Cutting Down On That Red Meat Mr. Bush?

I am not at all sure that even if our media and politicians had read in its entirety Mr. Bush's statements on increasing prosperity in China and India and its link to growing food prices, the reaction would have been any different. The false outraged, self righteous, preachy tone of the Indian response was childish and annoying. An instinctive America-bashing mentality seems to have taken deep roots in our civic discussions of global problems. In all this furore a much more interesting and informative study of American food habits, diets and its impact on climate change went relatively unnoticed. NPR covered it last week and the talk and the paper is worth following.

The study by Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University , Pennsylvania did a life-cycle assessement of greenhouse gases emitted during all stages of growing, processing and transporting food consumed in the U.S. They broke it down according to food types and concluded that consumption of red meat and dairy accounted for about 50% of greenhouse gas emissions by an average U.S household. Their main conclusions:

Source: Food Miles and Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the U.S.

..transportation creates only 11% of the 8.1 metric tons (t) of greenhouse gases (in CO2 equivalents) that an average U.S. household generates annually as a result of food consumption. The agricultural and industrial practices that go into growing and harvesting food are responsible for most (83%) of its greenhouse gas emissions.

For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home. By comparison, driving a car that gets 25 miles per gallon of gasoline for 12,000 miles per year (the U.S. average) produces about 4.4 t of CO2. Switching to a totally local diet is equivalent to driving about 1000 miles less per year, Weber says.

A relatively small dietary shift can accomplish about the same greenhouse gas reduction as eating locally, Weber adds. Replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week reduces emissions equal to 760 miles per year of driving. And switching to vegetables one day per week cuts the equivalent of driving 1160 miles per year.

What should the Indian response be to these findings? Indian agriculture food production chains are no doubt less energy intensive than the U.S. but industrial scale poultry and dairy production in India may be reaching comparable levels. The avoidance of beef by a majority of Indian seems to be helping in keeping industrial scale red meat production in check although we have lots and lots of cows that produce lots of milk and also plenty of methane. If you look at the breakdown of emissions during the dairy life -cycle production of gases in the above figure CO2, CH4 and N2O make up the dominant portion. Those ruminant stomachs are a real headache whether in U.S or in India! Our cattle are producing substantial amounts of greenhouse gases whether they are involved in industrial food processing cycles or not. The current debate on national responsibility for emissions have mostly involved people shouting at or worse past each other. I do feel that our response to statement's like the ones Mr. Bush made should involve more substance and less gas.

Selfish Genes and Altruism

Sometimes I just like to nitpick. David Brooks wrote a column in the New York Times exploring the ways science keeps explaining the way our brain works and the resulting conflict between those who are confident that all our experiences have a material basis and those who keep faith in the "something else", a soul, a ghost in the machine, a larger invisible unmeasurable presence that transcends material explanations.

Brooks writes:

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Brooks seems to imply that despite genes being selfish, people have altruistic tendencies. This is pet peeve of mine. The persistent misunderstanding that selfish genes lead to selfish behavior. I responded in a previous post about an article Nicolas Wade wrote about altruism and see no reason to change much:

The term “selfishness” in his article really reflects the metaphorical motives of genes and not the real motives of individuals. These are not necessarily the same motives. Both selfish and co-operative behaviors are contingent strategies which have evolved in certain circumstances such as living in highly social groups. Which one is employed depends upon an unconscious cost-benefit analysis of the greatest chance of reproductive success. The ultimate causation of both these behaviors is the gene's metaphorical selfish motive in getting the most copies of itself into the next generation. Thus ‘selfish genes’ (ultimate level) don't automatically produce selfish behavior (proximate level).

This clarification of the meaning of “Selfishness” is crucial since one of the biggest misapprehensions about evolution is that if genes have selfish motives then individuals will always behave selfishly with the obvious distasteful implications for human behavior. This need not be so since "selfishness" is the genes metaphorical motive which can lead to a wide range of behaviors ranging from selfishness to altruism in individuals.

More than 30 years since the publication of Richard Dawkins classic book The Selfish Gene, such misconceptions remain. If you were to glance through that book, you will find large sections devoted to explaining the evolution of altruism!

That's Dr. Brian May To You!!

One of my favorite rockers Brian May of Queen (love his little guitar riffs!!)

is now Astrophysicist Dr. Brian May, Ph.D in interplanetary dust from Imperial College, London


Listen to Dr. May belt it out on NPR's Day to Day. He's also co-authored a new book titled Bang: A Complete History of the Universe. Might not sell as much as A Brief History of Time but it's a fair bet that many unread copies will sit atop bookshelves. I got all nostalgic and listened to A Night At The Opera. Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon, Death On Two Legs, I'm In Love With My Car...

Dr. May is now chancellor of John Moores University in Liverpool. What is it with Liverpool and great rockers?

Strange Climate Debate in Times

Last week came the news that scientists are predicting a decadal-scale plateau in temperatures or even a slight cooling of Europe and N. America probably related to shifting currents in the oceans. The long term forecast that mean global temperature will increase over the next century remains, but the research reminded us that global warming does not mean that temperatures on every square inch of the earth will increase in step, monotonously and uniformly. Dot Earth has a thoughtful post on whether we can use evidence of long-term risk of temperature increase and put in motion meaningful practical policy to reduce emissions of CO2 or will predictions about the short term variability of climate systems such as the coming cooling of Europe and N. America put the brakes on efforts to limit emissions. All current projections about India point to continued warming in the Indian subcontinent without any decadal-scale breathers.

Given this background the Times of India had a debate on climate change in its view and counter view format. The Times view was the consensus view that argued for continued action no matter how climate systems behave in the short term. I agree with this but was surprised to read the counter view. This was no subtle nuanced argument about complexities of climate systems and the economics of different policy options of combating global warming, but a full sucker punch in the face against the very notion of human-induced global warming. On second thoughts that such a polarized view was tabled should not have surprised me since the very format of the debate forces the counter viewer to take a completely opposite position no matter how ludicrous it might be. And ludicrous it was.

The argument was made not by a climate scientist- when will our media ever learn to engage experts- but by columnist Jug Suraiya! Now Mr. Suraiya is a well respected columnist but he is not a climate scientist and his lack of science training shows. He opens his argument not by referring to real science contradicting warming but by pointing out that the writer Michael Crichton has written a science fiction book that questions the human influence on global warming. I kid you not! Mr. Suraiya raises the bogey of a vast conspiracy involving tens of thousands of scientists, media, lawyers and NGO's all bent on getting their piece of the global warming funding pie. He then goes on to make some very strange remarks about the composition of the atmosphere essentially saying that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere compared with other gases is minuscule and that adding a little more presumable won't make a difference. He ignores the fact that while the relative proportion of CO2 compared with other gases is minuscule, CO2 along with water vapor are the major greenhouse gases and that calculations indicate that adding that "little more" CO2 is precisely what will overload the natural CO2 mass balance of the earth and cause warming. He then proceeds to dismiss the rise in surface temperatures of the earth as a sign of urban heat island effect. I frankly felt very irritated with the man. Does he really think that climate scientists are stupid and have not understood the heat island effect and not corrected for it and validated that correction? The terrestrial temperature measurements are also complimented by measurements of ocean temperatures which also have increased and those of the troposphere which satellite measurements show to have steadily increased too. Read too much Michael Crichton and you tend to forget the real data.

Mr. Suraiya finally regards the melting of glaciers and polar ice caps as natural inter-glacial phenomenon but then points out that the Greenland ice sheet has been growing for the last 6 thousand years. We are in an inter-glacial period and most of the glacial melting related to it took place in the first few thousand years of warming at the beginning of the Holocene period starting about 12 thousand years ago. Greenland ice sheet volume would have fluctuated as a response to the natural climate variability over the past few millennium and may even have grown a little over the last 6 thousand years, but what is important is the increased rates of glacial melting, both alpine glaciers and those in the Arctic and Antarctica that we observe today. For example current studies of the Greenland ice sheet indicate that net loss in ice volume of several glaciers has accelerated in the last few years. Climate scientists are afraid that there is a danger of continued decay of the Greenland ice sheet with attendant sea-level rise over the coming decades as Greenland and the Arctic ocean warms up. This is the point I think a lot of climate skeptics miss out on. It doesn't matter what natural trend existed over the last few thousand years, it is changes over the last 50 years and the next 100 years or so that are of importance and these changes in global temperatures and consequently sea-levels, the overwhelming evidence tells us are being caused by human activity.

I am all for debate on complex topics like climate change, global warming and societal response to it. But the debate should now move away from whether there is going to warming over the next century to how best to minimize it and adapt to it. And it's time that our media brings in climate and policy experts to talk about it.

Dino News: T. Rex ,Predictions, Media Muck Ups

Dinosaurs are undoubtedly the stars of palaeontology research if you go by media coverage of the field. Paleontologists who study foraminifers or graptolites may disagree but for the media Dino's are always newsworthy. No news about these creatures is small enough to cover. Dino's seem to occupy an iconic status among creatures long gone extinct. They do fascinate, more than any other beasts they bring visions of a primordial world that once was. Stephen Jay Gould wrote on many occasions how the Tyrannosaurus Rex exhibit at New York Museum of Natural History inspired him to become a paleontologist. His excellent collection of essays Bully for Brontosaurus has an affectionate tribute to Dino-mania. Two news reports on Dinosaurs in the last couple of weeks caught my eye.

Creationists often carp that evolutionary theory lacks predictive power. Ask a biologist they say how human evolution will proceed over the next 5 million years and there will be a shake of the head and a can't say for sure for an answer. If you cannot predict the future evolution of a species then evolutionary theory is not a true science. This line of argument is often persuasively sold by creationists to the layperson not familiar with the scientific method. It is true that it is not possible to forecast what specific evolutionary trajectory a particular lineage will take since there is contingency built into evolution. The process is very sensitive to starting conditions. Small initial variations between sister species may lead to large differences over time but on the other hand they may not. Unlike physical laws, biological "laws" are not universal in time and space. There are exceptions to just about every biological patterns and processes and this makes predicting long term evolutionary trends difficult. Moreover external events such as climatic shifts may push evolution this way or the other, disasters such as meteorite impacts may obliterate well adapted species and reorganize ecosystems. But in science prediction does not always mean foretelling future events. Especially in evolutionary theory a large part of prediction making deals with reconstructing events of the past, retro-dictions if you like. Which means predicting that certain biological patterns and properties will exist in nature given expectation of theory and complimentary data from another area of research. Based on anatomical comparisons between Dinosaurs and other vertebrates it is the consensus view today that birds are the closest living relatives of Dinosaurs. If gross morphology informs us such then so should individual molecules. A reasonable prediction would be that there would be greater DNA or protein sequence similarity between Dinosaurs and birds than between Dinosaurs and any other living vertebrate. And that is exactly the pattern that has been found in ancient proteins recovered from a 68 million year old T. rex bone. The analysis grouped T. rex closer to chickens and ostriches than to lizards and crocodiles. You can listen to the details in this NPR piece. This is how evolutionary theory gets strengthened. Predictions such as these are made every day in labs and tested. Lines of evidence from different fields converging on the same conclusion. Nothing earth shaking, no paradigm shifts or revolutions, just day to day science at work although in this case retrieving protein from a 68 million year old fossil was something special. But nearly 150 years of testing and validating predictions such as these is why evolution is such a strong theory.

Given the frequent coverage by media on dinosaurs and their relationship to birds I don't at all understand how Science Daily could have got it so wrong in another piece on dinosaurs. This one dealt with the absence of heat generating brown fat in lizards and birds. This is tissue that generates heat in mammals and a comparative molecular analysis suggests that the gene UCP1 responsible of this function arose in the common ancestor of mammals and birds. This is what the report said:

The ability to produce brown fat evolved in a common ancestor of birds and mammals, but the ability to generate heat was lost in the group that gave rise to birds and lizards after it separated from the mammalian lineage (the researchers found the lizard genome similarly lacks a UCP1 gene). This strongly implies that dinosaurs, which diverged from birds even later than lizards, also lacked brown fat.

Science Daily has got the evolution part all mixed up. The common ancestor of birds and mammals is the common ancestor of dinosaurs, lizards and mammals. See figure of vertebrate phylogeny below. Red indicates presence of UCP1 and black indicates its absence. Question mark indicate uncertainty on when exactly UCP1 was lost.


Source: BioMed Central

Birds are not ancestral to dinosaurs as the report implies but birds are highly derived dinosaurs. The best evidence suggests that they evolved from within the maniraptors, a group of small carnivorous dinosaurs. Birds lack UCP1 because dinosaurs lacked it and they (birds) inherited that condition and not the other way round.

Update: Just saw this in DNA. The Indian media is never far behind in copying the mistakes of others. DNA (April 28 08) pasting the same report came up with its own headline: Dinosaurs died as they failed to generate heat. The print edition went further and announced a new theory: New Theory on Dino's Extinction. The original research article did not approach the topic of extinction with a single condition answer and for good reason. End Cretaceous environmental changes must have affected organisms in various ways. Dinosaurs were varied in their size , shapes, diet and thermo regulation. It's unlikely the entire group would be affected in the same way by ecological changes. Absence of UCP1 and a lack of heat generating brown fat was a shared condition in lizards, non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs (birds). Only the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. Any theory of dinosaur extinction has to explain this specificity since despite lacking UCP1 many ancient lizard and avian dinosaur (bird) species survived and proliferated. Many non-avian dinosaurs are thought to have had higher rates of metabolism than lizards and other reptiles so the answer to why dinosaurs went extinct has to account for that too.