Monday, April 8, 2013

Tar Sands Armageddon

I used to think that our Northern  neighbor, Canada, was one of the most civilized (and civil) industrial countries. And then came Tar Sands Oil extraction. The current Republican-like government is betting the ship on this single project, without any realization of the enormity of the disaster it will help bring about. Here are some tidbits of information obtained from "DeSmogBlog":

- Oil sands mining is licensed to use twice the amount of fresh water that the entire city of Calgary uses in a year.
 - At least 90% of the fresh water used in the oil sands ends up in the tailing ponds so toxic that propane cannons are used to keep ducks from landing.
- Processing the oil sands uses enough natural gas in a day to heat 3 million homes.
- The toxic tailing ponds are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world. -The ponds span 50 square kilometers and can be seen from space.
- Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conventional oil.

We have a stock in this Canadian enterprise, not only as habitants of a country through which the Canadian company wants to run a pipeline, but also as habitants of this planet suffering from climate change, but also  The proposed Keystone pipeline route through the US passes through the Ogawalla Aquifer, which provides water for 27% of the irrigated farmland in the US but also provides drinking water for 27% of the people living in this aquifer region. Jim Hansen, one of the most respected climatologists in the world, has said that giving permission to build this pipeline is a test case for  how serious the Obama Administration is about stopping or slowing climate change. In 2012 the atmospheric CO2 concentration showed, not a slow down, but a huge increase to the present value of 395 pmm.

It is not too late to stop this project! Lets call our Congressmen and Congresswomen.



Dr. Lagrange Would Be Smiling

In the late 1700's, the mathematicians, Leonhard Euler and Joseph Lagrange, discovered that there are five points where the gravitational attractions of two astronomical bodies exactly cancel out. Actually, due to the elliptical orbit of the earth, these are "areas" rather than points.
A diagram of the five Earth-Sun Lagrange sites is shown below (from Wikipedia).











These sites are not just of academic interest, but may actually be the saviors of the world!
This is a rather presumptuous statement, even for a molecular biologist like myself, so let me try to explain. In 1958 the Polish astronomer, Kordylewski,  observed the presence of large very faint clouds of dust at two of these Lagrange sites. And of course there have been many science fiction books using Lagrange sites for a variety of fantastic operations..  And then yesterday as I was imbibing my daily dose of Progressive News Blogs, I was startled to learn that NASA actually  has proposed a plan to robotically  "capture" a small asteroid in a net-like device (see below) and drag it to orbit the moon, where it could be intensively studied by manned expeditions. Wow! and double wow!!

http://tinyurl.com/cp7okjc











And now the plot thickens. A few months ago I read an article about a proposal by Russel Bewick, a graduate student (!),  and his collaborators in a paper in the Journal of Space Sciences. This is a respected journal and the paper, at least to my eyes, appears solid. They propose to drag a fairly large asteroid such as Ganymede 1036 to the L1 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, and to attach a "mass-driver" to maintain the position of the asteroid and also to generate huge clouds of dust. This dust cloud would encompass around 1,600 km and would be prevented from wandering off by  the gravitational pull of the asteroid. Berwick calculated that this cloud could produce a 1.6% reduction in the sunlight reaching the earth, too little to be actually detected by eye, but enough to decrease the temperature of the earth by around 2 degrees centigrade and eventually ameliorate the effects of global warming.

When I read this, I had said to myself that this is a  great idea but totally not feasible. But then came the NASA bombshell and what seemed  not feasible now seemed perhaps at least possible. But of course, the technology does not yet exist and the possible dangers abound such as making an error in the calculations (ie using English units and not metric units) and thereby letting the asteroid hit the earth and destroy 90% of the life, as happened 60 million years ago in the Yucatan.  But by the time we  have this technology, the accumulative effects of global climate change may be so horrible that this may be a chance worth taking to save our civilization. So my statement that the Lagrange Points may be the savior of the world may not be too crazy after all!

Blog Archive

Total Pageviews