Richard Zurawski

I have a confession to make. I am nuts about science and how it works. I am telling you this because I just can’t seem to stop reading and thinking about all the information that science has given us. And for every book I read there seem to be at least a dozen that I want to read. And this time of month is a bonus for me because my all time favourite magazines, Scientific American and American Scientist arrive in my mailbox.

I am a factual reader. I read almost anything about science that I can lay my hands on. I like bios and history as well, but its science that turns my crank. But if I can’t find science or history, I will read anything and I have to admit that I do have a few novels in mind as soon as I exhaust the factual part of my wannabe library. The long and the short of it is that not only do I get almost all of my information from reading, reading is also a wonderful recreation for me. And the flip side of it is that I also love to write, ergo this blog, my weather books, scripts for my documentaries etc. So it came as a bit of shock to me when I read in the newspapers that people are reading less than ever. Here is Halifax we seem to have some very good anecdotal evidence to that. The Daily news has just shut down and the oldest bookstore in Canada, the Book Room, went out of business last month. It seems that people are playing on the internet more than ever before and don’t have the time or disposition to read.

ipods, on-line games, Facebook, Myspace, chat rooms are the way that young people seem to entertain themselves these days. When I wander into my local books stores, I don’t see the crowded isles or a whole lot of young people. Bookstores are coming to resemble malls. They now sell nic nacs, souvenirs, candles, have coffee shops attached to them, and even bring in musicians to value add for potential customers. Frankly, I don’t think this will get more people into buying books.

I worry that this marvelous tool that we have, one that took us out of the dark ages and set use on the path of civilization five thousand years ago, the alphabet, is becoming obsolete. I know that Socrates warned of the evils of reading and books because he feared that thinking would be diminished because people would rely on books to think for them. But I wonder whether we are playing with fire as we implement changes in technology so rapidly, basically because the businesses of the world think they can market more products.

So much of what we consume on the internet or on our cell phones, blackberries and ipods doesn’t require us to read in any depth or assimilate information. We are becoming a society of the increasingly entertained and we play with pictures, images and sounds, not words. As the toys we use become smarter and smarter there is less and less of a need for us to read or write, to use the alphabet, the technology upon which we have built our civilization. Books are increasingly seen as tedious, old and boring. And yet to me, the best investment I ever made was when I walked into my first library, plunked myself down in a gigantic, overstuffed chair with a dozen books I had plucked from the shelves and spent my time entering an amazing world of words, ideas and information. It would sad to be the last man reading, no matter how compelling sounds and images from the latest that the internet has to offer.

It seems that no matter what we promise, we find ways to rationalize the breaking of those promises. We are nothing if not creative is the ways we look for loopholes. Take the promises of keeping space a non military place. Back in the good old days when there were only a couple of superpowers, it was us and them, the good guys and the bad guys and the programme was simple. Both The US and the USSR promised that space was a civilian pursuit and a new frontier of science and technology. Though, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, we really new it was all a military exercise, trying to get an edge over the other guy.

But we accepted that because it was like nuclear weapons. By and large you knew who the players were and what the risks were and even though the risks could be onerous and even down right dangerous, the permutations and possibilities were limited to a few scenarios. But like everything technological, that stable equilibrium point was a chimera. It rapidly morphed into a hydra of possibilities, nightmares and a host of players.

Now we have the Chinese, the Europeans, the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Americans and the Israelis in the space game. Need I go on? They all have the capability of throwing up rockets that can orbit the Earth, carry devastating payloads and weapons and strike any place in the Earth in under an hour. And if you think that our much vaunted spy satellites will keep us safe, think again. Anything that can be built, can be much more easily and simply destroyed. And explosive missile can render the most sophisticated systems to nothing more than space debris.

So why are we doing this in the first place? I mean, if its all so incredibly vulnerable, why bother. Its like everything else in our lives. We are looking, quite literally, looking for the proverbial “Killer App”, something that is out there that we haven’t yet discovered that is going to give us an insurmountable and devastating edge. We are looking for that sharp pointy stick that is going blind the other guy before he can retaliate and blind us as well.

But until we find it, if we ever do, all we are doing is finding new and better ways to destabilize an already, incredibly precarious balance of power. By throwing space wide open to weapons and hoping that we can use space to dominate the world, and folks, don’t kid yourselves, that is what this space race is all about, we are raising the stakes, providing another platform for ill intentioned people to visit incredible harm to any place on the planet.

Inherently, it appears, we can’t escape the fact that we are all rock throwers. And now we will up the ante from rocks to rockets.

Its oh so convenient and ubiquitous. Now its a plague. What was the whispered to be the future is now here to stay in the present.

In addition to spewing reams of climate changing gases into the atmosphere our industrious and burgeoning petrochemical industry that has spawned an effluent that is everywhere. About six months ago I saw a story on the wires about a patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean that staggers the imagination. More than 100 million tonnes of plastic, or 2.5 per cent of all the plastic produced since 1950 is now floating in this manmade dump that is fouling the largest ocean in the world. The patch is estimated to be about the size of the entire United States and is growing.

In my travels around the world, no matter where I have gone I have found plastic. My most memorable encounter with our waste was outside a small ancient Sassanid fortress called Rein about 40 kilometres from the city of Kerman in Iran. The beauty of that country and the desert left me speechless. As I looked out across the desert to the foot of the distant mountains I saw what I though was a desert flower bloom. As far as I could see the were multi-coloured patches that I thought were desert flowers blooming. I took a bit of a stroll into the scrub and realized that what I was seeing was not the bloom of flowers, but rather colourful pieces of plastic caught on the dried up desert plants. It was a startling revelation. The entire desert was covered in this multihued detritus. Here I was in a remote desert close to the Afghan border and the commercial waste of our civilization was there with me.

No matter where I have travelled our plastic has been there before me, befouling land and water. Its outrageous and deadly. On one level it spoils the esthetics of the scenery, but on another its a waste that will last thousands of years and it gradually breaks down, will release toxins and poisons back into the environment, that is unless it is ingested, or tangles the other creatures of our planet first and strangles them from within and without.

On so many levels plastic is a metaphor for bad. A plastic person is artificial, untrustworthy. Plastic money the road to indebtedness. Plastic is cheap. And now plastic is deadly, everywhere and a sign of what our civilization is.

How many animals have to die horrible deaths, choking, starving deaths before we stop making this blight? Its not just shopping bags, but appliances, computers, consumer items, building materials, clothes, wrap, garbage and on and on. Its precisely because it is so convenient and cheap that we have let our love affair with consumerism create create a monster of awful proportions. Next time you buy, think of where what you buy will end up, when it is no useful to you. How will become part of the solution? Don’t buy as much, slow the consumerism down. Think.

Ever hear the quote from P.T. Barnum? “There’s a sucker born every minute” Well, it seems that we are awash in people who are trying to separate you from your hard earned money and nowhere is that effort stronger with more fraudulent claims that in the “green” movement.

My latest run in with quack science and pseudo scientific claims is with the folks who peddle green laundry solutions, new ways to clean but without all those nasty detergents and toxins that inevitably enter the ecosystem.

There is this thing called “laundry discs” that consist of three plastic encased ceramic discs that you throw in with the laundry. They are supposedly good for 700 washes and say they will clean your clothes at a fraction of the cost of regular laundry detergent and without all the pollution. Nice idea. But how do they work? Well first off, inside the package, the instructions recommend the use of laundry detergent in conjunction with the discs. They also recommend using borax and bleaches in conjunction with the product. Sound fishy? Sort of defeats the purpose doesn’t it? They go on to say the discs create ions from the electrically charged ceramic discs. Any chemistry student knows that water is full of ions to begin with. Its called pH and measures the acidity or baseness of the water. So how do the discs create more ions and if they do how do they keep the chemistry from immediately bonding them back together? Then there is the problem of the electrically charged discs. How in blazes do they stay charged in the water??? Its just a bunch of ceramic beads rattling around in a plastic case! And they sell this stuff and its not cheap!

Its pure hokum, pseudo scientific words making outrageous, impossible claims. Now generally, I really don’t care about the loads of BS out there, laundry loads included, but it is particularly galling when business preys on our desires to use less, make less of an ecological impact, to line their own pockets. And when this stuff is sold as an eco panacea in local so called “green” stores its even worse. I found this product in a local large Halifax green store on Quinpool. And I am sure that its well meaning clientele have been picking it off the shelves in the hopes that not only saving money, but reducing the ecoburden as well. Both the store and the folks who buy this stuff need to get a short lesson in science.

Quack, quack! Back to P.T. and his adage. Folks, learn some basic science and be a little skeptical. If it sounds too good to be true, it is! If you really think that three plastic encased ceramic discs will clean your laundry for two years, then you probably think that Elvis is still alive as well. We seems to suspend our thinking when we hear phrases like “ions” “electrically charged” or “electrostatic”.

Now where was that carburetor that runs on water and gives me 100 miles to the gallon?

We have been tricked by the sensationalists elements in the media into believing that science and science advancements is all about big money, huge instruments, mega machines and projects that cost billions of dollars. But science is done in a thousand different ways, by people who work their craft in the Maritimes and not at Harvard or Oxford or Stanford. A wonderful example is the astronomical work of David Lane and Professor David Turner of Saint Mary’s University.

With a billions and billions of galaxies each with billions and billions of stars, in astronomy if you want to do some original work, you stand a good chance, especially if you pick the group in the northern regions of the sky.

Now Nova Scotia is not noted for its great “seeing”. Something to do with the weather I am told and the fact that clouds, fog and rain hide the night sky for protracted periods. That didn’t stop David Lane from building his robotic, remote controlled observatory in Stillwater Lake, Nova Scotia. It allowed David Turner an opportunity to focus his attention on a group of stars in Cepheus, a northern hemisphere constellation, called Cepheids, pulsating giant stars whose mass is perhaps 60 to 100 times that of our lowly sun. These stars are fantastically hot and in the spectral class O, burning their nuclear fuel, hydrogen, at a prodigious rate. Where our sun has lived some five billion years and will probably continue to steadily burn for another five, making it an ideal star for us to have picked to place our planet around. O type stars on the other hand though millions of time brighter than our sun only live a few million years and flame out in incredible supernova explosions that make them brighter than all the other stars in the galaxy for a  few months. Needless to say not a great place to place life and a planet next to for long term stability.

Both Davids have published a paper about a star system that has such a star in a vast cloud of interstellar material. What makes this star interesting is that it has a very bright companion orbiting the primary star every five days or so. The fact that this star is binary allows some very interesting science to be done on its mass, composition, spectral type and a host of other questions.

The advancement of science, even in an area as esoteric as astronomy, from instruments, though modest compared to the mega and hyper projects that fill the news headlines, is of incredible importance. Science come from thought, study, information collection and research. It comes from the minds of people like David Lane and David Turner. It comes from asking questions and finding ways around whatever obstacles one finds.

Imagine, as the weather becomes better and the seeing better, all the questions that we asked even a few hundred years ago about our place in the universe. Now think about the studies, the careful observations and advancements being made by small science, by people like David and David. Cudos guys!

Every time you get up, walk, stop, sit down, move you not only use energy, but you waste energy. Now some bright, enterprising young engineer has created a device that allows you to waste less. Its a small device that is attached to your upper leg that makes use of the energy that you use is getting from A to B and converts it to a rechargeable  battery. Its small enough that it takes very little energy and its efficient enough to keep a cell phone and a host of other devices permanently operating. Camera batteries, cell phones, computers and host of our other ubiquitous devices that all need batteries now have the potential of being run off a small power converter that taps into energy that would otherwise go unused and wasted.

What an amazing leap forward. Now imagine where this will take us. I am going to spend a few paragraphs on a flight of fancy and I urge you to do the same and see what you come up with.

How many of us work out in gyms. Imagine if we harnessed the tread machines, the stair masters, the free weights, the bow flexes et al to a converter that could store that otherwise wasted energy. Want home heat? Just get your kiester on that stationary bike and do a few miles. There are huge numbers of people out there who we could harness into the grid just through exercise alone. I could even see a cottage industry where we tap into people who have nothing better to do than to provide energy to the grid. You could become a career energy provider. Down on your luck and need a few bucks? go down to the local energy bar and cycle a few kilowatts into the grid and get your next meal.

Instead of having people wander the streets begging for coins, you could just hook them into the grid and get your energy from them as well as a service for all the coins. I could even imagine some enterprising sorts out there, and there is no shortage of them, is there, creating a bank of willing bodies for the lazier among us who would like to hire other people’s kinetics to keep warm, toasty and flush in energy.

It could even go further. We could mandate that all sporting events, amateur and professional, have a energy recapture system from all the athletes that would power the sports channels. But why stop there There are pets, pet walkers, just about anything that moves could become a portable battery charger. Imagine a new born being outfitted right from birth with devices that would keep us in lights, electricity and warmth. All their wiggling and squirming would truly be boon since we are making so many new babies, some 90 million a year!

The adage “be careful what you wish for” might apply in this case. Instead of creating more energy, perhaps we should consider using less. The end of my flight of fancy!

It’s time to have another peek at the greatest source of energy on, I mean off the planet. And by that I mean solar power. The energy that drives 99.999% of all things on this planet comes from the sun. Geothermal and nuclear power make up the other .0001%. Plants seem to have the right idea. The vast fossil fuel stores of oil, natural gas and coal are just solar energy stored in carbon form. 350 to 400 million years ago the vast fossil fuel stores were created by an amazing ecosystem upon which our modern society is currently choking itself to death.

Its time to step back to the progenitors of those fossil fuels and instead of burning them we have to emulate them. We have to learn how to power our technology through the sun. And it appears that we are making some headway in that respect. Solar panels have become far more reliable and energy efficient over the past decade. Though they still have a long way to go, they are providing many homes with safe, clean and long term energy.

But there is still a long way to go. Just as scientists a few hundred years ago looked to the birds in their efforts to understand how to fly, we have to look at the ultimate users of solar energy, plants, in order to understand how best to make use of the sun. Every tree leaf and blade of grass, quietly, efficiently and safely converts the power of the sun into energy to growth, feed itself and procreate. It disassociates CO2 into its constituents, lowers atmospheric CO2 in the process and makes oxygen, the gas of life for the rest of us to breathe. All this is powered by the sun and only the sun. And only a fraction of the sun’s power is tapped in the process. There is still a huge amount left over that gets radiated back into the vastness of space surrounding the Earth.

The chemical that plants have discovered that allows them to corral the sun’s power is Chlorophyll. Its an amazing chemical, one that has already been worked into the ecosystem and one that is almost everywhere recognized as the universal solar converter. While we mess with toxic rare earths, plants have already sorted it all out and made incredible use of their solar converter.

We in the West are at the forefront of technology. We in the west have also created the vast proportion of the world’s climate change problems. We have achieved what we have achieved on fossil fuels and in the process made it impossible for the developing countries. They are in a lose lose situation. They lose if they do not use fossil fuels and they lose if they do. It falls upon us in the West to make the next great leap ahead, develop the technologies that will allow us all to live in harmony with the world around us. It is quite possible solar research is the ultimate answer and we have to look no further than our own front yards. After all it was done before when the ancestors of grass and the trees came into being some four billion years ago. Time to revisit the obvious.

Now here is something that really, pardon the weather pun, frosts my shorts. The expression is appropriate though. In its efforts to make sure the Federal Government climate agenda receives no resistance from any part of the government, the Ministry of the Environment has muzzled its weather scientists. They have to toe the government line on the issues of weather and climate change, no matter what the studies, researches and information say. All this so that Minister Baird can continue to have an easy ride with the outrageous stances the Feds take in climate change a justify doing nothing about lessening the burden on our hapless atmosphere.

So, what if the Federal Environment Minister is the country’s most prolific purveyor of hot air. Here’s a little taste of his policies perspective. He is a staunch proponent of biofuels, one of the most misguided and stupid plans for the reduction of green house gas emissions ever. Biofuels actually create more climate change gases in the long run. Then there are the tar sands, an atmospheric, geologic and chemical scar on the ecosystem, one that keeps us rich because of the market of our best customer, the US. Its the single biggest source of CO2 in Canada! Baird stunned the world at Bali Climate Change Conference and embarrassed Canadians worldwide with his rhetoric about climate change which was designed to appease the US, Chinese and Saudi petrochemical interests and do as little as possible in stemming emissions. Baird’s idea of progressive climate change action is to defer any substantial action until 2050 and let the good times roll until then.

In Environment Canada we possess some of the best minds in the world studying climate and weather and offering their expertise and findings to any who have wanted it. Though they were funded by the government, until this government, they were never interfered with. Now all that has changed. The government muzzle is being clamped down hard. No scientists may talk with the media before his or her findings have been cleared by the Minister’s office. I have to ask, what expertise in the climate and meteorology does Baird have and how is it that his buffoonish ideas hold any sway at all?

Here is yet another example where this government seeks to control information, crucial, all important information, that comes from the people who actually study, understand and work with information about the climate, who are on the front lines in collecting the data, interpreting it, creating meaningful projections and scenarios. Yet they are now forbidden from releasing their finding to you and me, the people who pay for the studies, who must have this information in order to make informed decisions. What right does this government have to control what scientific information you and I have access to? How dare they muzzle climatologists and scientists in order to make their own propaganda look better. I am outraged. There is no excuse for this kind of Kafkaesque policy.

Let’s all go out and turn the power off for a day to do something green for the Earth. Let’s go out and sing for peace. Let’s get Hollywood celebrities to donate their time to charities. Why on Earth are we attracted to the idea of doing something and yet avoid the real issues so vehemently.

We did this in the 1980s when the African Sahel was hit with a massive drought that killed millions. It was the first onslaught of climate change and it made the career of a mediocre performer, Bob Geldoff, frontman the even worse Boomtown Rats. He assembled a huge ensemble of so called talent and celebrities, kicked off a campaign to “feed the world” and got super celebrity Michael Jackson, when he wasn’t rooming with young boys on his estate, to write the jingle. It earned him a knighthood from that privileged royal enclave in the UK and we all felt so much better that we could contribute something for those poor people over there.

When was the last time you looked at the Sahel, or whistled that godforsaken pap they composed and sold. The Sahara has gotten bigger, more people continue to die, poverty, famine and the daily struggle to live has, if anything, gotten worse. What “feed the world” didn’t do was get us to examine the real issues behind the misery and change, nor did it stop us from exploiting the regions for all we were worth in any way our businesses saw fit.

Now we have a crazy idea that if we turn out the lights and power for a hour during the day it will draw attention to the fact that there is climate change under way and we should do something. There already is the IPCC report out there folks. Its the largest, most comprehensive study ever taken by humanity and even though it was watered down by the business interests of the US, China, Saudi Arabia and even Canada it still has all the facts and conclusions that should impress any person who reads it. And since its release a scant six months ago we have new evidence that points to melting in the Arctic that is worse than even the worst case scenario offered by the report.

Instead of turning out the lights and power for a hour or day or whatever, if you really want to make a difference, stop the consumption of any new goods unless it is absolutely necessary, don’t use anything disposable, make your own lunches, dinners and coffee, buy local, whole, unprocessed food, take the bus or walk and bicycle, forgo the vacation that involves air travel or car travel, boycott plastic, turn down the heat/AC, if you must drive, drive slowly and never above 100kmh, make a pact with your partner to have only one child, and look at everything from a consumption standpoint.

And sadly that is just the start. Turning down the lights and stopping power consumption for an hour is worse than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It makes people feel like they are doing something, when in fact they are deluding themselves. Time to stop pretending. Time to do something.