Get Real with Vaclav Smil

 

The headline doesn't really rhyme, because Professor Smil's last name is pronounced "smill" to rhyme with "will."  But getting real is what Vaclav Smil does in his latest book, How the World Really Works.  And the reality that he presents, with incontrovertible evidence in the form of wide-ranging statistics and little-known but vital processes and connections among global economic flows, show that the highly-touted future of a fossil-fuel-less economy in ten or even thirty years is a pipe dream.  Not that it shouldn't happen—Smil tries to avoid the familiar political grandstanding beloved by both sides of the climate-change issue, with fairly good success.  What he excels in is showing in great but fascinating detail how essential but little-known industries such as ammonia synthesis play critical roles in sustaining the eight billion or so people on the planet, and that realizing a global zero-carbon economy any time soon would cause mass starvation.

 

Who is Vaclav Smil?  In reading his columns in the professional journal IEEE Spectrum, I wondered that myself while admiring his unorthodox but always fact-based take on various technical issues of the day.  He recently retired from a distinguished professorship in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba.  He is the only academic I have come across recently who can lay some claim to being a Renaissance man, having published in areas as disparate as population demographics and energy policy.  In whatever field he chooses to write about, however, he likes to start from the facts.

 

For example, if you were asked what are the four material pillars of modern civilization, what would you say?  Silicon, because it's used in virtually all computers and information technology?  Glass, because it forms the material backbone of the Internet?  Smil would disagree.

 

His choices for the four pillars are steel, concrete, plastics, and—the oddest member—ammonia.  Why ammonia?  Because ammonia synthesized from nitrogen in the air and natural gas is the source of the vast majority of chemical fertilizers used throughout the world.  German chemist Fritz Haber figured out how to do that by 1911, and the Haber process still provides most of the world's supply of nitrogen fertilizer, without which you get things like the recent collapse of Sri Lanka, which was caused largely by an out-of-touch government ordering all the nation's farms to switch immediately to non-chemical-fertilizer farming.  But the Haber process needs hydrogen, which comes from natural gas.

 

Plastics, the second pillar of modern society, are made mostly from petrochemicals or sometimes what used to be called "coal-tar derivatives."  Either way, they come from fossil fuels.

 

Concrete, without which we couldn't build most of the large-scale built infrastructure we have, is made with Portland cement, which in turn has to be manufactured with large amounts of coal, or sometimes natural gas.  Anyway, you need fossil fuels to make cement.

 

And steel is made in blast furnaces fired with coke, which is derived from coal.

 

Besides these four pillars, which have to remain in place if the six billion or so people who live less-than-average-income lives hope to improve their lot, all airplanes and nearly all ships burn fossil fuels.  Battery-powered planes or ships to carry even a small fraction of the vital international trade on which modern society depends will not be available for many decades, if ever.  So for the foreseeable future, we are stuck with using fossil fuels for a wide variety of essential processes and products without which most of us would have to crawl away somewhere and die of starvation. 

 

So what do we do, just give up on fighting climate change and get used to wearing bathing suits in the winter?  No, Smil says there are some practical things we can do.  Conservation is a big one.  A surprisingly large fraction, on the order of 40%, of food worldwide is simply wasted—spoiled somewhere along the transportation chain, or simply not used before it goes bad.  And there are tons of opportunities to conserve energy around the world, starting with displacing coal-fired plants (which China is still building like there's no tomorrow) with natural-gas-fired ones, going to smaller cars rather than SUVs and electrics where possible, and building more solar and wind-generation facilities.  But here is Smil reacting to claims that we could decarbonize at least 80 percent of the global energy supply by 2030:  "Alas, a close reading reveals that these magic prescriptions give no explanation for how the four material pillars of modern civilization . . . will be produced solely with renewable electricity, nor do they convincingly explain how flying, shipping, and trucking (to which we owe our modern economic globalization) could become 80 percent carbon-free by 2030; they merely assert that it could be so."

 

Smil's book is full of cold-shower moments like that, but he is also refreshingly free of the tendentious us-versus-them tone that dominates most public pronouncements on these matters by politicians and other leaders.

 

He does not deny that global warming, or climate change, is happening.  In fact, he shows how the essentials of the connection between carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and global temperature were worked out over a century ago, long before it became a contentious political issue.  When he sees global leaders convening an endless series of summits and proclaiming unrealistic and unreachable goals while letting things just go on as usual, he gets irritated that no one is working toward a more systematic and engineering-driven approach to the problem. 

 

What is needed, and what is so often lacking, is the wisdom to choose the right path, or combination of paths, and the courage to put the decisions into action.  That is the real problem Smil portrays in his book:  the fact that a truly global issue—climate change—will have to have a truly global solution.  And we haven't figured out how to do that yet.

 

Sources:  Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works was published in 2022 by Viking.

Dry Ice and Indoor Pools Don't Mix

Being retired from outside work, my wife has time to follow some peculiar news feeds, and last night she told me of a bizarre accident that killed three and injured several others. 

Ekaterina Didenko is a 29-year-old mother of two and internet influencer.  According to news reports she is a "qualified pharmacist" and has attracted over a million followers of her comments about medicines and related issues. 

For her 29th birthday, her husband Valentin, an IT specialist, had what he probably thought was a great idea:  he would rent a sauna room in a sports complex in Moscow, where they lived, and throw some dry ice in the pool to make cool-looking vapors.  The couple and their friends being internet-savvy and addicted to constant self-documentation, there are plenty of pictures online showing Ekaterina holding "2" and "9" balloons, shots with her husband Valentin against romantic backgrounds, and a video of someone, possibly Valentin, in full haz-mat gear throwing 25 kg (about 60 pounds) of dry ice into the small enclosed pool (we're talking Moscow in the winter here, so the only swimming most people do this time of year is in indoor pools). 

As Valentin hoped, the pool started to boil with clouds of water vapor, and Valentin and a few friends jumped in.  Then things started to go horribly wrong.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an inert, colorless gas, and is produced by the human body during respiration.  But it will not support life, and if you try to breathe pure CO2 for more than a few seconds, you will pass out through lack of oxygen. 

It's a fairly easy matter to calculate how much CO2 gas 25 kg of dry ice will produce.  The result is about 14 cubic meters, which is enough to fill a 5 by 5 meter room (about 17 feet square) up to a depth of 50 cm, or almost two feet.  And it would be at the lowest level in the room, because CO2 gas is heavier than air.  I don't know exactly how large the room was, but the photos I have seen indicate it was fairly small, and the pool would have probably been below the level of the floor in any case.

Even if all the dry ice didn't vaporize at once, there would soon be enough to cover the surface of the pool, which is where a swimmer's nose and mouth are.  Poor Valentin may not have fully realized what he'd done before the lack of breathable air caused him to pass out while still in the water.  He and two of his guests died of asphyxiation, and Ekaterina and several more friends ended up in a hospital with severe breathing problems. 

My sympathies are with Ekaterina, her children, the relatives and friends of the others who died, and everyone affected by this tragedy.  It's especially ironic given that it arose from a desire to please a loved one who was evidently known and admired by many people. 

That being said, it's nevertheless remarkable that no one apparently realized the dangers involved in what they were doing.  One hopes that degrees in IT and pharmacy include some training in basic chemistry and physics.  It's possible that somebody at the party at least had doubts that dumping 25 kg of dry ice into a warm pool of water in a small enclosed room was a good idea.  But something took place that day which is at the root of many technological and engineering mishaps:  a reluctance to be a party-pooper. 

Imagine that you were at the party and had at least grounds to suspect that this much dry ice could cause dangerous concentrations of CO2.  What would you have done?  Jumped in front of Valentin and cried, "Don't do that!  It's dangerous!"?

In the midst of a celebratory atmosphere and where alcohol was involved, such an action would not only be psychologically difficult.  Unless you're the perennial wet-blanket type who enjoys spoiling other peoples' fun (in which case you probably wouldn't be invited to the party in the first place), it would be hard to let the calm, rational part of your mind overrule the fun-loving, go-with-the-flow part and spoil the treat that Valentin had obviously invested a lot of time and money in.  Even if you'd managed to voice concerns, it's quite possible you'd be shouted down by the others and the accident would have happened anyway.  Your only consolation then would have been to be able to say, "I told you so."

One term for this effect is "groupthink":  the tendency of a group of people bonded by emotional or other ties to seek consensus even in the face of rational arguments to the contrary.  It's responsible for many engineering tragedies that could have been averted if someone knowing the facts had been able to persuade others that the course the group was taking was wrong. 

From photos of the incident reproduced in the news reports about it, Valentin and his friends were aware that dry ice was dangerous, but seemed to think that the main danger was in contacting it (hence the haz-mat outfits).  While it can cause painful burns, and apparently some guests were injured that way, extreme cold is not the only hazard dry ice can produce, as everyone involved in this incident now knows to their regret.

It is a tragedy that three people died and more were injured in an entirely preventable accident.  But the wide publicity it is attracting can serve a good purpose.  If it ever occurs to anybody else to dump a lot of dry ice into an indoor pool, anyone who has heard of this accident can now recall it to mind and say, "Gee, didn't some Russians die after somebody tried this very thing?  I don't think we ought to do that."  And next time, there's a good chance that other people will listen to the party-pooper.

Sources:  One media outlet (www.news.com.au) points to the U. S. Sun as the source of the English-language report on this tragedy, but no report I was able to locate mentions the date on which it occurred, which was presumably late February, possibly Feb. 28 or 29.  I referred to the Sun's report at https://www.the-sun.com/news/470891/three-killed-and-seven-fighting-for-life-after-being-poisoned-at-instagram-stars-pool-party-steam-show/ as well as reports from https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/russian-mummy-blogger-ekaterina-didenko-distraught-after-three-die-at-her-birthday-party/news-story/edc5e34edd7d7701fb1586925c4952e2 and

https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/29/three-dead-dry-ice-stunt-bloggers-party-goes-tragically-wrong-12323759/.  I thank my wife for drawing my attention to this report. 

When Scientists Aren't Scientists

I recently attended a scientific conference in the Northeast U. S. (I will be purposely vague about the exact venue for reasons that will shortly become clear), and on the plane I read an article by the Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield that pointed out an ironic fact about science:  in order to do good science, scientists must act at least some of the time like non-scientists.  Right after that, I got to see a good example of what he was talking about.

One of the main things that attract certain personalities to science and engineering is the supposed objectivity and emotion-free quality of science.  Mr. Spock, the famously non-emotional Vulcan of the Star Trek TV series, supposedly had a temperament ideally suited for science, because emotion was never supposed to influence his judgment.  Many scientific journals insist that papers submitted to them be written in the passive voice (not "We found that. . . " but "It was found that. . . "), thus removing any trace of the author's personality from the paper and making it sound more objective.  But Mansfield pointed out that thumos (a Greek word meaning "spiritedness" or "passion") often takes over when scientists perceive a threat to something they hold dear, even if the threat comes with scientific credentials.  And many scientists who discover something that goes against the current consensus of scientific opinion have to defend their new ideas passionately against equally vigorous and emotional opposition.  In getting emotional, scientists end up acting like ordinary non-scientists, but most good scientists tend to have a certain amount of thumos that motivates them to do the hard work and defending of their ideas that are needed to get a hearing in the competitive world of research.

The night after I arrived at the conference, the sponsoring organization held a banquet which included a buffet dinner, awards, and a three-piece classical music group that could barely be heard above the conversational din in the large hall.  During dessert, the chairman got up at the raised podium and announced the name of the after-dinner speaker:  William Happer, a well-known physicist.  I had heard his name before, and as he began his talk, I remembered where:  as author of an article entitled "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases."

By now, the most famous (but by no means the only) greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, CO₂.  The conventional wisdom among most scientists, policymakers in many countries, and the general public is that (a) humanity is playing Russian roulette with the world's climate by burning so much fossil fuel, which (b) invariably makes CO₂, which (c) traps heat and raises average global temperatures, which will (d) lead to all kinds of disasters, from dying polar bears to flooded South Sea islands and perhaps even an epidemic of kidney stones.  Therefore, all right-thinking citizens should be aware of their carbon footprints and do everything humanly possible to minimize them, or else go around feeling guilty for not doing so.

Prof. Happer's specialty is the way atoms and molecules absorb and emit radiation, and in the technically sophisticated and convincing talk he gave, he showed that the correlation between rising CO₂ levels and global average temperature is more alleged than real.  He also showed that the role of CO­₂ in the global heat balance has been greatly exaggerated, and that there are serious flaws in the way current models treat the details of how the gas absorbs radiation to affect climate.  He closed with a quotation from playwright Henrik Ibsen: "I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right."

The audience reaction was interesting.  They were quiet at first, but when it became clear that Happer was arguing against the main claims of global warming, most people except for a small circle near the speaker resumed talking as though nothing special was going on.  There was scattered applause at the end, and then Happer asked for questions. 

The first two or three were queries about technical details.  Then a tall, rather formidable-looking man rose and mounted the podium.  I can't recall all his words, but I know he began by saying his father was one of the founders of the field of cloud physics.  He charged Happer with at least two faults: cowardice, for not being willing to attend mainstream climate-change meetings to present his arguments; and ill will, for insulting the intelligence of the climate-change community.  In response, Happer pointed at one of the charts in his presentation and said, "The facts are there."  His accuser said something else in a tone of voice that I would characterize as non-scientific, and for a moment there I wondered if the after-dinner entertainment was going to be an amateur prizefight.  Then the chairman hastily grabbed the microphone and asked the musical trio to start playing.  The audience laughed that nervous kind of laugh that means people are relieved that something really awful isn't going to happen after all, and that was the end of that.

Only it wasn't, really.  What if Happer is right, and the vast majority of climate scientists, government leaders, and the public (which is not qualified to judge) has turned a molehill of a problem into a mountain that threatens whole economies and spreads fear and misplaced priorities worldwide?  A lot of people will end up looking pretty foolish, for one thing, which is why Son of Cloud Physicist got up and said what he said.  Of course, one should not make the opposite error of thinking that every crank and holder of a fringe opinion who comes along must be right and the mainstream is always wrong.  But Happer's evidence is not the only reason to suspect that the conventional climate-change picture at least has serious flaws.  Others such as David Rutledge at Caltech have questioned the conventional wisdom as well, but for different reasons. 

Climate change happens so slowly compared to the potential progress of science that I suspect the story will be gradually rewritten as time goes on to prove the dominant powers right whatever actually happens, and it will take a clever historian to tell the real story a century or two hence.  In the meantime, those of us who have more important things to worry about than how many centimeters per year the ocean is rising can take some comfort in the chance that William Happer's voice may be heard, and scientists will act a little more like scientists in the matter of examining the technical evidence for global warming.

Sources:  Prof. Happer's excellent article "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases," written for a non-technical audience, appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the journal First Things, pp. 33-38.  On Jan. 3, 2010, I blogged on Prof. David Rutledge's contention that we are not going ever going to burn enough fossil fuels to make much of a difference in the climate one way or another. 

Harvey Mansfield's article "Science and Non-Science in Liberal Education" appeared in the Summer 2013 edition of The New Atlantis, pp. 22-37.