An Idle Threat

Part 1 of a five part series on Pune City and environment. Updated every Tuesday.

I cross Law college road everyday on my way to soccer practice. The traffic is an endless stream, and sometime back I told the other coaches that I will be coaching from the other side of the road. At the Prabhat road signal and at Nul stop the back-up is so bad, you could easily miss 3 or even 4 signals before crossing the intersection. Urban legends about these backups are growing. Just last week a woman gave birth in her car waiting for the signal. Most vehicles keep their engines idling during their wait. That gave me the idea for this blog. How much pollutants does your vehicle emit when you wait for a few minutes at a traffic signal? How much does the entire city of Pune emit?

I first had an inkling that the amounts were big when I noticed at truck stops in the U.S. that the truckers never shut down their engines. A little web research told me this astonishing fact:

Trucks in the United States consume about 1 billion gallons of diesel annually while idling! This amounts to about 11 million tons of CO2 emitted annually (Source: U.S. Dept. of Transportation). Overall the transport system in the U.S consumes 8.4 billion gallons of fuel annually while idling. This amount to about 83 million tons of CO2 emitted annually while idling.

Edit: Based on EPA chemistry of fuel combustion 1 billion gallons will emit about 10.1 million tonnes of CO2, but the EPA warns that "calculations and the supporting data have associated variation and uncertainty".

Using vehicle numbers from the Pune Municipal Corporation Env. Status Report, emission factors for various pollutants from a World Bank study and some assumptions about mileage and idling times I did some calculations for Pune. The numbers do not give any comfort.

On a daily basis, assuming a vehicle idles for just 2 minutes every day:

The total fuel consumed in Pune by idling cars, two wheelers and rickshaws amounts to an incredible 19 thousand litres per day! Emissions of greenhouse gases amount to 45 tonnes/day.

How much do all of us on an individual basis contribute? Graphs below estimates how much fuel is consumed and how much CO2, PM10 and SOx is emitted by your vehicle every year if you idle your engine for just 2 minutes every day waiting for the light to turn green.

So, if you drive a regular car you probably lose about Rs 500/- or so yearly on fuel burnt while idling. This 2 minutes is a very conservative estimate I used to do the calculations. Idling time may well be much more. For example, idling your car for 5 minutes every day, you will spend about Rs 1250 per year in fuel burnt and so on. Something to think about next time you are waiting for the light to turn green at a busy intersection. How do you make people change their habits? One way is to appeal to their civic sense, and the other in my opinion the more effective, is to make them aware of the costs of their behavior.

See, where I am going with this? If I alone spend Rs 500/- how much for the entire city? Table below shows how much the city of Pune is paying yearly in terms of fuel lost, CO2, PM10 and SOx emitted, and fuel cost for vehicle idling. This is for total number of cars, two wheelers and rickshaws in Pune, assuming an idling time of 2 minutes every day.









For readers outside India, 1 crore = 10 million, so Pune city spends Rs 34 crore or Rs 340 million worth of fuel burnt while idling. If all vehicles in Pune reduce idling time by just one minute per day we would save about 3.4 million litres of fuel worth about Rs. 17 crore annually! This is equivalent - in terms of fuel saved and CO2 emitted - to removing around 18,500 two wheelers or about 9,300 cars from the roads of Pune.

By the way, you can learn more about idling and various myths using this website from the Canadian Office of Energy Efficiency, designed specifically to help individuals, communities, businesses reduce vehicle idling and pollution.

Artificial Life and ....Debates

The Times of India carries a weekly debate called view and counterview. This week (Aug 23 2007) it was about the possibility that scientists may be able to create artificial life in the next decade or so. The very nature of the format means that the debate takes a predictable path of presenting two extreme points of view. In this case, either artificial life is great or it is the ultimate evil, either "synthetic life is going to be man's crowning achievement, his greatest work of art, or " renegade super bugs could, like locusts , destroy everything they come in contact with". Is this really the point of view of the reporters? Have they clarified their personal positions on this issue, and does the public know whether these reporters have held consistent views in the past. Without this knowledge, I as a reader feel this debate on artificial life is ....just a bit too artificial. Instead of having a contrived debate with two people shouting past each other, why not invite a biology ethics expert to write on this immensely complex issue?

Then there are the inevitable bloopers about evolution. Narayani Ganesh who wrote against artificial life writes " recent outbreaks of diseases caused by viruses like West Nile flu', AIDS, avian flu', and SARS (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome) are very likely the outcome of unnatural or artificially created mutations that have manifested as contagious and life-threatening diseases with no tested cure". This is a very strange point of view. Pathogens like any other life forms mutate at a natural rate and may occasionally evolve a life strategy that may harm humans. There is no evidence that human activities are inducing mutations in viruses and making them more harmful than they otherwise would be. A large body of empirical work has disproved such notions of directed mutations. It is true that in the modern era, diseases which previously may have been restricted to isolated communities are finding their way into the global population, but that simply means that more people are in danger of being exposed to a naturally evolving pathogen.

Later in his article Mr. Ganesh says" maverick attempts to leapfrog evolution- bypassing natural checks and balances- could well prove to be our nemesis". These kind of statements are inspired by thinking of the earth as some kind of self-regulating entity, a concept made famous by James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. But evolution does not necessarily lead to any natural checks and balances. A virus may simple decimate a population of humans or some other creature not because nature has some kind of self-regulating population control measure that returns it to an "equilibrium" state, but because the virus has locally evolved a successful strategy of reproducing itself. The reporting on evolution continues to be uninformed.

Plate Tectonics and Energy Politics

I came across a couple of good articles in Edge.org on climate change. The first was a somewhat radical position taken by Freeman Dyson. In his opinion, the effects of climate change are exaggerated and can be mitigated by changes in land management and farming practices such as no-till farming and genetically engineering plants to create more root biomass, essentially increasing carbon stored in soil. He has some especially unkind things to say about computer models of climate change. This brought out a response from Alun Anderson, who invited Dyson to come to the Arctic and take a look for himself. A good give and take. Anderson mentioned that summer melting of Arctic ice has increased and this has resulted in a mad rush by Russia, Canada and Denmark to map accurately the continental shelf bordering their coastline.

What's the big deal about continental shelves? The five countries bordering the Arctic (U.S, Canada, Denmark who administers Greenland, Norway and Russia) have exclusive right over mineral deposits extending to 200 nautical miles from their coasts. This zone can be extended if any country can prove that their continental shelves extend to a distance more than 200 miles. Russia is now claiming just that. It is saying that the Lomonosov ridge which is an underwater linear block of continental crust aligned roughly NE-SW is a natural extension of its continental shelf. Preliminary estimates suggest that the ridge could yield about 10 billion barrels of hydrocarbons.

Plate tectonic theory has been used to explain the geological evolution of terrains, but this is probably the first time it has been called upon to resolve a brewing political crisis.

IBCAO-NOAA-NGDC.

In early Tertiary period (about 50 million years ago) the north Atlantic spreading ridge propagated northward (dotted purple line and arrow). This cause the continental shelf of Eurasia to rift and split apart. This rift evolved into a oceanic spreading ridge known as the Gakkel ridge (spreading shown by yellow arrows). The Lomonosov ridge is a linear block of Eurasian continental shelf which split and moved NW to its present position. Russia asserts that its Siberian continental shelf extends naturally as the Lomonosov ridge. The point of contention is highlighted by a red arrow next to the label Russia. Is there is geological continuity of terrains there? Plate tectonic theory suggests that the ridge was moved there into position and juxtaposed against the Siberian shelf. Recent seismic data show that as the ridge approaches Siberia it deepens and there are buried faults in the deeper sediment between Siberia and the Lomonosov ridge, a finding that supports tectonic theory. Denmark and Canada can probably make a similar claim on it's side of the Lomonosov ridge.

But why should that matter? Currently reality should take priority. Even if the ridge was originally somewhere else and stuck on to the Russian shelf later by plate movements, doesn' t that make it a natural extension of the Russian shelf. The law of the sea doesn't say which type of geological process should cause the extension of the shelf. I have a feeling Denmark will also be able to show that the Lomonosov ridge is attached to their shelf. As warming clears more Arctic ice, plate tectonic theory will have plenty to say on the complicated energy politics of the Arctic ocean.

Evolution: A Great Mystery?

Live Science , an online science news portal is carrying out a "greatest mystery" series, in which they are asking prominent scientists from various fields to talk about the unknowns. With a series title like this, it is inevitable that the chosen scientist and the reporter will play up the 'mystery' part and give the impression that scientists are pretty much befuddled. For the theory of evolution , the scientist interviewed (Aug 16 2007) was Massimo Pigliucci of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in New York. T. Ryan Gregory has dissected the interview in his blog and pointed out the various misunderstandings that it created regarding the state of our understanding about evolution. I will add just one more impression. The interviewer writing about various evolutionary "forces" says

Self-organization is another evolutionary force that some experts say whips up complex features or behaviors spontaneously in living and non-living matter, and these traits are passed on to offspring through the generations.

"A classic example outside of biology are hurricanes: These are not random air movements at all, but highly organized atmospheric structures that arise spontaneously given the appropriate environmental conditions," Pigliucci said. "There is increasing evidence that living organisms generate some of their complexity during development in an analogous manner."

The example given of a spontaneously arising complex structure is protein folding. Proteins take on endless shapes and the mechanism that triggers this form is a chemical signal.

I have always felt that reports like these neglect to explain the distinction between proximate causes and ultimate causes. Proteins do fold spontaneously, but proteins serving a particular function always fold the same way. So in trillions of cells in trillions of different organisms, something is controlling the consistency of the chemical signal and therefore the shape the protein. That something is the gene(s) that codes for the signal. Which means that over time evolution has populated the world with only those genes that code for just the right chemical signal. The process that causes such an accumulation of the right genes is natural selection.

Biologist may not today understand the mechanics of protein folding (proximal causes), but they accept that natural selection has to be the ultimate cause. In this case I feel Massimo Pigliucci fudged the part of ultimate causation and exaggerated the mystery of proximate causation. The level at which such apparent mysteries exists needs to be clarified by the interviewed scientist. It would be too much to expect from the media.

Indians Predated Newton

Lord Ram flew in the Pushpak airplane on his way from Lanka after his victory

The Kaurav Princes were test tube babies.

Arjuna used what amount to nuclear weapons in the battle of the Mahabharata.

All patriotic Indians are well aware that ancient India was the source of all human knowledge. But somehow we were too forgetful, too careless, too lazy to do anything about it and over time this priceless knowledge was lost.

Now it appears we were too generous. A Kerala school of mathematics having discovered the infinite series, one of the basic components of calculus in around 1350 A.D. passed it on to Jesuit Missionaries in 1500's. The Jesuit's held on to the secret for more than 100 years, until they spotted Newton struggling. Taking pity on him, they explained the infinite series to him. Newton promptly invented calculus.

Jokes apart, new research does appear to show that Indians had discovered the infinite series in around 1350 A.D. According to Dr. Joseph of the Univ. of Manchester, who made the discovery while trawling through obscure Indian papers for a yet to be published third edition of his best selling book 'The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European Roots of Mathematics' by Princeton University Press.

"The beginnings of modern maths is usually seen as a European achievement but the discoveries in medieval India between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries have been ignored or forgotten.

"The brilliance of Newton's work at the end of the seventeenth century stands undiminished - especially when it came to the algorithms of calculus.

"But other names from the Kerala School, notably Madhava and Nilakantha, should stand shoulder to shoulder with him as they discovered the other great component of calculus- infinite series"

Read the complete press release.

Due to the Independence day holiday, most Indian newspaper haven't covered the story yet although its slowly making its way in the blogosphere. I am waiting for the reactions of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad .