Hiding Behind Per Capita Emissions Doesn't Make Us Cleaner Than West

I wish India emitted a lot more CO2 and its per capita emissions were comparable to the developed nations.

I say this because I get mad reading headlines like this one in Indian newspapers:

Greenhouse emission numbers out and we're cleaner compared to West

The article uses our low per capita emissions as an indicator that our economy is cleaner than the West. That is misleading. Take a look at energy sources and how efficiently we use that energy. Here is a graphic which compares India's energy intensity (efficiency) and fuel mix with other major emitters. We compare poorly with the West and most other developed nations when it comes to energy efficiency and we use similar proportions of dirty energy sources as most other countries.

Source:World Resources Institute


We emit less both absolute and per capita because of widespread poverty and huge energy shortfalls..because of energy required but not produced.

Hundreds of millions of people live subsistence lives and hundreds of millions more have a low energy footprint. These people have minimal access to energy and no amount of spin doctoring numbers about per capita emissions vs absolute emissions should be allowed to hide that fact. The media needs to keep hammering away at this reality and not write self-congratulatory articles on our low per capita emissions as if that is something to be celebrated.

In fact, there is absolutely nothing to celebrate in our current emissions profile.  Less per capita emissions is a reflection of a large poor population and not a clean energy economy.

I wish that for once our politicians will look us in the eye and admit the real reason for our low emissions instead of making pompous pronouncements on per capita emissions and I wish our stupid media looks beyond these exaltation's  and not get hoodwinked into giving comforting news bytes about being "cleaner" than the West.

An Inane Sentence About Dinosaur Extinction

This from the Daily Mail about the discovery of a sudden shift in Early Cretaceous climate and its potential impact on dinosaurs:

The temperature drop during the Cretaceous period would almost certainly have wiped out an 'abundance' of the world's dinosaurs.

The scientists behind the ground-breaking study claim this would have been the first major step dinosaurs took on their eventual road to extinction.

Hmmm...I had heard stories about lemmings committing mass suicide but didn't know that the dinosaurs too came to an agreement in the early Cretaceous to take decisive major steps towards eventual extinction.

I know..I know.. the writer didn't mean it that way...but the sentence does come out reading that odd.

More seriously Dr Gregory Price of Plymouth University, one of the scientists involved in the study suggests that climatic shifts possibly caused by a dysfunction to the nascent Gulf Stream which brings warm waters to the north Atlantic resulted in a temperature drop about several degrees beginning around 137 mya and similar events recurring throughout the Cretaceous may have caused a gradual dying out of the dinosaurs.

If that is true it should be reflected in the patterns of dinosaur diversity through the Cretaceous period. Dinosaur diversity should show a systematic decline beginning around 137 mya.

What does the paleontological record show?

I dug around for references and came across several studies that have measured and estimated dinosaur diversity through time. They show that:

1) There is no trend of a systematic gradual decline in dinosaur diversity beginning around 137 mya (Ref).

2) There seems to be an expansion of dinosaur diversity early in the history of the group in the late Triassic - mid Jurassic. After that there were periods of minor expansion and diversification - as recognized by origin of new dinosaur groups - in the later Jurassic and in the mid - late Cretaceous (Ref).

3) The raw data i.e. the observed diversity from the collected fossil record shows a major expansion of diversity in the mid -late Cretaceous. That however may be an artifact of sampling. This can occur in a number of ways. Perhaps the mid-late Cretaceous has been sampled more intensively due to an interest in the late Cretaceous mass extinction. Or more Cretaceous strata is exposed and is available for study than earlier times (Ref) .

Corrected for these biases the increase in diversity in mid-late Cretaceous is more muted.

Figure below shows the patterns of dinosaur diversity through the Mesozoic.

Source: Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution

Fig a is an estimate of the frequency of new lineages originating through time and the pattern suggests that the majority of new groups seem to have evolved in the earlier 1/3rd history of dinosaurs,

Fig b, solid line shows observed diversity with peaks in the early history of the group with a Jurassic maxima and a later increase in the mid-late Cretaceous. Dashed line shows diversity corrected for ghost ranges, which are estimates of the total geological range of the fossil. Many times the first appearance of a  group in the fossil record may not coincide with the origin of that group. Therefore the earlier existence of that group is estimated based on evolutionary relationships with related groups. So for example the appearance of several new groups in the mid-late Cretaceous may not mean those groups originated then. If one applies estimates of when that group actually originated i.e. includes their basal ghost range, then the diversification peaks for mid-late Cretaceous are moderated.

Dotted lines show diversity corrected for sampling bias. The result suggests that diversification rates are heavily influenced by sampling. In other words the data corrected for sampling bias indicates neither an increase nor a decrease in dinosaur diversity throughout the Cretaceous.

Fig c shows the likelihood of shifts in diversity through time. The trend line suggests an overall decrease in diversity shifts (lineage branching events) after an early (late Triassic - early Jurassic) peak. The likelihood of lineage branching events (increases in diversity) fluctuated moderately throughout the Cretaceous (Ref).

4) Some studies show that dinosaurs did decline in diversity a few million years (10 million or so) before the K-Pg mass extinction event. Others suggest that no such pattern in discernible once you take into account not just observed diversity but estimated diversity as well. Estimated diversity is a measure of how much of the actual diversity remains to be discovered.

In summary.. the data does not seem to support Dr. Price's contention that there was a gradual decline in dinosaurs initiated by climatic changes around 137 mya over a time period of some 70 million years before the K-Pg mass extinction and certainly does not even come close to supporting the crackpot headline in the Daily Mail that Dinosaurs 'killed off by a sudden drop in temperature and NOT by a comet'

Dinosaurs were a group with a world wide distribution. There would have been throughout their history local extinction events brought about by environmental perturbations. A possible cooling of the earth about 137 mya may have harmed dinosaurs in the very northern latitudes but did not set the stage (in a non-teleological sense of the phrase) for a long term globally widespread decline of the dinosaurs through the rest of the Cretaceous. In fact, there may have been a moderate expansion of dinosaur diversity in the mid-late Cretaceous. Globally the dinosaurs seemed to be doing quite well until their rapid demise 65 mya.

Earth Day And Geology Education In India

I had no idea what to write for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day - April 22 - until I recalled a short note I had read in Current Science some time back about the state of geology education in India and its impacts on society.

Piyoosh Rautela of the Disaster Mitigation and Management Centre in Dehardun is critical of the state of geology education and calls for a revamp of geology syllabus and increased attention to the importance of geology in our daily lives.

He has this to say:

..The passouts of present times know how to determine their location using a global positioning system (GPS) and plot the same in maps created in the GIS environment but are unable to do the same using topomaps and compass/clinometer. To them, compass/clinometer and geological hammer are things of the bygone days...

and more on syllabus..

Geology is one such subject that has failed to keep pace with the changing scenario in most of the Indian colleges and universities. It is still being taught the same way it used to be in the 1960s. This does not imply that the courses have not been revised. There have been some additions and deletions but these have failed to make a perceptible positive impact.

I am not sure I share his perception on point one. I interact with graduate students from the local university and they all seem pretty competent in the use of the compass and in locating themselves on a map without a GPS. They were wielding the geological hammer with gusto too!

But I do think he makes an important point about geology education not keeping pace with times.

Now I hear all the time that the syllabus at post graduate (M.S) level is too "academic" and does not prepare students for industry. I am not too sympathetic to this point of view for a practical reason. I don't see how courses in most geology graduate programs in India can be really "industry oriented" when the faculty have no industry experience themselves.

The education to job pathway followed by a vast majority of academics is an uninterrupted B.S. to M.S. to Ph.D to faculty without any breaks to work in industry. No wonder their teaching methods and contents will reflect their own academic experience. That will be hard to change given this preferred route to professorship.

That doesn't mean that syllabus and teaching cannot be made more effective in preparing students for life outside academia.  I think that is what Piyoosh Rautela is getting at. Individual faculty no doubt revise syllabus and teach principles and concepts well. But how do you go from knowing a principle to using it to solve a problem. I think that element is lacking in many geology programs. The habit of critical thinking and problem solving is not being inculcated as rigorously as it should.

I am more worried about this aspect of geology education than a perceived lacuna of "industry oriented" education. A student coming out, sound in principles and a critical thinker will adapt to any industry, which in any case  takes up the slack and retrains the new entrant to suit their particular needs.

What will be lacking though if we persist with dull exam oriented syllabus is our ability to produce the next generation of top quality scientists and thinkers. This is worrying because knowledge of earth sciences and geology will be playing an increasingly important role in how we manage our planet in the future.

How should the academic geology community in India contribute to Earth Day?

I do support the usual measures that many people are writing about... take personal responsibility..  live a less consumerist lifestyle and so on.

But if we want to create a sustainable way of life on this planet we need a sustainable stream of skilled human resources. Scientists and intellectuals with the ability to think deeply about today's and tomorrow's problems and propose realistic solutions to them...people with the ability to assume stewardship of the country's development and environmental policies and guide them in the direction of a more responsible and less destructive way of achieving a better life.

And it all begins with how we train our students.

That is the best and most long lasting contribution that the Indian academic geology community can make towards Earth Day. Energize your syllabus, inspire your students and mold them into critical confident thinkers. Create a sustainable source of skilled people who can contribute towards building a sustainable planet.

A Geological Ode To Charles Darwin

And so really, it's just a scandal that the biologists have absconded with Darwin's memories.....He's ours. He's a geologist, and we're filing a class action suit..

Geophysicist Ross Stein of the USGS makes a good case in a discussion which turns into a tribute on Science Friday that Charles Darwin had foundational influences not just in biology but in geology as well.

On February 20th 1835 Darwin was ashore in Valdivia on the Chilean coast when a great earthquake struck.

From The Voyage of the Beagle: [page] 369 Feb. 1835. GREAT EARTHQUAKE.

The day has been memorable in the annals of Valdivia, for the most severe earthquake experienced by the oldest inhabitant. I happened to be on shore, and was lying down in the wood to rest myself. It came on suddenly, and lasted two minutes;

On March 4th the H.M.S. Beagle sailed into Concepcion port and Darwin and his crew witnessed a town devastated. He along with Capt. Fitzroy wrote about the damages and human suffering in their diaries.

But soon the scientist in Darwin took over and he made several insightful geological observations and reflections on vertical movements of the crust during earthquakes and associated volcanic and magmatic activity and their link to the formation of mountains chains:

[page] 379 March 1835. VOLCANIC PHENOMENA.

It is almost certain, from the altered soundings, together with the circumstance of the bottom of the bay near Penco, consisting of hard stone, that there has been an uplifting to the amount of four fathoms, since the famous convulsion of 1751. With this additional instance fresh before us, we may assume as probable, according to the principles laid down by Mr. Lyell,* other small successive elevations, and may fearlessly maintain that the problem of the raised shells,† recorded by Ulloa, is explained.

And then he astutely links the earthquake clusters with the coincident volcanic activity into an explanation for the formation of mountain chains:

[page] 380 CONCEPCION. March, 1835.

The elevation of the land to the amount of some feet during these earthquakes, appears to be a paroxysmal movement, in a series of lesser and even insensible steps, by which the whole west coast of South America has been raised above the level of the sea. In the same manner, the most violent explosion from any volcano is merely one in a series of lesser eruptions: and we have seen that both these phenomena, which are in so many ways related, are parts of one common action, only modified by local circumstances. With respect to the cause of the paroxysmal convulsion in particular portions of the great area which is simultaneously affected, it can be shown to be extremely probable, that it is owing to the giving way of the superincumbent strata, (and this giving way probably is a consequence of the tension from the general elevation) and their interjection by fluid rock—one step in the formation of a mountain chain. On this view we are led to conclude, that the unstratified mass forming the axis of any mountain, has been pumped in when in a fluid state, by as many separate strokes as there were earthquakes.

He saw raised beaches and altered depth soundings...conclusion.? ..the crust moved vertically during earthquakes...this must have happened many times in the past as well...applying Charles Lyell's principle of uniformitarianism...

..so..along with injections of magma, such episodic movements of the crust will eventually form high mountain chains like the Andes... and as Ross Stein elaborates...since these processes occur only episodically, it must be taking millions of years for mountains to form...therefore the earth must be really really old.

aside from these fundamental insights he explains the origin of batholiths oriented along the axis of mountains:

On this view we are led to conclude, that the unstratified mass forming the axis of any mountain, has been pumped in when in a fluid state, by as many separate strokes as there were earthquakes.

 
Not bad coming from one of the foundational figures of..modern biology.

What really struck me was the striking contrast in his descriptions of the gradual process of mountain building as against the gradual process of organic evolution. For mountain building he envisioned violent episodic events..the convulsions and paroxysmal earth movements that raised the crust in leaps and bounds and those new elevations gradually accumulated to raise the crust to great heights. Earthquakes were disruptive events and in between .... nothing happened...it was long periods of boredom followed by short periods of terror. Mountains formed through gradual but discontinuous processes.
 
Contrast this with his mechanism of biological evolution which also consisted of gradual change but one of a different nature. It proceeded through tiny changes which accumulated continuously..generation after generation. The rate of change may not necessarily be the same but change was continuous. He positively rejected the idea of disruptive changes or discontinuities when it came to explaining the origin of organic form. Traits did not come into existence through sudden leaps. His mechanism of natural selection acting on slight variations among individuals in a population demanded that descendants would differ only by very tiny increments from their immediate ancestors. Organic evolution therefore had to be gradual and continuous.

Ross Stein is right. Darwin was more than a competent geologist and he thought very deeply about geology...he had to.. since the abrupt appearance of new species and groups in the fossil record was a headache for him. This he explained mostly on the geological grounds of the presence of massive discontinuities in the preservation of sediments and fossils.

But he also saw a much more fundamental difference between geological processes and organic evolution and the difference was one of uniqueness.

For him, geological processes were part of the grand recycling of the planet. Magma rose up and solidified as rock. That rock over eons got weathered and the resulting sediment got buried and remelted into magma, starting another cycle of rock formation. Sea level rose and fell cyclically depositing sediment.

Biological evolution on the other hand produced unique features. The evolution of any new trait or species was a phenomenon without precedent and without anticipation of being repeated in the future. A particular novelty, a particular evolutionary trend or pattern in a lineage evolved through a contingent sequence of events only once in the history of life.

His most famous book - The Origin of Species - reflects these thoughts as it ends:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Genetic History Of Indian Populations

Partha P. Majumder summarizes population level genetic data from south Asian populations in a special issue of Current Biology on Archaeogenetics, the attempted synthesis of archaeology and genetics. The paper is open access.

South Asia — comprising India, Pakistan, countries in the sub-Himalayan region and Myanmar — was one of the first geographical regions to have been peopled by modern humans. This region has served as a major route of dispersal to other geographical regions, including southeast Asia. The Indian society comprises tribal, ranked caste, and other populations that are largely endogamous. As a result of evolutionary antiquity and endogamy, populations of India show high genetic differentiation and extensive structuring. Linguistic differences of populations provide the best explanation of genetic differences observed in this region of the world. Within India, consistent with social history, extant populations inhabiting northern regions show closer affinities with Indo-European speaking populations of central Asia that those inhabiting southern regions. Extant southern Indian populations may have been derived from early colonizers arriving from Africa along the southern exit route. The higher-ranked caste populations, who were the torch-bearers of Hindu rituals, show closer affinities with central Asian, Indo-European speaking, populations.

Nothing radically new, but its good to have a review article that compiles genetic studies done on extant Indian populations along with references to primary literature.

Missing though from this emerging data bank is ancient - but within a historical time frame- skeletal material and DNA from the subcontinent for comparison, which could potentially answer many vexing and controversial questions about historical migrations into India.

In this regard the recent find of Harappan age skeletons along with pottery and artifacts from Farmana, Haryana about 60 km from Delhi gains significance as recovered DNA from these skeletons could give data about the relatedness of these ancient northwestern Indian populations with Eurasians and central Asians and clarifying to some extent when admixtures of central Asian and Eurasian genes with Indian populations occurred.

There are other excellent articles in this issue. Particularly the one by Pritchard et.al. on The Genetics of Human Adaptation: Hard Sweeps, Soft Sweeps, and Polygenic Adaptation.

Mapping India: Can The RTI Be Extended To The NSDI

A clarion call seems to have been issued by the high priests of Indian government spatial data--

Resistance is futile...join the collective.

The Borg in this case is the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), an ambitious, much needed, slowly being built but yet to be fully realized vision to enable easy open and quick access to public domain spatial data.

The latest  to join this collective is another web mapping application, this time developed by the Central Ground Water Board. I began this post wanting to review it, but found it agonizingly slow the few times I tried to use it.

Instead I started thinking about the NSDI and what it could potentially do to facilitate a better engagement of civil society with government...more specifically..

can the mechanism of acquiring information through the Right To Information Act (RTI) be extended and modified to these web mapping applications under the umbrella of the NSDI?

Traditionally users of spatial information in India fall into two extreme categories. There are those "lightweight" users who go on the excellent mapping services of Google, Yahoo..so on and use the images to locate items of interest, find directions, distances and create custom maps by putting placemarks and routes. The image quality is excellent but the apps have no serious analytical capability.

At the other pole are "serious" GIS users who access spatial data from heavyweight GIS and image processing packages with extended analytical and mapping capabilities. These users are spatial data professionals working in both the public and private sector.

The NSDI will create a third kind of a user....someone who may not formally work in GIS, may not have access to or afford access to a GIS, but nevertheless may want access to spatial data and may want to ask sophisticated spatial questions. The web mapping applications that owners of public domain spatial data must create, will provide a gateway to such user aspirations.

This opens up exciting possibilities for civic groups, NGO's and curious citizens..the third user group.. so to speak, who want to examine and question government on the status of natural resources, urban planning and developmental projects..all areas where spatial reasoning is critical.

Entering a web mapping app via the NSDI it would be possible for example to ask:

1) For a particular area..show me the locations of ground water wells with contaminants above a specified quantity, within a specified distance of a known point pollution source...potentially through the CGWB web app

2)  For Ward X of city Y...prepare a map of lakes and streams and encroachments within these green zones...potentially through the Urban Mapping Mission websites.

3) ...For district X prepare a map of forest land with various levels of legal protection and the location of planned developmental projects within and near these forests...potentially through the Ministry of Environment and Forest website.

There will be some limitations to this kind of approach to information access:

1) The type of information a user may want is not included as a spatial layer in that particular web app.

2) The web app is not equipped with a query engine capable of performing the analysis.

3) The user knows what (s)he wants but does not have the expertise to perform the analysis.

4) The query might encompass a very large area and might run into bandwidth and application performance issues.

..so..  why not bypass these limitations which are sure to crop up and enable the user via the mapping application to compose a question, not using the formal query engine but ...in plain language like the ones above... and send them to a designated Spatial Information Officer. That officer - and each public domain web mapping application will have one -  will process the query using a GIS and if required gather information from other sources and send the compiled answer within a specified time line.

The answers would be sent as a map in an image format and associated attribute data could be sent as an excel or a database file. Administrative costs can be charged through online credit card payments or can be sent via a check.

In effect the RTI will be extended to include these public domain web mapping sites as an official application counter for information. 

At present the NSDI and each of the associated agencies do have an RTI officer. But you have to apply to a central office for information. That central office may not have developed the needed synergy and cooperation with its GIS office to efficiently process your query.

I am thinking in terms of a decentralized mechanism wherein queries are sent directly through individual web mapping applications to the spatial information officer in charge of that application and answers to these queries are generated by processing the spatial databases underlying the web mapping app.

I have a feeling that something along these line must be put in place if the NSDI wants to fulfill its promise of open access to data. The first few web mapping sites I have come across do not have truly dynamic query engines that would enable a user to perform sophisticated analysis. Besides, the government may choose to present the pubic with only a limited view of the total data set.

Placing these web mapping sites within the ambit of the RTI would mean that all the information sitting in the underlying databases and not just the subset view presented via the mapping applications will be open to and can be accessed by the public.

Moreover, the spatial layers and associated databases if correctly attributed and structured,  will give results to queries potentially within a few minutes.  So this method will have a huge advantage over a traditional RTI query, the answer to which will have to put together painstakingly from disparate files  which may not yield very well to spatial queries.

Mapping applications under the NSDI will allow citizens to view, browse and query public domain data with a geographic context. Sorting through data this way..thinking of spatial relationships between objects... may inspire citizens to think of new questions to ask and in to new ways of analyzing information. A more productive and open relationship between citizen and government can be forged if the NSDI opens up to these possibilities.

See: Mapping India

Buddhist Rock Cut Monuments And Deccan Lava Flows

During my recent field trip to the Konkan west coast one of the geologists leading the trip mentioned that all the famous Buddhist rock cut monuments situated in the Deccan volcanic province were excavated in lavas of the Bushe Formation.

I had never given any thought to this before. If you look at the various famous Buddhist rock monuments...Ellora, Ajanta, Bhaja, Karla, Elephanta ...they do occupy  similar looking basalt slopes and escarpments. Those are the lavas belonging to the Bushe Formation confirmed the geologist.

The Deccan Basalt lava pile is subdivided into hierarchical geological units - each corresponding to an eruptive episode - based on their geochemical similarities. Here is the basic chemical stratigraphy:

The Bushe Formation is quite thick and made up of compound lava flows. That means that eruptive episodes were made up of blobs of lava units that spread and overlapped and coalesced with other lava units to form a compound unit, forming a humpy undulating lava pile in the process.

Like a overlapping stack of pancakes...like this one..with the Bushe Formation for comparison..

So why did Buddhist monks and artisans choose these lava flows out of the many rock slopes and escarpments from other lava flows available..?

My quick speculations:

1) East of the Western Ghat escarpment is the Deccan plateau which is dissected into spurs of Deccan Traps and flat valleys. The Bushe Formation is well exposed in these spurs forming slopes and thick rock escarpments.

2) The locations of the caves in this part of the Deccan where the Bushe Formation is prominent are along ancient trade routes. Patronage from sympathetic merchants and rulers provided sustenance for the monks and artisans.

3) The Bushe Formation occupies a convenient middle tier in the multi-storey Deccan landscape.

Landscape evolution has transformed the Deccan lava pile in to a series of steep slopes and escarpments. The Bushe Formation especially the escarpments are situated above forested slopes which grade into the valley floors. That would have made Bushe escarpments ideal locations... isolated enough from the roads and villages to suit the Buddhist monastic lifestyle but still accessible via the forested slopes. Many of these caves also acted as resting stops for traders and merchants and so making them not too inaccessible by going too far up the landscape might have been a consideration.

Here is a picture of the Bhaja caves near Pune...occupying a steep rock slope.

Formations younger than Bushe form the upper story escarpments of the Deccan landscape. Access to these may have been too tough to negotiate.

4) The workability of the rock material.

Maybe there is a difference in the way rock material of the Bushe gives way to hammers and chisels compared with other especially the younger lavas. The Bushe has been described as a blocky kind of a lava while the younger lava which also form escarpments have been described as having splintery properties that may not give way to form the rounded and blocky shapes the artisans wanted.

I don't know. This is a problem that some experimental Archaeology can throw light on.

These rock-cut monuments are a wonder. If you are in the area don't miss out visiting them.

River Ghaggar / Saraswati Did Not Have A Glacial Source In Historical Times

[Update : New geochemical and geomorphological studies strongly suggest that Yamuna and Sutlej stopped flowing in to the Ghaggar /Saraswati thousands of years before the Harappan civilization. See these posts for more on this topic - 

1) Geological Update On the River Ghaggar
2) New Geochemical and Sedimentological Work On Ghaggar
3) New Geomorphological Work on Ghaggar
4) K.S Valdiya On The Glacial Saraswati Published in Current Science 
-------------------

A number of recent studies have bolstered the case that the River Ghaggar  -  which has been equated with the River Saraswati described in the Rigveda - did not have a glacial source in historical times and was likely always fed from the sub Himalayas (Siwaliks).

Why is this of any interest?

The background is the controversial question of the origin of the Aryans.

The more widely accepted theory is that proto-Sanskrit speakers entered the northwestern parts of India after or during the latter stages of the demise of the Harappan city states beginning around 1800 -1500 B.C. The ancestors of these proto-Sanskrit  speakers can be traced according to this theory to the central Asia steppes. In terms of the local ecology, geological evidence shows that by this time the River Ghaggar which was once a river with substantial water flow and was perhaps perennial had transformed into a smaller ephemeral stream.

The competing theory is that the Aryans are indigenous to India - indigenous in the sense that they were present on the northwestern plains at least since the advent of agriculture. In this scenario the Harappan city states was an Aryan civilization. To support this more ancient presence of the Aryans on the plains of Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan, one line of argument is to point to the Rigveda which mentions a mighty Saraswati river located between the rivers Sutlej and the Yamuna. The argument is that the composers of the Rigveda must have been living on the plains of Haryana when the Ghaggar = Saraswati was perennial which means before 1800 B.C which in one way supports the theory that they and the Harappan people were one and the same.

The Rigveda describes the Saraswati as originating high in the Himalayas. It is described as a mighty river and so has been thought to have been perennial and having a glacial source. But today the Ghaggar / Saraswati is no doubt fed from only the Siwaliks, nowhere near the high glaciers. To account for this, supporters say that earlier the glacially fed Sutlej  and /or Yamuna flowed into the Saraswati. Later around 1800 B.C or so the channels shifted and the Ghaggar was stranded as a small ephemeral Siwalik fed river. Image below shows the Ghaggar basin flanked by the Sutlej and Yamuna.

A virtual industry dedicated to creating geological scenarios as to how this must have happened and to collecting "evidence" has proliferated on the internet, in various articles and in popular books.

A review of the peer reviewed geological literature shows that these scenarios are wrong and are based on exaggerations of the size of the Ghaggar and misunderstandings of geological processes. I have written an explanation of much of the list below in an article for the magazine Pragati. A short list is given here.

1) Use of isotopes in search of Lost River - Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry: Data on stable isotopes of water in buried channels of ancient Ghaggar in Rajasthan shows a composition compatible with water from Siwaliks and not glacial high Himalayas.

2) Is River Ghaggar, Saraswati? Geochemical constraints - Current Science: Shows based on sediment geochemistry and composition and geomorphologic and paleo-climatic constraints that the River Ghaggar was likely always Siwalik fed.

3) Late quaternary geomorphic evolution of Yamuna-Sutlej interfluve: Significance of terminal fan - Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing : Studies the stratigraphy and geomorphology of Yamuna channels and concludes that the Yamuna has been flowing within its channel and has not been part of the Indus system i.e. could not have flowed into the Saraswati.

4) Saraswati Nadi in Haryana and its Linkage with the Vedic Saraswati River – Integrated Study Based on Satellite Images and Ground Based Information - Journal Geological Society of India: Collected data shows that metamorphic pebbles in the upper reaches of the River Ghaggar can be derived from Siwalik source rocks and does not indicate a high glacial Himalayan source. Also shows based on geomorphology that the Yamuna did not flow into the Saraswati.

5) Reconstruction of buried channel-floodplain systems of the northwestern Haryana Plains and their relation to the ‘Vedic’ Saraswati - Current Science: Demonstrates based on stratigraphic, sedimentologic and geomorphologic data that the River Ghaggar in historical times had a smaller flow regime than in the earlier Quaternary period and derived its sediments likely from the Siwaliks.

I say it is time to abandon the theory that Ghaggar/Saraswati had a glacial source in historical times.

That does not mean abandoning the broader theory that the Aryan /Vedic people were present on the Haryana plains before the collapse of the Harappan civilization. Archaeology and linguistics and perhaps genetics are a more powerful tool to address that question. Let me add here that most archaeologists and linguists support the theory that the Aryans were late arrivals to the northwestern part of India.

The funny thing is, in my opinion the theory of a glacial source of Saraswati is not necessary in this debate. The Ghaggar was a wetter river before 1800 B.C. because of a generally more wetter climate. Strong summer monsoons over the Siwaliks and then spring flow would have made human settlements along its banks sustainable. A life sustaining river would have been holy to the people depending on it, regardless of whether it had a glacial origin or not.

The insistence that there was a past glacial source derives from a belief that the Rigveda is accurate in every aspect of its recording of geography and physical events. Descriptions of Saraswati in Rigvedic hymns as originating from Heaven...High Mountains..boundless....impetuous...fast flowing.. arising from a slowly moving serpent Ahi (source here) has led to a conviction that the Saraswati arose from glaciers. This reading of the Rigveda has led to the theory being proposed initially and for sustaining it.

Unhappily for science and for those who are looking for a scientifically accurate account, this has frustratingly meant a popularization and easy availability through the internet of an increasingly untenable and unsupported geological narrative which is creeping into the public consciousness as the correct story. People who are supporting the glacial origin theory assert that they are approaching the problem as a scientific question and with a scientific temperament. I would like to take them at face value.

However, that does come with a condition and this is the willingness to give up on your pet theory if the evidence piles up against it. This is one of the critical tests of the scientific temperament. There is plenty to show now that the Ghaggar / Saraswati was always a Siwalik fed river. Persisting with the glacial theory in light of this gathering evidence and pointing to scripture as a back-up will diminish the scientific credibility of the "early Aryan presence" supporters and perpetuate misinformation about the subject. I hope one of them stands up and admits that geological data does not support this particular theory.

Tasmanian Devils And One Selfish Gene

Genes don't have real motives. Selfish in the term "selfish gene"  really reflects the metaphorical motives of genes and not the real motives of individuals carrying those genes.

Ordinarily, different genes in the multicellular bodies of organisms co-operate. Such a system has evolved because in sexually reproducing multicellular organisms the reproductive fate of any gene depends on the successful reproduction of the individual. Genes in the somatic cells of the body, cells which form the body mass, can extend their lives only if a copy of themselves in the sex cells gets passed on. Co-operating to build successful bodies is the only way out.

But what if a gene is able bypass this system? What if a gene is able to unlink its reproduction from the reproduction of the individual?

Just such a situation has occurred in the spread of cancerous facial tumor in populations of the Tasmanian Devil - a carnivorous marsupial. Scientists working on these animals have identified a nerve cell type known as Schwann cells as the progenitor of this cancer which must have originated through mutations in one Schwann cell of one individual Tasmanian Devil.

Devils are aggressive creatures and they often bite each other especially during mating. The cancer cells graft themselves on facial tissue of the other individual and grow and spread. As cells divide, the bodies defense may kill some of these cells, but mutants among them which are better able to resist  thus become more common. This is natural selection acting on this cell lineage. Within the lifetime of an individual devil, cancer cells divide hundreds of times. Cells in the nth generation would be different somewhat from their ancestral state. This is evolution, though not in the form we are familiar with or think of commonly.  Ordinarily, this cancer cell lineage would die with the death of the individual. In this case, their evolution continues when they get grafted on another individual. The tumor gene thus spreads through the population by bypassing the normal channels of reproduction. The cancer cells have been able to successfully invade another body in this way because there is very little genetic variation in the immune system of the Tasmanian Devils. That may be because there are a small inbred population. Immune cells don't recognize grafted cancer cells as foreign and don't reject them.

The mutant gene (s) responsible for this cancer can be thought of as a special type of a selfish gene. In a broader sense all genes are selfish since they "try" to maximize copies of themselves by competing against variations of themselves.  Generally, the reproductive fate of the gene is tied to the reproductive fate of the individual and so genes cooperate to make bodies successful. However, in the more specific usage of the term, selfish genes may enhance their own reproduction by subverting the reproductive machinery of the cell and in the process causing harm to the population in the long run.  During sexual reproduction any gene on average has a fifty percent chance of being passed on to the next generation. A selfish gene subverts these odds and ensures a more than even chance for copies of itself to be passed on.

In the case of the Tasmanian Devils, the "selfish gene" is not in the sex cells but is a somatic cell mutant.

We don't think of somatic cells as a separate life form. The cells that make up our bodies are us. But occasionally as in the case of the facial cancer in the Tasmanian Devils the us can morph into the other. Most cancerous cell types which rebel against the body don't have an extended evolutionary future. The cell lineage dies with the death of the individual.  This particular cancer cell however, which was once part of the Tasmanian Devil is evolving into a parasite. It has developed a life of its own.

This situation illustrates several broader principles of evolution.

Firstly that evolution has no foresight. There is no long term benefit of the Tasmanian Devils that evolution is striving towards. Natural selection doesn't work for the benefit of the species. Evolution through natural selection is all about immediate advantage. Mutant cells have found a way to propagate independent of the body and because their life cycles operate quicker than that of an individual, selection will favor the spread of these cells regardless of whether that is harming Devil individuals and populations.

Second, it demonstrates that natural selection doesn't only act at the level of the individual.  It can act on any entities which shows certain properties. If entities vary in certain traits, if these traits are heritable and if these traits affect "fitness" i.e. they enable one variant to reproduce more than the other then natural selection is off and running. In the natural world these conditions are most familiarly met by whole organisms but in principal they can be met by cells or genes within cells.

In this case, selection is operating at two levels. At a lower level cells which contain the mutant gene are fitter than cells that don't contain this gene. But at a higher level individuals that don't contain this mutant gene are fitter than individuals that do. In most cases the "interests" of the gene and the individual coincide. Here, because their reproductive fates have been decoupled the relationship has turned antagonistic.

Finally, the study shows that the reconstruction of a complete evolutionary narrative requires thinking across the entire (or as much as possible) hierarchy of life.  The so called division between reductionists and practitioners of "holistic" biology is and always has been a false dichotomy.  Genes, cells, individuals, social behavior and population history all go to make the unfortunate story of the Tasmanian Devils more complete.

** Wishing readers coming to this post via Desipundit a very Happy New Year. If you missed my earlier announcement do note that my blog Reporting on a Revolution has been renamed Rapid Uplift. ...more in tune with the broad earth sciences / geology theme I write about.  Thanks for your support.

Some Good Holiday Listening and Reading

Here's a list of holiday whiling-away's for you:

Literary and Musical Stuff:

1) The Definitive Dickens- Tom Ashbrook discusses a new biography of Charles Dickens with biographer Michael Slater

2) Alexander McCall Smith- Author of No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency talks about his work and life in Africa and Scotland.

3) Thelonius Monk - Terry Gross of Fresh Air talks with Robert D. G. Kelley  about the Jazz genius.

Sciency Stuff:

1) Is Evolution Predictable? Simon Conway Morris writes about it in the context of evolutionary convergence.

2) A Christmas Carol - Economist Steve Landsburg explains why Scrooge has been getting a bum rap from society.

3) Gene Patenting - Should your genes be patented and how the process impacts research and you.

4) U.S. Health Care - David Brooks looks at it as an ultimately values question.

Silly Stuff:

1) Nazis and GIS - Adolf Hitler is not pleased with the latest version of ArcGIS software.

I won't be posting now until early January.

Wishing everyone Happy Holidays!

Weather Ain't The Same As Climate Mr. Aiyar

It's amazing how much confusion there still is between weather and climate.

Mr. S A Aiyar writes a well read and well respected economics column in the Times of India. I like his columns. He has a gift for explaining complex topics in a succinct and simple manner. He gets it right a lot. Rarely though is he so completely wrong.

Like here where he tries to explain why climate projections can't be trusted:

If new technologies cannot reduce emissions by 80% save at a huge cost that causes economic distress, governments will abandon emission targets. They will not deliberately create deep recessions just to curb emissions.

Will this lead to climate disaster? Maybe and maybe not. Scientific knowledge of the weather is very limited, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections are just intelligent guesstimates. IPCC scientists may be the best in the world, yet they cannot predict the weather more than five days ahead.

Can they predict the next drought in India? No. The next El Nino? No. The number of hurricanes in the Caribbean next year? No. So, can they accurately predict the weather 100 years hence? Surely not. When we know very little about a problem, we tend to worry endlessly about worst-case scenarios. That does not make the worst case certain, or even probable.

He's right when he says that climate scientists cannot predict the weather 100 years hence.

But they are not trying to. That's not what climate scientists do.

Weather is the day to day or short term atmospheric conditions. Climate and climate change is about long term changes in average weather. If you want to know what the weather will be on a Sunday 100 years from now you will still have to rely on a meteorologist to tell you 3 days before that Sunday.

Climate scientists on the other hand will tell us that if you take a ten or twenty year interval 100 years from now, the average temperature of that interval will be higher than today.
 
That much is a near certainty and it follows from the basic greenhouse effect. If we keep emitting greenhouse gases the earth will warm up. What is uncertain is by how much and what exact regional effects will it have. That's where the climate models and IPCC projections come in. And they show a range of possibilities depending on assumptions made of starting conditions, emission trajectories for different economies and not yet well understood positive and negative feedback's in the climate system.

For drafting sensible policies to reduce emissions we don't need to know whether a series of powerful hurricanes will hit New Orleans in year 2102 or whether they will hit it in 2105 or the exact year in which India might face a crippling drought in the future.

Its enough to know that 100 years from now these events will be more common (update: or more intense). And our current and improving understanding of climate change does provide enough confidence on that issue, more than Mr. Aiyar wants to give it credit for.

Its a shame that a person as erudite as Mr Aiyar has misrepresented climate science and misinformed the public in so blatant a manner.

Can India Cut Emission Intensity Without Carbon Sequestration?

Yes, is the answer at least according to the Indian government.

A reader left a comment on my previous post on the distribution of potential basalt and ophiolite carbon reservoirs asking:

In your original post you suggested this was probably a non-starter for India, given our unwillingness to implement cuts in emissions. Do you think recent moves by China (and now more modest ones by India) to cut emission intensity will change the equation at all?

The original post was the one on Deccan Basalts as a potential reservoir for carbon sequestration projects.

I don't know about the Chinese plan but the 5 point plan put forward by Mr. Jairam Ramesh the Minister of Environment and Forest, India, to cut carbon emission intensity does not include carbon sequestration as a strategy.

Instead the government is aiming to reduce emission intensity by 20-%-25% by 2020 using:

1) Mandatory fuel efficiency standards for vehicles by December 2011
2) Mandatory green building code
3) Amendments to energy conservation Act
4) Progress report on forest cover
5) 50% of new capacities in power plants to be based on clean coal technologies

If you think these are big concessions by the Indian government you would be wrong. There is nothing really radically new about the way India plans to achieve its voluntary target of reducing emission intensity. That process was already underway much before Mr. Jairam Ramesh's announcement.

Emission Intensity is a measure of the energy efficiency of your economy - emissions per unit GDP - and between 1990 and 2005 India reduced its emission intensity i.e. improved its energy efficiency by about 17%.

Automobile makers have been steadily improving vehicle efficiency for years. Other industries too in an effort to be competitive have been streamlining their processes and improving efficiency. The Indian government years ago has set targets for expanded forest cover. Even India's notoriously  wasteful coal power plants have been improving their efficiency over the last few years and a large fraction - as high as 60% to 70% - of  new coal plants from both the public and private sector will be built using cleaner technology, the so called supercritical coal plants which use advanced coal combustion technology. This trend is being driven not by government fiat but by the rising price of coal due to increased demand and the need to import larger quantities of the fuel.

All this implies that this new target the government has announced won't require politically difficult decisions. Instead, the government is relying along with a few nudges and pushes on the naturally growing efficiency of industry to achieve a large fraction of the target of reducing emission intensity.

On the other hand geoengineering strategies like carbon sequestration which avoid emissions altogether face several hurdles. For at least the immediate target of reducing intensity by 2020 the science and technology may not be ready. Sequestration is also expensive. This means coal plants will have to bear much higher costs than they would voluntarily agree to. And that means government regulations and tough political decisions. And there are potential land acquisition issues that may come up if the sites chosen for sequestration projects underlie agricultural or forest land.

So emission intensity riding on the back of increasing efficiency of the Indian economy is likely going to be the government mantra for some time to come.

Unfortunately increased warming is a result of the total amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. And those despite a reduction in emission intensity will keep increasing, although at a slower rate.

Why Didn't Darwin Come To India?

Mauritius is the closest he got but he did use examples from India's biodiversity to bolster his case for evolution. Vikram Doctor writes an excellent article in the Times of India on Darwin's India connection.

That connection was Edward Blyth - self taught zoologist and curator of the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society Calcutta - who maintained a long and fruitful correspondence with Darwin about the animals and plants native to India.

Darwin acknowledges this contribution as

"his large and varied stores of knowledge , I should value more than that of almost any one."

This is the second impressive intellectual conversation about evolution I have come across in India via outreach and media over the last few weeks. Earlier in November at the British Library in Pune, biologist Madhav Gadgil talked about early evolutionary thinking, Darwin's contributions and recent advances in evolutionary theory.

Doctor's article too covers a lot of ground. He gives us a sense of the work and social environment struggling scientists had to face in India. I read and posted on David Gilmour's The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj recently. It describes the day to day lives of British civil servants in 1800's India. Their lives were hard but Blyth faced an additional problem. He stood outside the administrative hierarchy and was on a weaker social standing than other officers of the civil services. Self taught scientists from poor backgrounds were looked down upon by the Raj officers who during the mid 1800's mostly came from Britain's upper classes. There is a lot packed in the article on the difficulties and tribulations Blyth faced during his career in India.

Doctor's article also clarifies the controversy on whether Darwin really deserved the credit for his work or whether as some say he plagiarized Alfred Russel Wallace's ideas who had coincidentally discovered natural selection around the same time. That Wallace proposed a theory of evolution through natural selection is undeniable,  but both Wallace and Blyth recognized that just presenting an idea is half the work in science. Backing it up with evidence is harder. Darwin besides proposing a theory also did the hard work of compiling the evidence for evolution through natural selection. He can rightly claim most of the credit.

As an aside and something Doctor does not get into is that Wallace too has been painted in extremes. For some, he should be placed on a higher pedestal than Darwin. Others say - unkindly - that his only real contribution was that he hastened Darwin into publishing a shorter, streamlined and more accessible version of his theory. Darwin's earlier plan to publish a tome running into several thousand pages was shelved in fear of being scooped upon receipt of Wallace's theory. Still others point to the latter part of Wallace's career when he doubted that the human brain could be a product of evolution and use that to discredit him.

That is in my opinion just...well unkind. Wallace did discover natural selection independently and contributed valuable insights into other fields like biodiversity, natural variability of populations and bio-geography. That he could not compile evidence like Darwin did or that he leaned towards mysticism later in his life does not diminish the originality and importance of his earlier work.

Having said that, convincing people that evolution had occurred required evidence. And there is no doubt that Darwin made a better case for it than anyone else in his times with a little help from friends and colleagues like Edward Blyth.

Vikram Doctor's article is a pleasure to read. And...yes he does offer an answer to why Darwin didn't come to India.  Don't miss it.

Mapping India: Land Degradation and Desertification

In the November 25 issue of Current Science, researchers from the Indian Space Research Organization release a map and some important estimates of the extent of land degradation and desertification affecting mainly dry, semi-arid and dry- sub humid areas of India.

Source: Desertification/land degradation status mapping of India

About 69% of the total land area of the country - about 228 million hectares - falls in one of these three climatic categories. The numbers from this mapping project is cause for concern. They indicate that land degradation has affected just under half the extent - 105 million hectares of these dryland regions,  roughly 32% of the land area of India.

The main processes of degradation are water erosion, wind erosion and vegetal degradation through deforestation and overgrazing. The paper gives the extents affected by various degradation processes grouped state-wise.

I wish they had included estimates of degradation by land use. For example how much of agricultural land in each state is being degraded, how much forest and so on. These have been no doubt calculated. They show up as classes on the map, but the paper does not present the results by type of land use affected.

If predictions about changing rainfall patterns over India because of climate change turn out to be accurate they will accentuate many of these degradation processes. Rainfall is predicted to fall in shorter more intense bursts over many regions of India. This would mean more powerful surface runoff and greater soil erosion.

Regions of country which are hot and arid like Gujarat and Rajasthan are likely to get hotter and drier. That would mean more stress on vegetation and great wind erosion.

I come back to the National Action Plan For Climate Change (15 MB) There are 8 missions or strategies to deal with climate change. None of these directly includes the problem of land degradation and desertification in dryland regions. However the National Water Mission, National Mission for a Green India and the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture seem to have the right overlapping goals that could be focused to address this problem.

I mentioned earlier about the estimates of land degradation according to land use. These numbers matter a lot. Farmers occupying dryland regions are usually poor farmers cultivating marginal lands. If you look at the above map, you will see large regions classified as Agriculture Unirrigated being affected by various processes of land degradation. These are farmlands that are out of the reach of irrigation canals and other State largesse.  Millions of farmers cultivate small land holdings, depending only on monsoons and groundwater. Warming and changing rainfall patterns will have a larger impact on these marginal farmers. Their livelihoods and the food security for large number of people in these drylands is at risk from continuing damage to the land.

The National Action Plan For Climate Change needs to single them out for special help.

Charles Darwin Has Been Sighted In Pune

Its been 150 years - November 24th 1859 - that Darwin's book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published.

The British Library on Fergusson College Road, Pune, has a poster exhibit on the theory of evolution. There are 14 poster boards encompassing the gamut of thinking on evolution beginning with Charles Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos to his subsequent theories of common descent and natural selection to current understanding on topics like speciation, group selection, the evolution of attributes like musical ability  - which provides food for thought on whether every feature can be explained as an adaptation or whether some traits originate as spandrels or byproducts of the evolution of some other general feature - to recent thinking on the genome and the importance of mechanisms like epigenetics and gene regulation.

Source: British Council

Earlier on November 12th, biologist Madhav Gadgil gave quite a good talk on the relative roles of cooperation and competition in evolution. He spent quite a bit of time clarifying some common misconceptions about evolution, most notably the (mis)concept of an ideal type. That there is an ideal type or a narrow collection of attributes defining species and populations can be traced to essentialist thinking prevalent since...well since recorded philosophy of thought. One consequence of this thinking is that any individual of that group who exhibits variation outside that "ideal" or narrow range is considered an aberration of nature, a degenerate. Madhav Gadgil very eloquently dispelled that notion and stressed that variation is the norm of life, the fuel which drives evolution.

The sizable crowd which had gathered for the talk asked some thought provoking and challenging questions. There were more technical questions -  does the theory of the selfish gene underlie co-operation?...I don't quite remember Dr. Gadgil's answer but here is my take on this.  In his book The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins argues that you can think of natural selection as acting on genes and not the individual. All genes are selfish since their "goal" is to replicate themselves at the expense of their alternative version. Can this explain co-operation?  Yes ...in a very general sense if one is thinking of evolution in terms of gene selectionism then co-operation like any other attribute spreads through the spread of selfish genes.

There were also discussions on social Darwinism and how a clearer understanding of evolution - by removing misconceptions like racial purity and group superiority - can help us become a better society...never forget....fitness is local and ever changing and variation is everything....

A few canards were repeated during the talk and discussion, most notably how Hitler was directly influenced by Darwin. He wasn't.  He had not read Darwin and had no understanding of evolution and neither did his coterie. Maybe there were a few people throwing around phrases like survival of the fittest but really a heady mix of a radical Christian sense of racial superiority and extreme nationalism more convincingly explain his conversion to arch fascist. Check out this article and this one for a humorous but informative take on the subject.

If you are in town go stop by the British Library. The exhibition runs until November 29th.

Speeding Up Mineral Reactions To Fight Global Warming

The more familiar method of carbon dioxide sequestration involves capturing and pumping the gas into underground reservoirs where geological traps that have sealed natural gas for millions of years will serve to lock captured CO2 for eons as well.

Nature has published a paper by Jürg M. Matter and Peter B. Kelemen that proposes another method of CO2 sequestration, locking CO2 as carbonate minerals by reaction with a host rock.

Anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions continue to increase rapidly despite efforts aimed at curbing the release of such gases. One potentially long-term solution for offsetting these emissions is the capture and storage of carbon dioxide. In principle, fluid or gaseous carbon dioxide can be injected into the Earth's crust and locked up as carbonate minerals through chemical reactions with calcium and magnesium ions supplied by silicate minerals. This process can lead to near-permanent and secure sequestration, but its feasibility depends on the ease and vigour of the reactions. Laboratory studies as well as natural analogues indicate that the rate of carbonate mineral formation is much higher in host rocks that are rich in magnesium- and calcium-bearing minerals. Such rocks include, for example, basalts and magnesium-rich mantle rocks that have been emplaced on the continents. Carbonate mineral precipitation could quickly clog up existing voids, presenting a challenge to this approach. However, field and laboratory observations suggest that the stress induced by rapid precipitation may lead to fracturing and subsequent increase in pore space. Future work should rigorously test the feasibility of this approach by addressing reaction kinetics, the evolution of permeability and field-scale injection methods.

The advantage here is that the gas is converted into a solid phase and so exists in a more stable form. The principle may be sound but I'm going to think out aloud on bridging the very long distance between scientific possibility and its practical realization in the field for a country like India.

First come the political and economic issues with a scheme of this nature. Those hurdles are immense. India's stated position is of no mandatory limits on emissions, so there is no political urgency in examining CO2 sequestration projects like this one. And this method is going to be expensive as well. Transporting CO2 from emission points to suitable storage sites and then drilling and pumping gas in hard rock ain't going to come cheap. It might work if the price of emitting CO2 is very high. But under the current scenario in India with no limits or penalties on emissions there will be no economic incentives for polluters to even explore a scheme like this.

Besides, there are other urgent practical matters that need to be carefully thought out before rock masses can be given out for CO2 storage.

There is no problem in India finding a suitable host rock. In Maharashtra and adjoining states of Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh there is half a million square km of Deccan Basalts, a rock rich in magnesium and calcium that will provide plenty of reaction surface and storage volume. This potential reservoir is up to 2 km thick in the central portions and along the western ghats. Other areas of the country too have mafic igneous rocks of the right composition that may extend to even deeper crustal levels.

However... where do you drill and store and to what depth before the project becomes too expensive?...

A crustal thickness of up to 1 km underlying cultivated areas must be kept untouched only for groundwater storage. That may seem excessive since groundwater is extracted mostly from the upper few tens to a hundred feet or so. But the Deccan Basalts and other mafic crystalline rocks have deeper aquifers too. Already these are being exploited by groundwater bore-wells that are reaching a few hundred meters in many parts of the country as demand for the groundwater increases.

Water in these crystalline rocks is stored and moves along fractures and cracks. Fracture systems in these rock masses penetrate to great depths and must be kept open if the rock is to act as an effective aquifer.  The danger is that gas pumped to depths even greater than 1 km may seep up through these deep penetrating fractures depositing carbonate minerals and plugging up the shallow permeability pathways for groundwater.

You could in principle go to very great depths say much more than 2 km, but at some point drilling through the hard crystalline rock will make the project uneconomic.

So then.... if the choice is between pumping CO2 into the crust to economically viable depths to keeping aquifers healthy, then the health of the aquifers must win out. Timely groundwater access improves crop yield and farmer income. The relation is direct and the benefits immediate. Risking reducing the  porosity and permeability of these rocks with carbonate minerals to attain a more nebulous benefit (for people who depend on groundwater) of lowered atmospheric CO2 content will be a suicidal course to take and I unfortunately mean that literally.  Groundwater irrigates a major share of cultivated areas and access to it offers the best chance of alleviating grinding farmer poverty in face of uncertain rains and lower crop yields due to increased temperatures.

So, no playing around with rock masses under cultivated areas...that might leave sections of the crust underlying wastelands, forests and urban areas as potential sites. Of these wastelands appear as the most promising sites in terms of the least political and civic resistance to such a project. This provided field experiments demonstrate the feasibility of this project and the political and economic conditions allow its implementation.

India's National Action Plan for Climate Change (15 MB) has very little to say about carbon sequestration. None of the eight missions or strategies meant to deal with climate change include carbon capture and sequestration.

It is under the political radar and it is expensive and India can best mitigate the effects of global warming by keeping the shallow crust fractured and permeable so as to act as an effective aquifer for groundwater.

My feeling is for India at least in the near term this method of preventing atmospheric CO2 buildup is a non-starter.

You'll Understand Homeopathy If You Understand Einstein

....Homeopathy - can it get more stupid than this...?

Warning: Advanced degree in physics and chemistry required to follow this discussion:



Now you know why those white pills pack so much punch! They are literally powder kegs of energy.

Teaching Human Evolution In Pakistan Can Be Dangerous

Kenneth Chang of New York Times has written an interesting summary on the teaching and acceptance of evolution across Muslim countries and among Muslim immigrants in many western nations.

Atomic physicist Pervez. A Hoodbhoy went through a dramatic moment while lecturing at a university in Pakistan:

Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominent atomic physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan, said that when he gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, the audience listened without objection to most of it. “Everything is O.K. until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoy said.

Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out. “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge,” he said. “Your lineage is what determines your worth.”

Its scary that this took place not at some isolated madrassa but at a national university. Overall acceptance of evolution - especially human evolution - is low in Muslim countries. The technological advancement engulfing these countries is not necessarily paralleled by a more scientific mindset among citizenry. Religious beliefs are playing a large role in driving a wedge between the two. Turkey is a great example. Just 2-3 decades ago creationism was not a factor affecting science education in Turkey. Today, the influence of Islamic parties is greater in society, evolution teaching is diluted at the school level and creationist textbooks are influencing biology syllabus.

The article does not mention Muslims in India but I doubt if attitudes towards evolution are significantly different among Indian Muslims.

And I wonder what the break up would be according to educational level and how it compared to Hindus.

How Much Oil Underneath?

A friend asked me a few days ago why the Karnataka government were giving two different estimates for iron ore potential in the state. One file says that the iron ore reserves are about 3,447 million tonnes, while another department file says that the state has about 9,000 million tonnes of iron ore resources.

I replied that assuming the Karnataka government is using the words as they are commonly used in industry, reserves are the fraction of resources that can be economically exploited at any given time. Neither is a static quantity. Both will change given new finds, technological breakthroughs that enable recovery of previously out of bound deposits and the economic and political climate.

Coincidentally Scientific American has an article in their recent issue on the current reserves of oil and how that quantity is changing with new finds and new technology. They give one example:

When Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, analysts thought that only 10 percent of its unusually viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil, a fraction of the 278 million barrels already recovered. “In the next 44 years, it produced not 54 [million barrels] but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining,” energy guru Morris Adelman noted in 1995. But even this estimate proved wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron, by then the field’s operator, announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today Kern River still puts out nearly 80,000 barrels per day, and the state of California estimates its remaining reserves to be about 627 million barrels.

This story will apply to a wide range of mineral/oil deposits all over the world.  Famously the United States has produced a cumulative 200 billion barrels of oil from reserves that never at any one time exceeded 40 billion barrels.

In the many responses to the Scientific American article I thought this one from JR Wakefield stood out as it explains what peak oil means from different perspectives:

Its not about how much oil is in the ground, it's how fast you can get it out and at what net energy.  This thus article is highly misleading.   Here are the Five Horsemen of Peak Oil:

1) Geological Peak. That is the point where we have consumed half the oil in the ground. So far we have consumed a trillion barrels. Estimates of remaining oil range, but the number appears to be 3 trillion barrels remaining in the ground. So we are not at geological peak. Hence skeptics of peak oil use this for their arguments, like this SA article does.

2) Flow Rate Peak. That's the point at which you cannot extract the oil fast enough to meet demand. This is especially so with old fields in decline (which is a fact) and new fields which have difficult geology (like this one).  The flow rate from them does not keep up with decline, nor keep up with growing demand. The article failed to mention that North Sea is all in terminal decline and the UK has to now import oil. Indonesia peaked years ago and has to import oil forcing them out of OPEC.  The Cantarell field in Mexico, the third largest in the world, and the US's 3rd import source, was producing 2.3mb/day at it's height.  Today it's 560kb/day with a 41% drop from last year.  WE ARE AT FLOW RATE PEAK NOW.

3) Geopolitical Peak. That's when exporting countries, due to their own growing demand, decide not to sell their oil abroad any longer but decide to keep what's in the ground for their own future domestic needs. So far only the US does this, but expect other countries to soon follow that.

4) ERoEI peak. This is the point at which it takes as many joules to extract the oil than you get from the oil extracted. That is, one barrel in to get 1 barrel out. Conventional wells in the 1960s were 100:1. That has dropped to about 25:1 today. Aging fields and new unconventional fields have very low ERoEI. The tar sands in Alberta for example is less than 6:1. Our entire society is based on the NET energy, not what's extractable. Calculations show that we will reach over all break even in oil extraction between 2020 and 2030. Once that is reached it basically means we have completely run out of oil.

5) economic peak.  This is the point where the economy cannot tollerate high oil prices and plunges the world into a recession, like this one which was caused by $140.barrel oil.

The challenge before us in terms of combating global warming is to ensure a transition from hydrocarbon energy to low emissions renewable energy much much before we start running out of the stuff not just in geological terms - which is not going to occur anytime soon - but by the other measures like Flow Rate and ERoEI as well. Likely even the Flow Rate Peak and the ERoEI peak are not constant but will keep shifting as more efficient ways of extracting oil and other hydrocarbon resources are discovered.

A Government Scientist Speaks Out On Flood Management

You don't hear many Indian Government scientists opining about science, policy, the environment, civic criticism...well you get the picture.

There are restraints....to put it politely.

But Chetan Pandit of the Central Water Commission has broken the shackles and in the October issue of Current Science comes out sparring strongly against - in his opinion - the woolly headed arguments of the environmental community  and the media on the subject of big dams and flood control.

He puts forth several fallacies and myths regarding dams and flood control and argues very well that big dams have served as effective flood managers.

And I had to chuckle at this:

We Indians seem to be particularly susceptible to this ‘romancing with the past’. Everything, be it water management, or agriculture, Ayurveda, mathematics, literature, astrology, etc., we like to believe that in India all learning had reached its peak in some distant past, and the best thing for us to do is, to continue to do what our ancestor’s did. And this is given a lofty name ‘wisdom of the centuries’.

You may be inclined to view big dams as destroyers of forests and biodiversity and so on but Chetan Pandit has made some good points about the intellectual environment in which debates on these issues take place and are presented to the public in India. One of the most important points he makes is that many people who get involved in criticizing government projects are numerically challenged. Arguments are high on the emotional quotient but there is little quantitative analysis of data to go with it.

I am sure not all environmentalists are so mathematically naive, nor should every developmental project be reduced to just numbers. But this is a government scientists view. When presented with a  rare opportunity to speak out he doesn't restraint himself.

Read the article here.

Update: Chetan Pandit via an email to me wants to clarify:

I never said that those criticizing government projects are “numerically challenged”, or mathematically naïve, etc. Even a high school student would be able to import the data on flood affected area into a spread sheet and plot a graph to see whether or not there is any increasing trend. What happens is, if they do that their argument will collapse, the numbers do not favour them, they know it, and therefore they have to willfully ignore the numbers. Which is why I wouldn’t describe the environment in which debate takes place as “intellectual”. It is pseudo-intellectual.

Chetan Pandit

Sure, he didn't use the words numerically challenged and mathematically naive. Those are my words but he does imply this. For example he writes about noted anti-dam activist Shripad Dharmadhikary -

In his exhaustive critique of the Bhakra dam, noted anti-dam activist Shripad Dharmadhikary writes, ‘Even after the Sutluj flows were augmented by the transfer of Beas water into the Bhakra reservoir, the reservoir has not filled up in most of the years’4. This was probably intended as a critical comment on filling of the Bhakra reservoir. But its implication, which probably escaped Dharmadhikary, is – Bhakra is very successful in flood control. In the years, the dam did not even fill; it is obvious that all the floods were absorbed 100%. And this, despite transfer of a substantial quantity of water from Beas to Sutlej through the Beas–Sutlej link.

But its implication, which probably escaped Dharmadhikary,...

So I read this as meaning Dharmadhikary did not understand the topic well enough. It certainly doesn't read as meaning that Dharmadhikary churned out the numbers, didn't like what he saw and then ignored the finding.