments after being air-dried and crushed to less than 2 mm in size.
2.2. Ageing Experiments
Ageing of SSB in soil was conducted through pot and field experiments. Each experiment was performed with three treatments in triplicate: control soil (without SS or SSB), soil with SS, and soil with SSB, at an application rate of 1% (w/w on dried basis). For pot experiments, 1.75 kg soil from each treatment was incubated for 90 days at 75% of its water-holding capacity by periodically adding water. This period could ensure well ageing of SSB to a certain extent. (27,30) For field experiments, a 1-year rotation of summer maize followed by winter wheat was performed in plots from June 10, 2020 to June 10, 2021 to examine long-term ageing effects on the speciation changes of SSB-derived P and S in soil...
The results, as shown in this graphic from the paper, seem to have been promising.
The caption:
SS = sewage sludge. SSB = sewage sludge biochar.
An excerpt of the concluding discussion:
Although heavy toxic metals can be released by the mechanism of oxidation of sulfides, the authors speculate that over time they will become immobilized, but recognize that proof of this might await future work.
I am personally fond of pyrolytic procedures. These require heat, and the only sustainable, reliable way to supply heat of this quality is using nuclear energy, yet another way this much maligned tool might work to save humanity from itself, with the dubious caveat that this would require abandoning our fondness for ignorance.
I trust you will enjoy a pleasant week.
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