John Coulter   China Daily 15 October 2010

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/2010-10/15/content_11415881.htm

Every year after the Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine are announced, the media in China ask when a Chinese will get such an award. The Nobel prizes may be authoritative, but they cannot be used as yardsticks to measure China’s scientific research.

I have been collaborating with educational institutions in Beijing for the past 10 years. Sometimes my Chinese colleagues ask me in bewilderment why none of their countrymen had won the Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry. Their voice drifts away when they talk about Chinese Nobel laureates in the United States or Europe perhaps to make the point that Chinese, too, are very intelligent.

There are problems in the Chinese education and research systems, because they lack and do not honor true creativity.

Once, I told my colleague at Tsinghua University in Beijing that if Albert Einstein was in a Chinese university today, he would probably be a gardener, for he would fail to conform to the existing norms. Before he could respond I cited from my personal experience. To demonstrate ratios, I had asked how many students were left-handed, ready to say something like six out of 31 is about 19 percent. I stopped dead in my tracks when not one hand was lifted. The hammer had hit the nail on the head. Perhaps natural left-handed children get knocked out early.

Yet reflection on the question leads to answers of other kinds, which in turn may augur well for China in the future and encourage a new quantum leap to better and insightful research.

First, the Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry is awarded typically a decade or so later after a pioneering research is completed. It was only in the 1980s that China began creating an environment conducive to international-level research. Second, the first waves of research in the 1980s and 1990s were more of a catch-up process, emanating from a low base. Thus it is unlikely that whatever original research was been carried out would be on the radar of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize.

The deepest concern was raised by the heroic Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman, who in 1965 said the building blocks of physics and chemistry, from atoms and protons to quarks, had already been discovered.

Any new work worthy of a Nobel Prize would necessarily be complicated, drawn out and time-consuming. This is manifest in the typical age of a Nobel laureate in recent times. The ages of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in chemistry are 80, 79 and 75. The two physicists who won this year’s Nobel may have been young at 52 and 36, but the 2009 winners ages were 86, 80, and 77.

Chinese scientists should look to the future with optimism. This year’s Nobel laureates in physics have pioneered the way forward for commercial production of a flexible skin made of a single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal patterned lattice. Its strength is hundreds of times greater than steel. This shows the way forward is to work on pragmatic applications rather than abstract theories.

In today’s China, new technologies are being encouraged, pursued and nurtured by governments and entrepreneurs in hundreds of labs across the country. “Renegades” like Einstein may no longer be able to make breakthroughs. Instead, teams – a complex but integrated network of scientists, engineers and administrators – have put China’s second moon rocket in place.

The successful launching of Chang’e 2 satellite shows how far China has traveled in outer space research. Perhaps the scientists engaged in research are not outstanding individually. But they really climb the scientific summit as a team.

The New York Times’ influential columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently wrote that China had four moon shots going, explaining that a “moon shot” was a 25-year horizon, multi-billion dollar game-changing research, development and implementation project. Friedman talked about new airports, bullet trains, electric cars (including recharging infrastructure). Most significantly, he was impressed by China’s visionary investment in bioscience, and the purchase of 128 DNA sequencers from the US.

It may not matter to the Chinese economy and society whether individuals or teams of two or three win the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry or medicine because the cohesion in China’s scientific push today is unprecedented in history.

The author is an Australian research scholar collaborating with academic and commercial institutions in China.

Unjamming the pedal of accelerating climate change

John E Coulter Published in Chinese in China Ministry of Environmental Protection journal, “World Environment”, 2010:3  Can be viewed below in  Chinese language section as original  posted 2010-5-28 

 Only two decades ago, weather was the most innocuous subject of conversation, consciously chosen to avoid sensitive subjects. “Nice day – do   you think it may rain tomorrow …?” Now the subject of abnormal events and possible disasters – of rising seas, for example – is a hot topic, hotter headlines than the sensational multi-million car recalls from jammed accelerator pedals. And with modern media technologies, news flashes from on-the-spot, and satellite photographs, we may forget that most of the weather is still normal, and enjoyable. We get the impression that natural disasters are on the rise because the media know they are a good sell and have the technology to deliver into to our living room.

 The fundamental fact about climate change is that climates do change.  Certainly abnormal weather makes the news, and hugely effects communities.  The World Metrological Organization defines an abnormal weather event as one that only happens every 25 years or longer, so some recent blizzards, droughts, extreme temperatures, torrential rain and super cyclones around the globe and in China are abnormal.

 With the global economy now squeezing the global environment in which it sits, humans have good cause to wonder, is it us that exacerbates the wind and rain and temperatures?  Of course, partly yes. We took 20 billion tonnes of fossils fuels in 2009 and burning the carbon in it turns it into 29 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted to the air, and that tonnage is building up faster each year. A bottle of the gas is invisible, but in huge amounts and mixed with other pollutant gases of ugly colors, and with suspended ash particles, it acts like the cover of a greenhouse, trapping hot sunlight in that would otherwise be reflected back to space.  Global Warming.  But this theory is hard to prove in a laboratory, because it is only on the scale of 10 km thickness of air that the effects might take place. 

 Skeptics laugh at the fact that some regions of the globe are being hit with abnormal blizzards, and they cannot imagine that 391 parts carbon dioxide in 1 million parts of clean air can do much damage.  After all, the carbon dioxide at that small portion does not poison us.  We breathe out carbon dioxide and we are okay.   

 But apart from the basic Green House Gas effect well known, our pollutant emissions probably cause other changes.  Even possibly working together accelerating climate change, and we are just starting to try to put the strands of science together that would result in gestaltic shock to see what is ahead.

 In a research program at Stanford University, a dozen different sciences are compared and meshed using units of exergy, which they refer to as a unifying currency.  In the 2006 Energy journal classic, “Quantifying Global Exergy Resources”, Weston Hermann of Stanford opens our eyes to a simple comprehension of what is going on on Earth, and of the positive options available if we properly integrate the dozen technologies available, and that the Stanford group are comparing and sharing.  But if we measure current exergy trends and do not change technologies we will see it could be like a jammed accelerator on climate change.  This is the core of Hermann’s description.

 (By the way, exergy is simply available energy.  The energy in a brick – the  energy in the nuclei – is gigajoules, but unavailable for use. The exergy of sunlight reaching the 12,700 km diameter Earth is 162,000,000,000,000,000 joules per second. We can shorten that to 162 petawatts, and Hermann says 162 PW.)

 When the 162 PW hits the upper atmosphere, 42 PW are immediately reflected and scattered. Approximately 86 PW are incident on the Earth’s surface, and heat it up. And here is where this approach leads us to a different part of science: But first the question for that different part of science – have you ever wondered how water gets up in the sky? Because in 24 hours, globally, on average 1,400 trillion tonnes as vapor is lifted a few kilometers high.  To get water vapor in the kitchen you cook it, using a few thousand joules of heat. Well, Hermann’s science gives us the answer to the question from the different view. Of the 86 PW hitting the Earth’s surface, 41 PW are used up in evaporating that mass of water. The lifted water floats in the air for an average of about 9 days and about 20% of that blown over land falls as rain or snow. But the increasing green houses gases may filter some of the incoming 86 PW, leaving a decrease in the 41 PW lifting power and the result can be extreme drought.  In the Figure, as an example, on a sample of ocean and land, pollutant gases reduce incoming sunlight to 82 PW and the power to evaporate to 39 PW. That filter is there constantly increasing and the droughts become more frequent and longer. This example shows the onshore wind to southern China which brings good rain and makes Yunnan in the hinterland a botanical paradise. However with atmospheric pollution intense (shown in deep red) sunlight’s capacity to evaporate water is reduced. Yunnan has experienced its worst drought in 80 years, and as industry continues to pollute, drier climate in south west China will become the norm.  

Another powerful fact is that the air in the day and the night sides of the globe heat up and cool down, expand and shrink, so the effect is like a dual chamber heart pump.  When we pollute the fluid circulation to the extent we have, extreme swings of temperature and precipitation can be likened to giving the natural cycles palpitations.  And a tiny change of 2 or 3 degrees can be a dangerous fever, as with a human body. What doctors call critical is in climate science called tipping point.

 Of course climate change can be viewed in several time scales. About 65 million years ago dinosaurs were wiped out by a very nasty climate change and humans were not to blame for that one.  About 70,000 years ago several species of hominids were wiped out, including the branch of Peking Man, and only about 10% hominids, including of course the species we have descended from survived. Main theory is ash around the globe from Toba Volcano in Sumatra, now a very large crater lake with core center island. 

 This is the first time humans must take some of the blame for affecting climate.  But it hurts to alter habits, and it hurts more when you hurt by trying to alter habits and your neighbors continue on with high life style.  Climate change is still debated, still scoffed at, and nearly everyone feels it is so gradual we still have time.  If the greenhouse gases effect causing global warming was the sole problem, and if we leveled out emissions we would have maybe a century of time, and the planet and people may even adjust.  But if it is true that pollutants in the air filter sunlight to the extent that there is less evaporating power, and if those pollutants change the pumping circulation, even slightly through chemical reactions and the physics of flows of different weighted, sized particles, then the combination could be a devilish synergy to accelerate climate change. We would be like the driver with a jammed gas pedal. 

 There is recall solution.  The first thing is to acknowledge with present practices the enjoyment of economic goods at the expense of environmental “bads” is, on a global scale, unsustainable.  The factory manager who dismisses the problem with a “it doesn’t matter” needs to be serious about altering practices. More importantly, public administrators and entrepreneurs, who in combination drive the economy, must come to comprehend that the climate change they think they are driving slowly, could possibly accelerate out of control. 

 Five millennia ago, sorcerers would toss tortoise shells on the ground and forecast the weather from the way they lay.  Emperors hung on to the results because bad harvests or floods implied they had lost the Mandate of Heaven.  We still get forecasts wrong, and the global carbon cycle and water cycles in the sea and air (el Nino etc) are far from being well understood.  But not using the science we do have means we are as superstitious as the ancient sorcerers.  A photograph from outerspace looking back at Earth reminds us we are a spaceship in a vacuum, and we now have the technology to damage where we live – the biosphere, as fragile and relatively, as thin as appleskin. 

Private selfishness combined with public environment recklessness was defined well in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in his classic essay, The Tragedy of the Commons.  Now Spaceship Earth is our common heritage.  On a spaceship small changes in conditions can prove fatal.   No smoking allowed.  By writing Scientific Outlook on Development into its Constitution in 2007, China has already changed its development paradigm in order to address the problems of the environment and climate change.  Now that Scientific Outlook needs to be implemented in an integrated way.  In a milestone national video/teleconference on 5 May 2010, the Premier has told officials at all level to use an “Iron Hand” in realizing energy targets, specifying the 6 main polluting industrial sectors. Exergy analysis can point the way, identify inefficiencies, and help us to be sure we do not get a jammed pedal into accelerated climate change.

There is something in the future I can see now. It is a world where the cost and consequences of what we do are obvious to all. Life is a long chain of small and big forks in the road, and we decide according to what we sense ahead. The decisions, depending on importance, can be described as subconscious, automatic, almost unthinking, pondering, dwelt on, discussed, agonized over. We are driven by thinking of the benefits. It is harder to think of the costs, to realize the costs, or even to be aware of or imagine the risks of high costs.

It is common for us to judge costs in time and money. The costs are supposed to be countable, and we estimate times to be taken for our actions. But there are hidden costs, hidden by ignorance or design. Consider the consequences of smoking. The money cost of the cigarette is inconsequential compared with the physical downside to the smokers health, and those else who inhale passively. Currently soci-economists try to put a money value on the costs of health issues – medicines, hospitalization, lower productivity, even earlier death. But the chemistry that excites/rewards our brain with a hit of nicotine must have a net negative effect if we draw the boundary to include not only the cigarette and the brain, but also the lungs, and lungs of passive inhalers. That chemistry, in a unified numeraire, is yet to be discovered, but will be.

Added 12 June 2011:

When I met Malte Faber at a cafeteria in the World Bank complex in Washington 1990, he told me when he looked at a car, he could “see and feel” the entropy not only out of the engine in exhaust pipe and radiated heat and noise and vibration, but in the cumulative entropy that went in to the entire supply chain from deliver to sales, back to assembly line, back to parts manufacture, raw material ingots, back through refining to mining and the earliest stage of exploration. That beautiful new car represents a lot of entropy.

Does not mean we stop enjoying cars.  But we should acknowledge that extrapolated growth with given technologies is impossible.  If we can measure that cumulative entropy, or what seems to be another way of putting it, exergy destruction, then our world and its future and what we want to do with it would look very different.

It is almost certain that the entropy Carnot confronted in 1824 and the energy (and useful energy) Joule experimented with mid 1800’s are not the right measure.  I suspect we need to go back to the ethereal idea of force, with emf being the dominant denominator.

Added 12 October 2020.  The cost of action (the initiative, the input) might be measured in electromagnetic forces that were previously locked up and now released (combustion. mainly) but the result, output has to be measured in “impoved orderliness” or lower entropy, or (for now) satisfaction, demand satiated, or  in price one is willing to pay,

by John E Coulter, translated by Renmin Uni postgrad Wang Zhuoni

Can be viewed as published in Chinese language section posted 2010-2-2

Consumption is now vaunted as the panacea to the Global Financial Crisis.  This is a sick solution and a knee jerk reaction by economists who do not see the big picture.  Hopefully statesmen will see that quickly consuming what you have leaves you with nothing.  Like the provisions in a life boat, because (economist do not know this but intelligent people should) the globe we live on is a life boat.  Dont economists/policy advisors get it?  We are on a totally isolated, finite, spaceship hurtling and spinning through the vacuum of space.  In terms of material resources, my gain is your loss. 

We cannot blame those clever people of two centuries ago who drove policy with a boundless New World vision.  But in 1966 our entire global living space was captured in a camera lens frame from an Apollo rocket and now we can no longer be small minded about our sustainability.  Let us rethink where we are at.

The epitome of a consumer is Pakman, the little bean eater in one of the first computer games appearing as a screen on a table in corner stores in the US in the sixties.  Pakman was just a caricature – a circle with a triangular mouth whose aim was to gobble whatever was in front of him.  The more the better.  The ultimate consumer.  There is just one issue with this scenario, now comes to the fore:  No matter what is out in front for the free taking, the faster the better, Pakman consumes but has no emissions – solid, liquid or gas.  If policymakers are advocating consumption as the solution to today’s problem, tomorrow’s resources will not be free. But there is a far more serious yet under-addressed problem of what to do with waste.  The throughput, equal in mass defined by number of atoms, comes out the backside.  Policymakers need to be responsible for where waste goes.

A Pakman world is a daunting science model.  You and me, as represented by Pakman, occupy a mere 0.07 cubic meters of space.  As primitives, on average we inhale air at 1.5 liters/second, drink 3 liters water and eat half a kilogram of grain a day.  Without O₂, we die in a few minutes, without H₂O we die in a few days, and without carbohydrate (C_xH_2xO_x) we cannot live long either.  But for a primitive person, the world seems boundless.  Even though not one atom of oxygen, hydrogen or carbon is created anew, or destroyed, the natural cycles of carbon and rain, driven by incoming photons from the sun, replenish resources needed. The small amount of waste is recycled by nature, and even some used water and excreta recycled by conscious design.   

Industrial Pakman is another matter.  Apart from basic human needs, the processes driving GDP divided by global population of 6.7 billion results is unsustainable consumption and horrific throughput of waste solids, liquids and gases.  Industrial Pakman operates on an average surface that is 80 meters wide and 280 meters long, and fortunately Pakman has another resource which is a vital natural temperature and air conditioning service – the sea, and for each of 6.7 billion of us, that averages 280 meters long and 200 meters wide (and 3,500 meters deep).  Each Pakman has an airspace of 760 million cubic meters, which seems so enormous we do not need to appreciate the fact. It is hard for us to imagine the scale, but as we enter the year 2010, a realistic inventory of resources and the ecological services brings a new view – a view that should hasten policy makers to look for new technologies, even new paradigms, and certainly not listen to relic economists advising extrapolation of growth by accelerated blind consumption.

A sphere of air averaged for each person on the planet would have a diameter of 1040 meters, and depicting Pakman in it at under 2 meters height makes him seem insignificant.  This was certainly the case for Primitive Pakman, and waste was inconsequential.  For Industrial Pakman, consumption over a life of 70 years and back-up of waste over that lifespan, at today’s rates, can be seen to be putting unbearable burdens on our finite surroundings. Table 1 sets out approximate data 

Table 1 lists the most basic resources we need and estimates the amount in tonnes an individual consumes and emits during a 70 year lifetime. 

It is important to admit, though economists never dream of this, that in material terms, physical consumption balances with aggregate waste.  A confusing factor in attempting to comprehend the seriousness of the problem is that historically the substances were not understood as chemical compounds, or in the case of oxygen and pollutant emissions, not even appreciated at all.  Founding economist, David Ricardo, in his 1817 defining tome on resources, pronounced water as “free” because of its abundance.  Even now, governments have trouble valuing water, when sometimes it is pure falling rain or flowing mountain streams, sometimes as disastrous muddy floods, and after farms, factories and households have run it through their systems, often as pollutant. The saying, until two decades ago in the West, “Gone up in smoke,” meant for something to disappear and be of no account.  Now some governments are willing to value that smoke (as carbon dioxide) at $20/tonne, and entrepreneurs are saying they will buy it for storage or some form of safe disposal at $70/tonne. 

Trying to aggregate land, sea and air as the three basic phases in physics – solid, liquid and gas in either tonnes or cubic meters is a dilemma that markets try to solve by fixing prices at the intersection of demand and supply curves in whatever units of measure.  This is the best working system we now have, and governments attempt to regulate economic activities by shadow pricing public resources like water and common land, and attempting to penalize polluters. 

But let not the science daunt us.  A puny 1.65 meter (average) Pakman is an actor. almost a bystanding interloper, not a master of his biosphere, though now with capability to make a mess of it.  If all the carbon dioxide a person produced in a lifetime (global 29 billion tonnes/population 6.7 billion people x 70 years) the 302 tonnes, if it were solid dry ice, would be a cube of sides about 7 meters. We could bury in some desert.  But the emission is a gas, dispersing now to make up 383 parts per million of the volume of the air.  That is not poisonous, and it is invisible.  The scientists promoting Green House theory are bold enough to predict that the increased entrapment of photons will raise global average temperature by a few degrees, and at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference one small island representative said he had cried when a ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius increase was dismissed for wording that capped at 2 degrees.

I do not think we can engineer the weather that finely.  But when Pakman gobbles 1900 tonnes of matter and then expels it as waste, that adds up to polluting the environment seriously, and we cannot foretell the consequences.  In 1971 Havard University Press published a book of momentous importance.  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process.  The author, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, was an economist of decades of respectable contributions to his discipline.  What he advocated was iconoclastic and revolutionary:  He criticized 2 centuries of economics as founded on Newtonian mechanical models – a perpetual motion machine of magical clockwork that was impossible, even in theory.  Economic processes are unidirectional flows: breathing, refining iron ore into iron, making cars… The phenomenon of entropy, discovered in 1824 by Carnot studying steam engines, and refined in 1876 by Gibbs to include all chemical processes is at work.  Encapsuled in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy always increases.  Fortunately for us, in finite material environment, the sun is an outside source which can replenish energy, and sustain our life giving flows.

Georgescu-Roegen’s book took the seventies by storm, coming at a time of environmental awakening (publishing of Silent Spring, Limits of Growth, and the oil crises) and he was feted around continents.  A follow-up explaining volume by activist Jeremy Rifkin had a foreword by Al Gore. But then the impetus died. Four reasons.  Firstly, entropy is a difficult concept even for students of thermodynamics and chemists who have to use it as an application is solving some problems.  The building blocks of its science will need to be taken down and restructured, probably needing quantum mechanics, to be of wider use.  Certainly its science was beyond the ken of an old economist like Georgescu-Roegen.  Secondly, as intuitively exciting as it was, it had no fit in the fields of information theory, art and the pseudosciences where it was usurped. Thirdly, the economist chant of “Markets will adjust” is true in the long run, and without entropy science, consumers eventually find out how expensive energy inefficiency and polluting can be, and production processes are adjusted, even if it takes ten years.  Finally, entropy was bad news for business and politics.  Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Regan in 1980 preaching humility of economic processes.  The bible of economics, titled simply Economics, by Paul Samuelson carried a page on entropy economics in the 1980 eleventh edition, then dropped it up till now in the current Nineteenth edition.

But the old iconoclast was right.  Old economics based on old science needs to be revamped on new science.  Consider this.  The First Law of Thermodynamics sets out that matter and energy cannot be created and destroyed.  So to talk of producing and consuming energy is unscientific.  Joule introduced the concept of energy and it actually conceals what goes on when chemical electromagnetic forces (in fuel) are converted to heat/work.  The scientific approach is to track exergy conversion to entropy.  On our Earth, for Pakman, not one atom of anything is created or destroyed (except in nuclear industry). We do not produce one atom of carbon, iron, or oxygen.  They are all parts of magnificent (dare I say supernatural) cycles. 

So Pakman is in his confined sphere, gobbling goods and excreting bads. In exactly equal tonnages.  That is the model we need from now on. Entropy always increases, and only the inputs from the sun, at a fixed rate, can replenish the cycle.  Of course our throughput of carbon far exceeds the photosynthesis that refixes carbon, and is a problem we need to sensible address.  Figure 1 is a start for this approach.