Hurricane Irma, warm oceans, and expanding the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale

Back in 2011, I wrote about the current five-category hurricane system that the US uses (known as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale), noting that the foundational logic of the scale was based on structural engineering questions:

a former NOAA hurricane center administrator and co-inventor of the SSHS that, "there is no reason for a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale because it is designed to measure the potential damage of a hurricane to manmade structures. If the wind speed of the hurricane is above 155 mph (249 km/h), then the damage to a building will be 'serious no matter how well it's engineered'."

The current scale tops out at a "Category 5," which is any sustained wind speed above 155 mph. However, if one uses the threshold values for Categories 1 through 5 to develop a regression equation, it is possible to extend this relationship ever outward. Specifically, a revised category scale would be something like this:

Category 1: <95mph
Category 2: 96-110mph
Category 3: 111-130mph
Category 4: 131-150mph
Category 5: 151-175mph
Category 6: 176-205mph
Category 7: 206-235mph

Back in 2011, Hurricane Camille had sustained wind speeds of 175 mph, which is what prompted me to write that post. Currently, Hurricane Irma is reported as having sustained wind speeds of 185 mph, making it the strongest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. However, based on the current hurricane scale, both Camille and Irma are classified as Category 5, even though Irma is obviously far stronger than Camille (which was - itself - a massive hurricane).

Indeed, the current system is fundamentally limited and fundamentally limiting, since one loses any sense of comparative scale once you enter "Category 5." And what would it hurt to look at adding a "Category 6," especially if warming waters are known to lead to stronger and more sustained hurricanes? Indeed, with warming oceans, hurricanes that will reach sustained wind speeds between 175 and 205 mph will not be theoretical. Indeed, Hurricane Irma is proof-positive that such hurricanes can and will form.

But so what? Why would that matter?

Well, in the US, the SSHS is a widely known and used shorthand for hurricane strength. It's something that people latch on to when discussing preparedness measures and when making comparisons against past events. But if the maximum scale is effectively open-ended, the designation "Category 5" will be shared by a hurricane with wind speeds of 155 mph and another with winds speeds of 185 mph (like Hurricane Irma). And the simple fact is that wind speeds of 185 mph are fundamentally different than wind speeds of 155 mph, and placing both in the same open-ended category will not help with making short-hand comparisons that would be equivalent to comparing a Category 4 hurricane against a Category 3 hurricane.

The way we categorize natural phenomena is important, since it structures the way that we view and respond to the world, and if we continue to use a hurricane classification system whose comparative utility declines into a future that is expected to have stronger hurricanes, that can impact the type of public response given to future storms.

On sectorial water use and obfuscation via statistics

So a friend of mine posted this picture on their Facebook wall, and its message seemed well-intentioned but also so very problematic.

Let me first state that I do think that California must make hard decisions about water restrictions and water use, and I don't think that the current forms of water restrictions and bans are anywhere approaching what would be an equitable diminution in water use (and never mind the problems that California's system of water laws, interstate compacts, and inter-watershed irrigation systems play in creating further problems in the legal, political, and water management worlds). However, I don't know whether this image presents a useful comparison on all fronts. Furthermore, the presentation is arguably deceptive, since the compared units are not the same, with toilets (presumably being the one thing that the viewer is supposed to be sympathetic toward, since it is placed last) being based on a very low metric of gallons/flush of one toilet, and all the rest (presumably the ones the viewer is supposed to feel antagonistically toward, since they are often held up as being "enemies" of water use) being based on really large sector-wide annual figures.

This simplistic switch of metrics undermines the presumed argument of the image on two fronts. First is the casual deception: why present sector-wide annual figures for the "bad" water uses, and personal, single-use figures for the "good" water use? This presentation does not present an easy-to-grasp comparison between water uses at the State level. (There is also the problem of using words like "million" and "trillion" to describe the amount of water used, since it is so easy for people to lose the differential scales between hundred, thousand, million, billion, and trillion, but those sorts of distinctions are better covered in places such as this visualization of what $1 trillion looks like.) In order to place the water used in Californian toilets in direct comparison with the others, we must first convert the value of 1.6 gallons/flush into a figure of gallons/year throughout California. When we do this, we find that toilet-flush water use in California is at least:

1.6 gallons/flush (x 5 flushes/person/day)
= 8 gallons/person/day (x 38,800,000 Californians)
= 310,400,000 gallons/day in California (x 365 days/year)
= 113,296,000,000 gallons/year

(I write "at least" 113,296,000,000 gallons/year, since I am using the figures for household toilets and only 5 flushes/day, even though the average is somewhat higher. This number doesn't include, of course, water use statistics for public toilets, urinals, port-a-jons, etc.)

Now let's list all the water uses presented in the picture in increasing gallons/year:

70,000,000 gallons/year (fracking)
400,000,000 gallons/year (Nestlé bottled water)
113,296,000,000 gallons/year (toilet flushes)
1,100,000,000,000 gallons/year (almond farms)

When we look at toilet flushes in this perspective, it is clear that it is 1,618 times greater than the reported value for fracking. Furthermore, it is 283 times greater than the reported value for Nestlé bottled water. Indeed, when presented in this way, California toilet-water use can be presented as being far more profligate than either fracking or Nestlé bottled water, and by a LONG shot, simply because California has SO many people, and almost 60% of that population (22,680,000 in 2010) lives in sunny, drought-ridden SoCal. This places domestic water use (which includes baths/showers, toilets, dishwashing, lawn irrigation, carwashing, etc) far ahead of most industrial water uses... save agriculture

Indeed, when compared to the reported value of almond farms, toilet-water use is a mere 10%. However, there's a problem with the number presented in the graphic for almond farms. Specifically, the number of 1.1 trillion gallons/year is 1.6 times greater than the value reported by Hanson out of UCDavis, whose figure of roughly 2.1 milion AF/year works out to roughly 680 billion gallons/year (compared to this number, toilet flush water use is roughly 16%).

Let's look, though, at water used to grow alfalfa, which is, according to Hanson, the largest agricultural water use in the State. Accordling to Hanson, alfalfa grown in California uses roughly 5.2 million AF/year, or roughly 1.7 trillion gallons/year (which is about 2.5 times greater than the amount he reports for almond and pistachio irrigation). The second-largest agricultural water use (reported by Hansen) is for forages, which uses roughly 3.3 million AF/year, or roughly 1.1 trillion gallons/year.

So we can see that -- from an argument based around comparative water uses alone -- the merits of placing fracking and Nestlé bottled water fall flat, since toilet-flush water use far outstrips both of these two uses combined. It would have been a better argument to put up alfalfa farms and forage farms. However, it's almond growers that have been in the news, and not alfalfa or forage, which is likely why it is almond growers that are shown (even though they are not the largest agricultural water users, and even though they have a far more valuable crop than either alfalfa or forage crop farms).

Now, one could still use the water use figures presented in the graphic to make associated arguments, but I was unable to find a single argument that held true against the fracking, Nestlé, and almond farms while preserving toilet flushing. For example, one argument for water conservation that is often made against fracking regards removing water from the hydrological cycle completely, and it's true that one could make the argument that water used in fracking is effectively "lost" to the immediate hydrological cycle (since fracking wastewater is often deepwell injected) and therefore cannot be used for drinking or any other use, but that argument doesn't hold for almond farming or bottled water, since both return their water to the immediate hydrological cycle (primarily as groundwater recharge, evapotranspiration, and biomass decay in the case of almond farms and as urine that is flushed down a toilet in the case of bottled water). So the argument that it's about removing water from the hydrological cycle use is not valid across cases.

Another common argument against fracking, irrigation, and bottled water is that these uses are consumptive uses. In the case of fracking, this is undoubtedly true (as laid out above), and water used in agriculture is often also considered to be consumptive. However, the charge of consumptive use can also leveled at most of California's toilet water flushes, since much of the State's water is pumped from watersheds in Northern California and the Colorado River, creating consumptive water use pressures in those areas.

The only real argument that comes to mind is that it is unfair for the government to impose water restrictions upon flesh-and-blood citizens but not impose water restrictions upon corporate "citizens." However, such an argument isn't a water volume argument, but a water rights argument, especially in how Californian water rights are not egalitarian, with a large part of this argument lying in the problems associated with California's water rights laws. Most individual Californian citizens do not own any water rights, let alone water rights that predate 1914. The date of 1914 forms the demarcation date between so-called "junior" and "senior" water rights, and those holding junior water rights will have their rights to water curtailed before those of senior water rights holders. Such a system of rights is based on a "first in place, first in right" principle, with a strong incentive for the right to be held by a non-human entity (such as a corporation, water district, or the like), since the death of an individual could lead to the "death" of that right. From an equity perspective, such distributions of water rights is inherently inequitable, since it creates structural inequalities that become evermore entrenched as the value of water increases (making the purchase or transfer of water rights less likely to occur). During times when water availability is high, such a structurally unequal distribution of water rarely impacts large swathes of citizens. In cases of drought, though, such inequalities emerge. But regardless of the structural inequalities that California's water rights system imposes upon its citizens, the percecption of unfairness in who gets the restrictions is not due to water volumes (as the graphic implies), but due to water policy and water law.

One "good" note though (if only from a perspective of masochistic schadenfreude), is that if the drought continues, it is likely that even those holding senior rights (which includes many major agricultural water users) will have their water withdrawals restricted.

In sum, while bottled water and fracking are often seen as problematic for various social, public health, and environmental reasons, the comparative water consumption in these two sectors doesn't hold a candle to the total sector-wide water consumption of toilets. Furthermore, hiding the scales of water use between different water uses in the way presented in the graphic is deceptive, and such deception can foster mistrust of the messenger or supporter of the message. In other words, in order to make the graphic less deceptive and more salient to a message associated with different types of water use, it needs more than just a simple comparison of water volumes.

Of course, this additional nuance can create problems when trying to disseminate a message...

What innumeracy (and lack of government oversight) can lead to: Wildly outrageous numbers masquerading as fact

Much like a lack of understanding relatively small changes over relatively long periods of time (such as with evolution or with inflation) can cause some people to make massively incorrect assertions, so, too, can a lack of the ability to grasp really large numbers lead to making assertions that are orders of magnitude implausible (or even impossible).

I read a story at PhysOrg about a new piece of research out of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan:

The idea of corporate social responsibility to manage common-pool resources such as water, forests and pastures is flawed, says a University of Michigan researcher.

Aneel Karnani, associate professor of strategy at the U-M Stephen M. Ross School of Business, says that when a common-pool resource is left without any enforced property rights, it results in degradation and destruction of the resource.

Karnani uses an in-depth case study to make his point—groundwater use by Coca-Cola Co. at its Kaladera plant in the state of Rajasthan in India. The groundwater level in Kaladera has dropped significantly from 9 to 39 meters below ground in the last 20 years.
The plant operates four bore wells that are 100 meters deep. In its early years of operation, the plant withdrew about 200,000 cubic meters of groundwater per year. In recent years, the company has reduced its water usage to about 100,000 cubic meters annually, or about 0.2 percent of total water extraction.

...

Coca-Cola says the Kaladera plant's water consumption is minimal and has little impact on the local groundwater regime. It also says it has built rainwater harvesting structures around Kaladera that recharge the groundwater aquifers with 15 times the volume of the water extracted by the plant.

The story doesn't go into the numbers much further than what I present above, but - immediately - the numbers look kinda "hinky" to me. Why? Well, 200,000 cubic meters per year is a lot of water extraction. (100,000 cmy is also pretty big.) Just how big is 100,000 cmy?

Well, the number of 2L bottles of Coke that 100,000 cubic meters per year will fill is 50 million bottles of Coke, which is equivalent to 3.2 bottles of Coke every second. (That's equivalent to a little more than 9.5 cans of Coke every second!)

That means that - in order to actually "recharge groundwater aquifers with 15 times the volume of the water extracted by the plant" using "rainwater harvesting structures around Kaladera", the Kaladera plant will need to collect 1,500,000 cubic meters per year.

Is that feasible?

Well, we need to know what the annual precipitation is in that area in order to determine the amount of rainfall that would need to be captured to reach 1.5 million cubic meters.

Looking at Google Maps, we find that the Kaladera plant is located in the Jaipur district of the Indian state of Rajastan. According to India's Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, the Jaipur district is in a "semi-arid" region that receives an average of 563.8 mm of rainfall each year (Wikipedia's page on Jaipur district cites 668 mm, based on BBC Weather). Converting this into meters, we get 0.5638 m (0.668 m), and if we then divide this number by 1,500,000 cubic meters, we can find the area necessary to capture "15 times the volume of the water extracted by the plant":

The plant would need a rainwater harvesting system that covers an area of 2,660,517 square meters (2,245,508 square meters), or roughly 2.7 square kilometers (2.2 square kilometers).

And this doesn't even take into account losses due to evaporation and interception!

So, does Coca-Cola's assertion that it's recharging the aquifer with "15 times the volume of water extracted by the plant" through only using "rainwater harvesting structures around Kaladera" seem feasible? Nope. Not at all. Not unless Coca-Cola has over 2 square kilometers of land set aside for the sole purpose of collecting all rainwater that falls on the landscape. And - at least from Google Maps - it doesn't look like the Coca-Cola plant's foot print is even 0.5 square kilometer.

WTF IS the Higgs Boson?

This kind of describes what we expect it to be.



... as well as potentially what it isn't.

Yay, science!

On BMI

I have a rough BMI of 30. What does this mean? It means that I'm in the "Obese" category, as defined by the CDC. There is no category above mine.

But wait, am I obese? I don't think so... I cycle 8 miles each day, do manual labor, and eat (relatively) healthily. I haven't checked my resting heart rate recently, but I'm guessing that it's between 60 and 70. I have a 36" waist, and 48" shoulders. I can benchpress 200 pounds, easily leg press 500 pounds, and do calf extensions at 250 pounds per side. How is this obese?

Recently, Devlin's Angle did a piece on BMI - the history, and stupidity of it. On the one hand, the usage of the BMI to indicate a single person's relative health is a good example of misuing a [simplistic] formula meant to determine population level characteristics, not individual ones. On another hand, this is also a story of how numbers and scientific wrappings seem to hold social significance. On yet another hand (this is turning into a Vishnu-statue of "other hands"), the BMI is a major tool in looking at trends in obesity. Finally, on the remaining hand (of Vishnu), it's completely meaningless, mathematically speaking.

Here's the equation:

BMI = weight in pounds/(height in inches^2) x 703

Devlin's Angle goes on to explain where the 703 comes from, and ponders the question of why the height is squared...

Devlin's Angle outlines two reasons why the BMI is useless as a individual measure: it's a population-based measure, and populations are made up of sedentary individuals (not atheletes) and it was derived at an early time in the statistic-ization of sociology. On the first point, the formula assumes that all "extra" weight on an individual is from fat. On the second point, the formula is derived to measure the trend of the majority of the population.

I would like to outline two other reasons why the BMI sucks for people like me: height and body proportion. Devlin's Angle points out that the BMI was derived in the early 1900s in Belgium. Looking at Wikipedia's entry on human height, one finds that in the mid-nineteenth century the average height in the Netherlands and France (they don't list Belgium) was164 cm and 165 cm, respectively. Looking at these measures "today", one sees a "slight" difference: 182 cm (169.7 cm) and 177 cm (164.6 cm), respectively (female heights in parenthesis). I assume that female heights weren't included in the mid-nineteenth century measurements, but we see that after 150 years, Dutch females are taller (males much taller) and French females as tall (males much taller) than their ancestors. What is so important about this? Well, remember that the equation for BMI was based on the average person. The average person being (among males) as much as 12-18 cm taller than the people measured to derive the BMI.

Let's try and make two individuals who matches the criteria of different BMI groupings; one from the mid-nineteenth century, and one from today. Since BMI is only a relationship between height and weight, this shouldn't be difficult to figure out. Therefore, a mid-nineteenth century Dutchman of average height (roughly 65 inches), would have the following BMI table:

Underweight (below 18.5): below 110 lbs.
Ideal (18.5 to 24.9): 110 lbs. to 148 lbs.
Overweight (25.0 to 29.9): 148 lbs. to 178 lbs.
Obese (30.0 and above): 178 lbs. and above.

We can imagine the "average build" 5'5" person and think, "Okay, that works." However, now let's look at what the BMI chart would mean for the average height Duchman of 6'0":

Underweight (below 18.5): below 135 lbs.
Ideal (18.5 to 24.9): 135 lbs. to 183 lbs.
Overweight (25.0 to 29.9): 183 lbs. to 219 lbs.
Obese (30.0 and above): 219 lbs. and above.

That man would have to be one skinny person. Imagine a person who is 6'0" and 135 lbs. Jim Carrey - someone we might think of as tall and skinny - is according to this site - 6'1" and 180 lbs. That's on the upper end of "ideal". President Barack Obama is - according to this site - 6'1.5" and 180 lbs. (Which, strangely, gives him a slightly higher BMI of 23.4 compared to John Kerry's 22.5, even though I would say that Obama's more atheltic now than Kerry was in 2004).

So, height is a determinant. Therefore, BMI was a good measure of estimating the height/weight relationship of early 1900s Belgians, not necessarily early 21st century Americans.

Also, there is body proportion. Having a relatively long torso, I have been blessed with not having to worry about too little leg room on aircrafts (yet), but I am annoyed at how low the backs of seats cut me (usually well below the shoulder, even on "tall" chairs). There are trends on body proportions, both in terms of proportions of height (i.e., long torso vs. long legs) and width (e.g., hip-to-waist ratios). Neither of these are included in the BMI. True: certain regions have slightly different cut-off points for BMI measurements, such as in SE Asia where there is a relatively consistent height body proportion, however, in the United States - where there is such a wide range of different height and width body proportions that BMI loses its meaning even faster. But why?

Well, take me for example. I have a long torso. What does that mean, though. Well, a single inch of height that is comprised of torso has more mass than an inch of height comprised of leg; there are more organs, more girth, and more water in the torso than in the leg. Therefore, if someone has a relatively short torso compared to me (i.e., they are my height, but have much longer legs than me), having a 240 lbs. somewhat athetic build would mean that individual would have legs even more massive than mine (or a torso that was gigantic). In other words, body proportions will have a direct bearing on the amount of mass you are carrying around (and therefore, your weight), irregardless of how much muscle or fat you have.

Related to the issue of body proportion is the issue of amputation. If you amputated a leg, you could lower your total body weight by 20-40 pounds (depending, obviously, on the weight of your legs). If I cut off legs, then my BMI would drop to about 25 (still "overweight", but not "obese"). However, if you had both your legs amputated (or weren't born with both legs), then you could shorten your height by 27" (plus or minus) and your weight by 40-80 lbs. However, due to the formula, my BMI would actually increase to 44 if that happened to me.

What to do? Well, I have a novel idea of doing a BMI survey of a cohort of incoming students, combined with a number of other measures that will give an indication of body proportion, muscle mass, and fitness. Then, look at doing statistics on the whole set to see what sort of relationship one would get for "modern" BMI cut-offs, and determine if there is any easier way of determining a general figure of fitness that can be used by an individual (as opposed to being a proxy for an entire population, mostly made up of sedentary individuals).

The Planet -- Documentary (all 9 parts from YouTube)

DieterVog has - on YouTube - the nine-part Swedish documentary The Planet. I've provided them all below (don't know how long they'll be up on YouTube, though).

Part I:


Part II:


Part III:


Part IV:


Part V:


Part VI:


Part VII:


Part VIII:


Part IX:

Dan Gilbert: Global Warming is happening too slowly

Dan Gilbert feels that a major problem with global warming inaction is that global warming is not happening fast enough. (Much of the following are paraphrased or quoted from his talk.)

Four features global warming lacks:

• A face: understanding what other people are doing is so crucial that our brain has developed an obsession about human agency. This is why we see faces in the clouds, but not clouds in peoples' faces. Global warming is not trying to kill us, and that's a shame.
• A violation of moral suasion: Visceral emotions are aroused by things our brains have been concerned: food and sex. NOT atmospheric chemistry. Societies are built around who you can sleep with and what you can eat, and not about how much you can consume.
  
• A threat to the present: The brain is an exquitely designed "get-out-of-the-way" machine. Only recently has our brain been able to think about the future and take actions againt a future event, which is why we use dental floss and invest in 401k plans. However, global warming is still in the "R&D" version.
  
• Ability to see absolute changes: Because we are so bad at percieving changes gradually, we are more likely to tolerate it since it was a day-to-day gradual change, not an abrupt one.
  

Walk Score

A while back, I was introduced to walkscore.com. At the time, it seemed little more than a Google Maps application that linked types of local amenities with a "walkability" score. Pluggin in "Ann Arbor" returned a score of 91/100. Not too shabby, if I say so myself. However, the website offers a lot more now than just this "get your walkability score" feature.

Since a year ago, the website has increased its analysis (by a lot) and has rated 40 cities by "walkability" of their neighborhoods. There are several no-brainers, based on the criteria of walkability: San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Chicago rank 1-4, respectively, while Indianapolis, Charlotte, Nashville, and Jacksonville rank 37-40, respectively. However, a few are a little odd (having lived in or visited these cities):

• #9 Los Angeles (score: 67)
• #11 Denver (score: 66)
• #23 Detroit (score: 52)
• #25 Tucson (score: 51)
• #28 Phoenix (score: 50)

Looking at all of these cities, one can say that the reason why the walkability scores are "off kilter" are due to the scale at which WalkScore decided to investigate each city. Having live in Denver, and visited Los Angeles, I can tell you that these are not "walkable" cities - in the context of their metropolitan areas. True, their down town regions are quite walkable, but getting to it usually involves a lot of sitting in a car in slow-moving traffic. Looking at the maps for both of these high-ranking walkable cities, you can see that their "boundaries" of consideration are much smaller than the total metropolitan area. If you were to expand the analysis into these areas, it will be quite likely that both of these cities will see their overall score (and likely their position) decline markedly. For example, if Los Angeles included the cities of Compton, Lynwood, and Carson, it would be linked to the score for Long Beach. However, even this addition would not likely bring the reality of the metropolitan area's walkability. Without including areas like Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Alhambra, Monterey Park, Huntington Park, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Palos Verdes, Bellflower, Lakewood, Cypress, Los Alamitos, Garden Grove, Fountain Falley, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Fullerton, Yorba Linda, Irvine, Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, Laguna Niguel, as well as (possibly) all the cities up through San Bernadino and Moreno Valley.

Similarly, Denver's walkability is much higher than I "know" it should be. True, the walkability score refers only to Denver's city limits. However, the metropolitan area includes the cities of Englewood, Aurora, Littleton, Glendale, Columbine, Wheat Ridge, and Arvada, Westminster, Thornton, and Broomfield. Without including these commuter cities to Denver's total, it is not really possible to get a sense of the true walkability of the contiguous metropolitan area. Why, for example, include the corridor out to the Denver International Airport (when very few people live out there) as a "neighborhood" and add it to Denver's walkability score? If you were to include that, then why not include the city of Glendale, which is completely surrounded by Denver?

Similarly, I was shocked to see Detroit and Phoenix located so high in the pecking order. However, looking at their maps, you quickly see that both of these cities' analyses do not include their outlying regions and contiguous cities. For example, the highly unwalkable Scottsdale, Glendale, and Peoria aren't included with Phoenix (but for some reason the unwalkable town of Paradise Valley is). In fact, if the mostly unwalkable (outside ASU campus) Tempe were added to the analysis, then the unwalkable Mesa (rank: 30, score: 48) would automatically be folded in, as well, making us wonder why Chandler, Gilbert, and Apache Junction weren't included in the analysis... In my estimation, Phoenix metro area should be WAY lower than a walkability score of 50.

Detroit is a similar case. As of July 18, 2008, it was sitting pretty at 23rd position, and the analysis didn't take into account anything outside the actual city limits of Detroit, including the Detroic metro-area cities (in Oakland County alone) of Allen Park, Belleville, Dearborn Heights, Dearborn, Ecorse, Flat Rock, Garden City, Gibraltar, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Point Park, Grosse Pointe Woods, Grosse Point, Hamtramck, Harper Woods, Highland Park, Inkster, Lincoln Park, Livonia, Melvindale, Northville, Plymouth, River Rouge, Riverview, Rockwood, Romulus, Southgate, Taylor, Trenton, Wayne, Westland, Woodhaven, and Wyandotte as well as the developed-but-unincorporated areas of Brownstown Township, Canton Charter Township, Grosse Ile Township, Grosse Pointe Township, Huron Charter Township, Northville Charter Township, Plymouth Township, Redford Charter Township, Sumpter Township, Van Buren Charter Township. If you were to add the highly unwalkwalbe contiguous Detroit-area metro cities of Wayne County and Oakland County, then D-town's walkability score (similar to Phoenix) would decline by a LOT. In fact, if you take a look at Jacksonville's score again, it takes into account a LOT of the outlying areas of the city (which D-town's analysis fails to do, let alone take into account a majority of the contiguous urban areas outside the city limits).

Conversely, Tucson is not really noted for its lack of walkability. So what's it doing below the Motor City? Well, looking at the map for Tucson, you see that Davis Monthan Air Force Base is included in the analysis (not really part of the city), as well as Rita Ranch and Houghton. If these neighborhoods (and military bases) are added to the score for Tucson, why aren't larger metro areas included for LA and Denver?

More evidence of environmental problems in China

A while ago, I wrote on the problems of obfuscating CO2 emissions numbers from the Bush administration. That entry was motivated by reading a story about how China surpassed the US in the CO2 emissions factor.

Now, NASA has released some photos accompanying their web report of their 2006 report NASA: Supporting Earth System Science 2006. The one photo that I found really startling (and illustrative, pardon the pun) was the one toward the bottom of the page, of [gray] cloud cover over China. Go over there and check it out.

The NYTimes have written a series of pieces about air pollution and the Beijing Olympics:

• August 27, 2007: As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes
  
• December 27, 2007: Beijing's Olympic Quest: Turn Smoggy Sky Blue
  
• January 10, 2008: Consultant Questions Beijing's Claim of Cleaner Air
  
• January 24, 2008: Olympic Teams Vying to Defeat Beijing's Smog
  
• January 24, 2008: Smoggy Beijing Plans to Cut Traffic by Half for Olympics, Paper Says
  
• February 4, 2008: Empty Olympic Promises (Opinion)

(Registration required)

These pieces all point to a serious problem of air pollution in China (or they are all lying and have doctored several hundred/thousand photos). The photo the kite-flier in the "Beijing's Olympic Quest" really hits home for me, because it was taken outside the gates to the Forbidden City, near a location I stood at in 2000. In my photo, the red gates with Mao's painting is clearly visible over my shoulder (like the photos in the Wikipedia entry of Tiananmen Square). However, one can only barely make out the imposing outer wall and gateway to the forbidden city in photo accompanying the NYTimes story.

The scale of the impacts on China are so massive that they defy one's normal ability to comprehend it. However, the problems are there, and they are compounded by other systemic problems, by the immense number of people (all those independent degrees-of-freedom), by the perceptions of growth and development, the urgency of showcasing the country for the Olympics, the struggle of the central government to maintain power, the Westward expansion of development within China to non-Han regions, etc. One can only get a snap-shot of these major social issues taking place both within China, and outward from China.

The environmental stories (due to my own background and biases) are perhaps the most alarming, and the NYTimes can only really cover a small number of them. Combining the known changes (listed above) taking place with stories of water pollution, falling water levels, disappearing animal species, increased coal mining, and others discussing the hazardous growth of the country, I have to wonder how the future of such a large nation can be maintained, even in the short-term.

To me - right now - that photo on the NASA page is a great summary of the scale of environmental impacts on China. It is scary. It is real.

Record summer temperatures.

The title of the NOAA report says it all to me: Sixth warmest summer on record ends with record heat in South. Some highlights from the report:

• August 2007 was 1.2F (1.0C) warmer than the 20th century mean August temperature, and 6th warmest summer since recording such things as summer temperatures began in 1895.
• Within the 48 contiguous states, August 2007 was 2.7F (1.5C) warmer than average.
• Globally, the combined land and ocean temperatures for August 2007 was the 8th warmest on record, 0.85F (0.47C) above average.
• Global land temperatures for August 2007 were the 3rd warmest on record.
  
• Of the 50 states, only Texas and Oklahoma were slightly cooler than average.
• The warmest August in 113 years occurred in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Utah.
  
• Increased temperatures had concomitant increased energy requirements in the SW and SE.
• Rainfall was below average in the Southest, mid-Atlantic, Ohio River Valley, northern Plains, and northern Rocky Mountains.
• Forest fires in Georgia, Florida, and the Rocky Mountain states were attributed to lowered rainfalls.
• Rainfall was above average in Texas (the wettest on record) and Oklahoma (the 4th wettest on record).
• Heavy monsoons affected regions of South Asia, affecting millions of people.
• Hurricane Dean - the first major hurricane of the Atlantic Hurricane Season - was the first storm to make landfall as a Category 5 storm since Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

All of that is (to me) news that doesn't do me good. However, I am wondering how long it will take for people in general come to realize that their concerns shouldn't be limited to record temperatures (i.e., the hottest summer on record, the hottest day on record, etc). Rather, people need to think about how a season's temperature relates to longer-term temperature trends. One method by which to do this is to look at temperature trends in a similar fashion as how hydrologists and fluvial ecologists investigate river water discharge patterns.

A hydrologist (or fluvial ecologist) will use what he/she might consider a representative sample of discharge data for the purposes of the problem. In this case, I used roughly 80 years of discharge data measured by the USGS for the Huron River as it flows through Ann Arbor, MI.


Unless you are a much better person than average at seeing underlying trends, all you will see in such a case will be spikes of high discharge, with most discharge occurring between ~100cfs and 1000cfs. However, there are a lot of times when discharge is higher than 1000cfs and lower than 100cfs. If I was to say that something was an event that was extremely rare (i.e., occurred only one time out of twenty), I would be at a loss to tell someone what that event would be.

For the reason of being able to assess a measured discharge against long-term trends, a ranked discharge curve is created. In this curve, the data are ranked in increasing (if one is a hydrologist) or decreasing (if one is an aquatic ecologist) order.


Looking at this ranked discharge curve (note that I used a logarithmic scale on the y-axis), you can see that events less than 90cfs and events greater than 1200cfs are extremely rare (based on the above definition). This would mean (among other things) that any event of greater than 1200cfs is a very significant discharge event; even a flow over 930cfs could be judged to be a 90th percentile discharge. If I was to check the most recent discharge value (318cfs, measured at Sep-18-2007 @ 8:45am), I would see that the river was experiencing a 47.5 percentile flow - pretty close to the annual median discharge.

Comparisons can also be made between rivers. If you compare the Huron River with New Mexico's Delaware River (both about the same watershed area), you can tell that there are some fundamental differences between how the hydrologies of each area works.


Now, if temperatures were to be measured like this, I would argue that it would be much better than the current method of comparing against the greatest value on record. You wouldn't be saying things like, "The 12th warmest summer in recorded history." A statement like this (imho) would make people think that the 12th warmest summer in recorded history is not that significant; similar to the logic that no one really cares about the 12th-place finisher of a marathon. However, if the 12th warmest summer was very close in temperature to the 4th warmest summer, a graph of ranked temperature - like the ranked discharge graph above - would more easily show how different ranked summers relate to each other. Something as simple as this is (I believe) important in having people understand the relationship between rather abstract concepts as global temperature trends.

Howtoons and typhoons.

I was directed to this site from one of the other blogs I read. However, after looking at some of the comics, I was interested in the one on the Beaufort Scale. Mostly interested because of the hurricanes that are currently working their ways across the subtropical areas of the N. Hemisphere. Now, I know that the Beaufort Scale is not the same as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, but just so you know (without having to read through the Wiki article), a category 1 hurricane is equivalent to a 12 on the Beaufort Scale (so the bottom panel is a graphical depiction of a category 1 storm). HOWEVER, the relationship between the two are not linear (i.e., a Beaufort 13 is not equal to a Saffir-Simpson 2).

The major hurricane people are looking at right now is Hurricane Felix. This hurricane is the fastest to go from a category 1 to a category 5 - roughly 72 hours - before making landfall in Nicaragua. This sparsely-populated region of the country may suffer greatly from a lack of adequate warning (since just a few days prior, it was "merely" a tropical storm). Hurricane Felix also makes the second category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean basin - the first time since reliable record-keeping began in 1944.

Meanwhile, on the western shores of Mexico, Hurricane Henriette is slowly making its way into the Gulf of California. I predict that this will be a mixed blessing for the region. On the one hand, there will be massive problems in border towns due to flooding and lack of adequate sanitation, and a general problem with flooding and mud/landslides. On the other hand, the region needs water right now - after suffering the 12th summer of drought (this one hotter than any of the previous 11). Of course, much of my perspective is from the US side of the border - having little knowledge of what life is actually like in regions on Henriette's storm path.

Societies of the future?

According to a recent news article, Japan’s future is not as bleak as some might think. True, the majority of its major cities (Tokyo, Kawasaki, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, and Sapporo) have huge chunks of densely-populated land lying within a 10m rise of the coastline (which is expected to recede dramatically in the next 100 years). This is an issue of sea level rise. Japan also has impacts from hurricanes (aka typhoons) every year or so. With these expected to only grow in size and strength, I would say that the future looks rather bleak.

This brings me to wonder how many people sit down and think about the physical changes that will cause political and social changes in the world of our future. People, that is, other than fiction writers. Do political scientists and policy wonks sit around and wonder what the world will be like after even a one meter rise in sea level? How many people would that cause to become migrants? How many countries would become inhospitable due to aquifer inundations and overland flooding? For one, Bangladesh would certainly become greatly uninhabitable, forcing hundreds of millions of people into a state of social upheaval. This would also be a similar case for much of low-lying India, northern Egypt, as well as coastal China.

Would this lead to a precipitation of military expansionism? After all, much of the fertile lands of a region are located in the floodplains of a country, and many countries have floodplains near their shores. When these become inundated with sea water, it will undoubtedly have a social and economic impact. Who is to say that any country would be able to easily absorb these impacts? Why not invade neighboring countries to take their lands and crops before your own country becomes unable to feed her citizens? It is, after all, a question of being “nice” or survival of your nation.

This brings up the question of whether the use of nuclear weapons remains a viable threat. Since many nations built cities on their agricultural lands, use of nuclear weaponry will only shrink the amount of agriculturally viable lands available to the victor of such a war.

Possibly one thing that will happen will be the movement of cities from fertile areas to non-fertile areas. Since transportation systems have proven their capacity of shipping food from far-flung regions of the world to the cities of the planet, it would make sense that cities no longer need to be located near their food sources. By moving cities (and possibly including industries) to areas marginal agricultural lands, relatively large regions of the country could be returned to producing produce for a hungry and climatically impacted nation. Of course, countries would need to ensure that this radical reorganization of the entire basis of a nation did not rip the fabric of society apart. If the majority of US citizens now ended up living in cities in the mountains of the West or Appalachia, or the deserts of the Southwest, a lot of political power would be stripped from the currently population-dense East to the currently population-sparse arid West.

So going back to the original premise of this whole question: what is going to happen in the future? We as a society or government make plans going out into the future for ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years. However, we blindly accept that there will be a future USA (or any other country) to which our legacy will be given. Who could have imagined in 1900 the radical changes that would have happened to the world in the next 100 years (or even the following 50 years)? Why should the future of the world be any different in 2000? We feel more connected with the world, and have established trading relationships with several other nations to help ensure stability; the inter-marriage of royal families that kept the peace in centuries past. However, these marriages proved not to be foolproof as armies of cousin kings marched against each other. Similarly, the commercial marriages may well not prove so stable (that capital is fungible and mobile makes these ‘marriages’ even more shaky in my opinion).

Having played such simulations as the Civilization series of games, it always struck me that a viable option of feeding a nation (once my civilization had moved to the level of having vast roadways and railways) was to shift my major population centers to regions where natural resources were scarce. This alleviated localized pollution impacts (which would negatively affect agriculture), while allowing for population maintenance (usually my populations would reach ridiculously large numbers well before this became a viable option). In my scenario, mountain ranges housed the mega-cities of the future, and the formerly-populous grasslands once again opened up to agriculture and forestry.

Now there is obviously a large difference between Civilization the game, and civilization the reality. For one thing, all the versions I played didn’t have climate change as a disaster that could strike the world. (It did have alien invasions in one add-on version, as well as guerillas that would strike at you from the frost-bitten northlands of your country, which were rather odd things one had to deal with, although you did have the option of turning these random encounters off.) For another thing, the diplomacy and policy buttons were rather crude instruments (about as precise as using a pneumatic hammer to do dentistry) that could suddenly cause a war to start because a trade relation didn’t work out so well. Yet another was that battles and campaigns were affairs that took place somewhere in the background of the game with a random number generator. Still, it is my opinion that these kinks could be worked out, and as the game becomes more complex with the passage of time. Perhaps the next version will include global climate change as a factor in the game. (Ahh, how will the resource-hungry leaders of other nations reply to such a major impact to their countries?)

Although Civilization was an interesting tangent, I still haven’t really gotten to theorize about my original question, which was who sits down and plans out alternative futures? I’m sure people do it in the time frame of 5 years. After all, corporations and governments all come out with their Five Year Plans. However, I wonder how many people consider the Fifty Year Plan. Or the Hundred Year Plan. True, it is really difficult to enact public policy that you will be assured will be around for the next 100 years. However, if the nations of the world today wish to remain the nations of the world tomorrow, especially in the light of the impacts of climate change on the world’s societies, long-term planning needs to be done. The time frame of the “strategic planning” of today needs to stretch further.

Risk Society

Amongst the many interesting points brought up by Gary Was, the scale of the energy demand was something that I hadn’t thought of for some time. The number of nuclear energy plants (i.e., clean energy) needing to come online every year to power growth in the United States alone was mind-blowing. Having considerations for the rest of the world seemed impossibly high.

This is a little ironic, considering that Ulrich Beck discussed many of the issues of scale by pointing out the potential hazards of nuclear technology (amongst other things) in his book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. In a more-recent article he stated:

“With the past decisions on nuclear energy and our contemporary decisions on the use of genetic technology, human genetics, nanotechnology, computer sciences and so forth, we set off unpredictable, uncontrollable and incommunicable consequences that endanger life on earth.”[1]

That Beck would flash into my mind while I was watching the presentation was not surprising. However, it is interesting that looking back on what I recall reading of Beck and his arguments, he didn’t discuss the issues of risk surrounding reliance on fossil fuels. This form of energy appears to have become the albatross around the neck of industrialized society; the medallion of progress that we have accepted in place of the possible risks associated with diversification into alternative (possibly risky) energy sources.

The issue of scale – when referring back to Was’ lecture – appeared throughout his talk, and brought to mind two immediate questions:

1) Since he didn’t discuss the issue of changing scale too much, does Was think it central to the issue (and left it out for brevity’s sake) or peripheral (leaving it out for that reason)?

2) How many people recognize the issue as one encompassing different temporal and spatial scales?

As for the first question, I would like to thin the answer lies closer to the former, and that a discussion on issues of scale would be not only off-topic, but rather dull to the majority of people there (quite probably including myself). Further analysis of this question would require being able to get into Was’ head, so I will leave off here.

The second question is (while possibly just as philosophical) more interesting than the first, because it draws upon implications stemming from social constructs as well as biological limitations. Some of the more obvious social constructs that limit our recognition of scale are the “invisible hand” of the market; the overarching social identity (e.g, American individualism or Japanese conformism); and the robustness of nature.

The “invisible hand” of the market is a great “black-box” explanation of all the interactions taking place to get any good (and all its constituent energy and material flows) from its sources to you. If you were to ponder where the fried egg you had this morning actually came from, you might get back to the obvious point of a chicken (unless you get eggs from a different fowl). However, this doesn’t give you any idea about the number of chickens it takes to supply even a single grocery store’s-worth of eggs over a month; the transport network needed to get eggs from farm to packaging to warehousing to your market; and any other myriad connections I cannot even begin to fathom (and all I wanted to do was enjoy my egg!). The almost-flippant tacit semi-acknowledgement of this process in the over-used, dogmatic, and therefore near-useless term “invisible hand” is a convenient way to ignore the network underlying a majority of market transactions.

Overarching social identity is also a great way of cudgeling a nation’s people into thinking between a particular set of blinders. As a person who grew up with expectations of living according to two apparently opposing social identities (US individualism and Japan’s conformism), I realized the presence of these identity pillories early on, and did my best to have an identity of individualism of my own creation. However, I didn’t realize the immense impact an American social identity had on her citizens until returning to the US after living for 14 years abroad. It was amazing to me how people didn’t seem to comprehend things I took for granted. Two examples which stand out in my mind were the implications of countries’ interactions through history and the implications of working within coalitions of different sizes.

I would argue that the idea of the robustness of nature is both a social construct as well as a biological limitation. The robustness of nature operates as a social construct, because although we know that massive engineering projects have changed the face of the planet, we still act as if the planet cannot be broken. They physical enormity of the planet gives us comfort in this way. The time scales over which impacts are fully imprinted on the earth is much longer than our biological ability to fully comprehend, making it a biological limitation. Because of these two sets of blinders, we are unable to comprehend the absolute vastness of environmental (or socio-environmental) impacts: tsunamis, drought, famine, desertification, etc.

Our biological limitation is a limiting factor that we cannot really get past (perhaps genetic engineering at some point in the future can get us over this current high-bar and on to a different level of biological limiations). Our minds can only process so much information; can only comprehend numbers of a certain magnitude; can only grasp the interconnectedness of a frustratingly few variables; etc. Due to these limitations, we came up with simplified explanations and models of the way the world should ideally work; models that ultimately fail when taken to increasing levels of complexity. Because of this exploration of increasing complexity, having computers is a godsend. Of course, computer technology created a new set of new social and technological complexity.

At the end of the day, if we were sit down and try to think about growing levels of complexity (as I have done while thinking about and writing this paper) within any field of our choosing, I vouchsafe that it would be one of the most frustrating mental exercises you could try and attempt to do. It’s frustrating (at least to me) because of the attempt in trying to maintain all the potential outcomes as they grow exponentially, along with the number and quality of connections between each new level of elements.

This discussion of complexity all comes back (of course) to being reminded about how to scale the needs of a growing planet to that which people can grasp. From there we can only wonder what people will do when faced with the enormity of the implications behind the numbers. I suppose a form of Beck’s “risk society” has arrived, and we must face it, complete with our cultural constructs and biological limitations of understanding, as Dylan Thomas wrote, “Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,/And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,/Do not go gentle into that good night.”[2]

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[1] U. Beck, “The Silence of Words and Political Dynamics in the World Risk Society,” Logos, 1(4) 2002.

[2] Thomas, Dylan (2003) Collected Poems 1934-1953 (London: Phoenix).