June 2007 Issue
READERS’ FORUM
We welcome Readers’ Forum letters of interest to the professions. Send
them to PEGG Managing Editor George Lee, glee@apega.ca. Although we will run
longer letters at our discretion, please try to keep them under 300 words. Letters
represent the opinions and not necessarily the expertise of writers. The PEGG
reserves the right to reject letters. Letters are edited for style, clarity,
length, taste and legality.
Real Conservation Issues Being Missed
Re: A Homegrown Canadian Fuel, The PEGG, April 2007.
It is refreshing to read of a commitment to alternative energy. However, your article underscored a lack of objective journalism in The PEGG.
The publication seems little more than cobbled together sound bites and corporate proclamations. There are some very difficult questions facing our profession and society, and this article misses some of those.
For example, the article condemns ethanol as a poor return on energy invested. Yet the return equals that of tar sands operations.
The province lacks an energy policy of any form, and the call for such a policy should emanate from APEGGA. Ideally, the policy will be a responsible, sustainable one.
Right now, governments and APEGGA merely follow corporate initiatives. I am not against corporate involvement, but we must remember that the corporate objective is based on maximizing shareholder profit, quarter by quarter.
There is currently no mechanism to encourage conservation of national resources, beyond weak environmental regulations and programs. The United States, in contrast, has a very well-defined priority of national energy security.
Energy policy must be based on long-term vision rather than short-term goals. As Canadians, we are lacking that vision.
Who better to provide it than scientific, and objective, professional engineers?
Our current path will lead us to complete depletion of our natural gas reserves and the use of nuclear energy to produce oil exports. As a province and a country, we need to examine what we are really selling and ask if the price is worth it.
Waren Orr, P.Eng.
Edmonton
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Mercury Pollution Connected to Autism
Re: Coal-Fired Power Plants Face Mercury Regulation, The PEGG, April 2007.
I am the acting municipal administrator of the Municipal District of Ranchland No. 66, west of Nanton. While reading my employer’s issue of The PEGG, I was pleased to discover that Alberta is taking steps to control mercury from coal-fired power plants, and I sincerely hope that other provinces and territories, as well as the federal government, realize just how important it is to get mercury under control.
I watch the whole mercury issue with great interest. I have a seven-year-old-son with autism. This was once a very rare condition, but recently released information from the Center for Disease Control in the United States shows that that is no longer the case. Now, one in every 150 American children is on the autism spectrum.
There is substantial evidence that mercury could be playing a huge roll in this pretty much worldwide epidemic. One only has to read the 2005 book Evidence of Harm by David Kirby to see the very plausible connection. Although this book only tackles mercury, which is still used in some childhood vaccinations as a preservative (thimerosal), it is mercury from all sources that poses a threat to all forms of life. It is second only to radioactive plutonium in toxicity for humans.
I have also read that counties in Texas with the highest incidences of autism were the ones with a coal-fired power plant within their boundaries or nearby. The increase in incidence of autism followed the rise in use of coal-fired power plants to produce electricity there.
Mercury has also been linked to a number of other conditions, among them attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, non-verbal learning disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, pervasive development delays not otherwise specified, speech disorder, Alzheimer’s and even Gulf War Syndrome. Someday it may be proven that a combination of genetic predisposition and heavy metal toxicity causes these conditions. Perhaps our genes may give us all different tolerances for toxins and a different ability to self detoxify.
If that’s so, it becomes obvious that children and the elderly would be our most susceptible populations and be the first to exhibit symptoms of high toxin exposure. This would also explain why autism seems to run in some families.
Any of your Association’s members who have a child or children with autism or one of the listed conditions, and believe that the condition is a heavy-metal toxicity issue, can seek support from a parental group based in Calgary called www.hopeforhealingchildren.org.
We meet once a month and we also have many links on our website to track down information about neurodevelopmental disorders and toxins, ways to detoxify these children, and doctors who believe in this theory and are willing to help you. An Edmonton branch of our group is in the works.
Gregory M. Brkich
Calgary
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Data Verification Not Independent
Re: Outdated Remarks Ignore Global Warming Data Verification, by J. Ed Mathison,
P.Geol., Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, May 2007.
Mr. Mathison continues to quote the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Mann, et al., 1998, 1999, and the Stern Review, even though they been shown to be variously incompetent, unrealistically biased or worse. He should spend time reading dissenting research and opinion if he honestly wants to come to grips with this or any other science-related issue.
To quote from the IPCC 2001 itself: “The fact that the global mean temperature has increased since the late 19th century and that other trends have been observed does not necessarily mean that an anthropogenic effect on the climate system has been identified. Climate has always varied on all time scales, so the observed change may be natural.” Why was this not among Mr. Mathison’s opening quotations?
The UN IPCC is a transnational bureaucracy. This is the same UN that many people consider consistently incompetent, corrupt and self-serving. It would be farcical if its activities hadn’t been so expensive and tragic. Why anyone would turn over any task to an arm of the UN is beyond me.
The panel has been highly selective in whom it chooses as authors. It has been biased in advance by socialist politics before scientists have made final reports, openly bullying anyone who dissents from the political line. It has been deliberately dishonest in its claims (de Frietas, Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, 2002; C. Landsea, open letter, January 2005).
Some IPCC lead authors have been scientifically unqualified but were apparently appointed by virtue of socialist activism sympathetic to a politically imposed agenda (Reiter testimony to the House of Lords, March 2005).
The IPCC is being compromised. It simply is not an honestly scientific investigator.
Mann, Bradley and Hughes, 1998, 1999, should never be mentioned as credible again. Mr. Mathison thinks their work has all been verified and that problems revealed were not serious. Let me reiterate that the fundamental data was edited in a severely and unacceptably biased manner, the statistical methodology was fatally flawed and, as a result, the conclusions were categorically invalid.
Mann, et. al., wouldn’t make their data and methodology freely available to other researchers upon request, which suggests they were hiding something (National Academy of Sciences, 2006). Even the most recent IPCC report has eliminated the famous “hockey stick graph” entirely rather than attempt to defend it, whereas in the previous IPCC it was repeated numerous times and triumphantly touted as “smoking gun” that ended all debate.
The Rutherford, et al., 2004, 2005, papers cited as confirming the aforementioned work lists as co-authors (wait for it) none other than Mann, Bradley and Hughes. This is obviously not independent confirmation. Papers by the same co-authors using the same flawed data and flawed methodology do not count.
The Stern Review has also been exposed as incompetent on scientific and economic-analytic grounds by Carter, et al., and Byatt, et al., World Economics, 2006. Stern is selectively and persistently biased in data sources and handling, persistently chooses unrealistic scenarios, gives too much weight to computer models and not enough to observations, consistently fails to quantify and reveal the degrees of uncertainty in scenarios, does not disclose significant gaps in knowledge, uses an unrealistic discount rate without justification — then consistently overstates costs and understates benefits. It is deeply flawed and does not constitute a basis for informed and responsible policies.
Climate-related panicky idiocy is not new. Von Storch and Stehr have documented
similar mass delusions for at least the last 250 years. The apocalyptic villain
of the story has reversed from cooling to warming at least four times in the
last century alone. The lesson is that hysteria repeats itself.
Is the climate changing? Yes. It has changed for about 4.6 billion years, virtually
all of which time passed before mankind had even evolved let alone industrialized.
Has the climate been warmer than now? Yes, several times in the geological past and written human history. Has the climate been colder than it is now? Yes, several times in the geological past and within written human history.
Nothing indicates that we’re outside of normal variation, let alone that humanity is causing any of the changes that are now occurring, have always occurred and will always occur. At least IPCC 2001 got that much right.
It is the most infantile form of anthropocentric ignorance to think that the climate we experience now is perfect, has been unchanged since the dawn of time and should be maintained at any cost.
It doesn’t matter how many well-intentioned but ignorant laymen believe the propaganda or how many demagogues and governments repeat the dogma: a stupid thing remains a stupid thing.
Hundreds of thousands of people still believe in astrology, homeopathy and palm reading, though they are demonstrably fraudulent and baseless. The number of adherents does not make them true.
To paraphrase Feynman, science is what we do to make sure that we’re not fooling ourselves into believing what we wish to believe. We need to remove hidden agendas, covert socialist activism, ersatz asceticism, basic incompetence and political manipulation from this debate.
Bob McAuley, P.Geol.
Calgary
Reviewing Own Work Underscores Bias
Mr. Mathison’s most recent letter once again overstates the case for anthropogenic
global warming and, more seriously, may mislead your readership.
The way coauthors of one paper frequently serve as peer reviewers of the next was the focus of harsh criticism by the Wegman inquiry of 2006, as pointed out in my previous letter.
Mr. Mathison avers that the paleoclimate data “now allow for a high degree of confidence in reconstructions back 1,300 years.” In doing this, he continues to ignore the previously stated conclusions of the National Academy of Sciences, 2006.
The report stated that “the uncertainties associated with reconstructing
hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures [from AD 900 to 1600] from these
data increase substantially backward in time through this period and are not
yet fully quantified” and “very little confidence can be assigned
to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature
prior to about A.D. 900.”
This “high degree of confidence” appears to exist only in Mr. Mathison’s
imagination.
Mr. Mathison omits critical facts. For example, the IPCC AR4 report states that, “It
is also likely that [the second half of the 20th century] was the warmest Northern
Hemisphere period” in the last 1,300 years.
Therefore, his statement ignores the entire Southern Hemisphere. It also fails to acknowledge that the IPCC definition of the word “likely” means greater than 66 per cent probability, which is in no way equivalent to “a high degree of confidence.” By statistical criteria, it’s really awfully weak.
If the IPCC had a greater degree of confidence in that statement, they would have used the phrase “very likely” (greater than 90 per cent probability) or “virtually certain” (greater than 99 per cent probability).
Mr. Mathison seems to have great faith in the veracity of the proxy data and appears unaware of many serious issues that have been raised with regards to the applicability of tree-ring data, in particular, to temperature reconstructions. We should all have serious concerns even about the IPCC’s weak conclusions.
Confounding factors such as precipitation and carbon dioxide fertilization have been ignored, serious breaches of the scientific method have been identified, and researchers have refused to reveal their data for independent evaluations. I strongly encourage any interested parties to visit the web site of Steve McIntyre — one of the men who “broke the hockey stick” — at www.climateaudit.org for more insight into the sorry state of paleoclimate research.
Dr. Nathan Schmidt, P.Eng.
Edmonton
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Faulty Logic Of the IPCC
The IPCC logic goes like this: there is a net increase in carbon content of the
atmosphere of about 3.6 gigatonnes per year and the anthropogenic carbon release
to the atmosphere is eight gigatonnes per year. Therefore, if manmade emissions
were reduced, the carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere would be reduced.
Although on the surface this appears logical, in our incredibly complex ecosystem there are many sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, all interacting and to some extent interdependent. The overly simplistic analysis above is false and a review of the observed carbon dioxide data from around the world proves it.
Observations of the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory sampling network — which covers the world — are radically different in the Northern Hemisphere from those in the Southern Hemisphere. In the north there is a very pronounced annual cycle of concentration from a maximum in the winter to a minimum in the summer.
The conclusion is that since the north has a large amount of seasonal vegetation, during the growing season there is a large uptake of carbon dioxide, which reduces the atmospheric concentration. Graphs demonstrate the magnitude of the CO2 consumption by vegetation alone.
In the south from the equator onwards there is virtually no annual cycle. A small cycle shows up further south but it is opposite in seasons to the north, which is to be expected.
The most important conclusion is that there is virtually no mixing of the
air masses of the north and south. If there were, the cycle seen everywhere in
the north would be imprinted on the south.
Approximately 94 per cent of the world’s anthropogenic carbon is released
in the Northern Hemisphere. This translates into 7.5 gigatonnes per year in the
north and 0.5 in the south.
Per hemisphere, one gigatonne of carbon would increase the CO2 level by almost exactly one p.p.m. It is logical, therefore, that the CO2 level should be at least 28 p.p.m. higher in the north than the south since the retention time for CO2 is approximately four years.
Also, for five months of each year the CO2 level is lower in the north than the south. There is a minimum difference between the annual average CO2 levels in the north and south, as a maximum two p.p.m. The rate of increase in CO2 levels has been identical — 40 p.p.m. in 25 years.
The question becomes if there is such a large disparity in CO2 emissions between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and there is very little mixing, why are the CO2 levels and rates of increase the same?
The answer to this question is relatively simple, considering the total annual CO2 cycle is estimated to contain 200 gigatonnes of carbon, of which only eight gigatonnes is anthropogenic.
The total world atmosphere contains 760 gigatonnes of carbon, so all the CO2 is recycled in less than four years. This makes the propaganda concerning the anthropogenic CO2 emissions affecting our environment for the next 150 years totally without foundation.
A vast amount of research has been done to determine the effect of increased CO2 content in the atmosphere on the growth rate of every type of plant. The results vary widely with different plants but on average a 300 p.p.m. increase in CO2 generates a 40 per cent increase in growth rate. Since the 7.5 gigatonnes of anthropogenic carbon represents only two per cent of the Northern Hemisphere’s atmospheric carbon, it is not difficult to conclude that this increase can be absorbed by the increased uptake by the vegetation.
A more credible cause of global warming is outlined in the Sami Solanki paper, which details the changes in solar irradiance and its effect on our temperature. The paper shows a divergence between solar irradiance and temperature after 1980, which can be explained by the fact that an increasing global temperature due to increased solar irradiance will cause an increase in water vapour in the atmosphere, the primary greenhouse gas. The oceans will outgas more CO2, a secondary greenhouse gas, than they absorb, and this combination causes the increase we see today.
The effects today are to some extent self correcting, since the added water vapour in the atmosphere will eventually increase the cloud cover, causing a decline in temperature, resulting in more water vapour condensation, therefore more clouds, etc. Once the oceans start to cool they will uptake more CO2 and the pattern of varying temperatures and CO2 content which we have observed through proxy data such as the Vostok ice core samples for the last 700,000 years will be repeated.
All of the above data is factual and verifiable, unlike the constant stream of vague and unsubstantiated hypothesis put forward by Kyoto supporters. If anyone can provide solid scientific data and an alternative explanation for the CO2 data analysis, I would be very pleased to read it.
Barry A. Moore, P.Eng.
Calgary
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What Message Do Billboards Send?
Re: APEGGA Ads Send Powerful Message, The PEGG, May 2007.
The mentioned campaign is indeed very simple. Like every campaign with billboards along a highway where drivers pass them at full speed, it has to be. Simple images that tell all. Simple messages that are easy to understand.
But in making the message so simple, what message is APEGGA actually sending the public? Let’s take the billboard pictured with the story as an example.
A gas pump nozzle is shown. Very simple, very easy to understand. And it rides on what makes Alberta rich these days: oil.
It is “brought to you by” the APEGGA professions. This is a trip back into the old days of TV, where shows were “brought to you by” a company or a product. A catchphrase easily recognizable. A way to soften the message, to make it more appealing.
An old, reliable gas pump nozzle. A familiar item in everyday life. Delivering a product essential to everyday travel. From extraction to your car, “Professionals in Engineering and Geoscience” are making it possible.
But two things struck me.
First, there is no splash guard on the nozzle. Exit public protection.
Then, the basic design of the gun is decades old. Exit innovation.
I thought that public safety and innovation were two of the most important
traits of our profession. Why did APEGGA choose not to raise the awareness of
the public about these two points?
And what about things left out of this picture? Fossil fuels are at the heart
of the greenhouse gases debate.
Could APEGGA have done things differently and left a more permanent impression on the public? Something that could have shown a more interesting, or bolder, aspect of the engineering and geoscience world?
How about a picture of the nozzle with the text: “Imagine your car running without gas. Professionals in Engineering and Geoscience are working on it.” That would have raised a few eyebrows.
I think APEGGA missed a chance to promote the future of engineering. We cannot pretend to go forward when we only contemplate the marks left by our steps.
Pierre Lapalme, P.Eng.
Laval, Que.
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Project Seeks Crowsnest Miners
Have you ever worked in the Crowsnest mines? Do you know of someone who did or
do you have a relative who has worked in the mines? The Mantrip Project needs
your help.
The Crowsnest Pass Ecomuseum Trust Society (Bellevue Underground Mine) has received a grant from the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation to hire a researcher to collect names and other information about underground and surface coal miners in the Crowsnest Pass between about 1890 and 1982. By gathering names, supporting information and stories about miners, the trust will develop a time capsule that truly portrays coal mining in the Crowsnest Pass.
Data collected will include names of miners, birthdates, countries of origin, employment records with dates, tag numbers, mines worked, mine occu-pations, nicknames, certifications, and work incidents such as accidents, near misses and deaths. The Mantrip Project, as it is formally known, will also seek short anecdotal information to help bring colour to the life of the miner, reflecting such aspects as comradeship, union activities, social, safety, humour and specific jobs.
The data, once compiled, will be comprehensive and centralized to allow for easy access. It will be available to the public, genealogists, researchers and historians. Sources will be noted for those who wish to do further research.
We are researching local sources at this time and would like public input. If you are a miner, a former miner or someone with relatives or friends who mined in the Pass, we would like to hear from you. Miner profile sheets are available on our website, www.bellevue mine.ca, by e-mail through Rudy Pagnucco at mantrip@crowsnestguide.com, or by phoning Diane Peterson at 403-563-3217.
Mantrip, by the way, is the name miners gave to their rides down to their “rooms” from the surface. They rode in coal cars modified to seat them. Miners would head down in groups and be dropped off at their work places. A miner’s trip would vary from a half hour to an hour and a half long, depending on the level and distance from the mining entrance.
Coal mining in the Pass involved working in slopes of up to 85 degrees. This type of underground coal mining was labour intensive, because in most cases there was no motorized equipment to rely upon.
Eva Welsh
Project Coordinator