Climate and Point of No Return

The science section of the Times of India has a rather alarming article on global warming. According to Australian scientist Tim Flannery, we may have already emitted greenhouse gases to a threshold value that may cause "irreversible climate change". Flannery remarks that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report due in November will show that greenhouse gas level by mid 2005 have reached around 455 parts per million, a level not expected until a decade later. The Times of India calls Flannery a "world recognized climate change scientist". I looked up his credentials and found that he is a palaeontologist, an expert on mammals who over the course of his research I am sure has acquired a good knowledge of climate change. But he is not a climate scientist. Don't Indian science reporters ever do any background checks? He may well be right about greenhouse gases already passing some threshold, but with or without immediate thresholds, isn't climate change irreversible on the time scale of the next few hundred years anyway? Owing to the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere there is always going to be a lag between our reducing emissions and its effects to be felt in terms of stabilizing the temperature.

This press release reminded me of a cartoon I saw some time back.

Cartoon Creator: Mike Adams; Source: www.NewsTarget.com

Flannery's fears may be well founded. We should be doing better than this.

Tiny Frogs and Fault Rocks

Two news items that caught my eye in the last week or so.

Tiny Frog is India's smallest land vertebrate:
Biologist S D Biju of Delhi University working in the western ghat forests in Kerala discovered a new species of leaf frog which they named Nyctibatrachus minimus. Adult males are barely 10 mm in length and can fit inside a 5 rupee coin (Image source Delhi Univ).

The pleasant surprise was that a press release from an Indian university was picked up by a major science news portal, in this case Science Daily. Indian universities do not have well organized proactive press offices. News of research rarely filters out even in Indian newspapers. Indian scientists for their part have remained largely invisible to the public. We meet them not through their books or articles or on radio and TV talk shows, but only on that tiresome "science day" when hordes of bored school children are made to walk through science exhibits in some government institution. There a government scientist will tell you how fulfilling a career option science is. Despite their best efforts, science as an activity doesn't register among young Indians as something exciting.

Fresh from within the San Andreas Fault:
In 2004, the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, a monumental project to drill right into the world's most famous fault zone began. The San Andreas fault zone marks the boundary between the Pacific plate and the North American plate. The goal was to set up a deep monitoring system to analyse the movements of rocks along the fault zone. After drilling about 2 miles, geologists have recovered about a ton of rock from within the fault zone itself.

It is a magnesium aluminium rich silicate rock known as serpentinite (Image source: Earthscope). Its composition and physical structure will be invaluable in understanding the conditions at depth, and how this major plate boundary behaves and how earthquakes work. In time geologists using this deep monitoring system hope to refine earthquake prediction methods.

Diets, Consumption and Global Warming

Part 6 of the six part series on Pune pollution and environment.

Sometime back a blogger left a comment on one of my earlier blogs, suggesting a number of ways to reduce pollution. Among the many was, "don't drive, walk as much as possible", the rationale obviously being that using less fuel is good for the environment. In these times, when global warming is one of the big talking points, walking is the healthy and responsible way forward. But is it?

A few weeks ago I read a strange article in the Times of London, where a calculation was presented. Apparently if a person walks to the store and around the neighbourhood for errands, let's say around 3 miles or 4.8 km, then providing that person with enough calories to replace those burnt, emits more CO2 than if the person had driven to the store. Driving to the store and back according to the calculation will emit around 0.9 kg of CO2. On the other hand, walking to the store will burn around 180 calories. To replace that with a mostly beef diet will result in 3.6 kg of CO2 emissions. With a straight face the report says “The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.” This says a lot about how energy intensive the meat food production chain has become in developed countries. But not just the meat. If you try to replace those 180 burnt calories with milk, it will result in 1.2 kg of CO2 emissions, still more than driving. In 2002, in the United States, the food production system accounted for around 17% of fossil fuel use. Going vegetarian or "vegan"will reduce this burden. Another study has calculated that the difference in greenhouse gas emissions due to shifting to a veggie diet is as much as that achieved by shifting from an SUV to a standard car, a reduction of about 1.4 tons CO2 per person per year. Cutting meat altogether from our diet seems very unpopular at present. Recently, Michael O'Leary, the boss of budget airline Ryanair, came under heavy criticism when he remarked that global warming can be eliminated by slaughtering the world's livestock. Off course going veggie alone doesn't help as illustrated by this cartoon.

I walk a lot in Pune, so do I actually contribute more to global warming by walking and not driving. Suppose following the U.K example I walk around 4.8 km per day and burn about 200 calories. My diet these days is almost entirely vegetarian. Based on a Ford Foundation study on energy intensity of Indian agriculture I calculated that producing 1 kg of food will result in about 2 kg of CO2 emissions. This includes energy required for the entire food production chain including fertilizers and transportation. If I burn 200 calories, eating healthy I would have to eat about 300 grams of various vegetables to make up those burnt calories resulting in about 0.6 kg of CO2 emissions. Much less than the person walking in U.K. and gorging on beef later. Energy intensity of Indian agriculture is still much less than the industrialized food production of the west. If I drive those 4.8 km in my Fiat (that old beast still chugs along) this will result in about 1.15 Kg of CO2 being emitted. But if a person zips around on a two wheeler, driving 4.8 km to the store and back will emit around 0.19 kg of CO2. In Pune, walking over short distances is better than driving a car, but not better than driving a two wheeler when it comes to replacing burnt calories and emitting greenhouse gases.

This will work as long the person maintains a particular weight. If a person starts overeating then all those extra calories represents extra emissions of CO2. This is likely to be a problem in urban India with all the new found prosperity. Trends of weight increase in urban Indians suggest that 40 to 50 million Indians have become overweight over the last few years and it could get worse. To gain one pound a week one has to eat 500 calories extra per day. That is a total of 3500 extra calories. Urban Indians are becoming fat not by eating huge amount of healthy veggies, but by stuffing themselves with calorie rich foods like sweets and oil rich fried stuff. That would mean they will require about 900 - 1000 grams of extra food to put on 1 pound of weight or 20 kg of extra food to gain 10 kg weight. The energy intensity of producing smaller amount of sweets and oil is probably the same as consuming larger amount of veggies. Going by this assumption, that would mean additional emissions of about 230 kg CO2 for every 10 kg of weight increase. If 50 million Indians become overweight by 10 kg that will result in additional emissions of 11.5 million tons of CO2. The figure will be much more if they start eating more chicken, since poultry industry is becoming very energy intensive, western style. My calculations are probably off by some amounts but the intent is to show that obesity and consumption has unexpected consequences.

How are urban Indians doing when it comes to personal lifestyles and the contribution thereof to global warming? Why not find out? Use the personal CO2 calculators I have listen below to calculate how much you contribute to global warming.

Carbon Counter
Conservation Fund Calculator
Carbon Footprint Calculator

To help you out here is a conversion list:

1 Dollar ~ Rs 40
1 gallon = 3.37 litres
1 kg = 2.2 lbs
One unit on your MSEB electricity bill ~ 1 kwhr.
1 cylinder of cooking gas (Propane) ~ 16.5 litres
Fuel Economy: 1km/lit = 2.35 miles/gallon
1000 kg = 1 ton

Compare your emissions with those of households of other nations given below.
CO2 Household Emissions by Country:
Australia - 14 tons/yr
China - 2.4 tons/yr
U.K- 9.8 tons/yr
U.S.- 19.06 tons/yr.

In the interest of full disclosure, I emit about 4 tons per year, a little more I suspect than many Puneites, primarily due to international travel.

This has been a fun series to write. I will be writing on and off about Pune so watch this space.

Part1. Idling and Pollution
Part2. PMT buses and Pollution
Part3. Rickshaws and Pollution
Part 4. Urban Forests and Clean Air
Part 5. Sensing Corruption Remotely

Was the Hobbit our Ancestor?

The enigmatic Hobbit is in the news again. About a week ago National Public Radio website which has a pretty solid reputation for good science reporting carried this headline, "Case Grows for 'Hobbit' as Human Ancestor". First some background. Remains of a 3 feet tall human-like creature, technically know as Homo floresiensis, with a brain much smaller than modern humans, were discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia in 2004. The remains range in age from about 20 -12 thousand years old. Controversy has raged on whether this creature nicknamed the Hobbit represents an extinct species of the human family or whether the remains are of pygmy modern humans (Homo sapiens) with a rare genetic condition known as microcephaly, which causes retardation of brain growth among other body deformities. You can follow the controversy in this series of blogs. The balance of evidence seems to be favoring the hypothesis that Homo floresiensis is a different species of hominid. The latest research dealt with shape of wrist bones, which according to researchers are not at all like the wrist bones in modern humans and Neanderthals, but more like wrist bones in early Homo erectus, the species considered ancestral to modern humans.

So, assuming that the Hobbit is a different species, does that justify a headline calling it a human ancestor? Image below shows the family tree of hominids, showing not only the pattern of branching but also the geographic distribution of the various hominid species.

Note: I just cannot remember where I downloaded this image. If anyone recognizes the source do let me know and I will credit it.

There is still a lot of disagreement on the status of Homo erectus. Some anthropologists call remains of early Homo found in Asia by the species name erectus, preferring the name ergaster for African representatives of early genus Homo. Others prefer naming all early Homo as erectus, a convention I will use here for the purpose of this discussion. What do we make of the early evolution and diversification of Homo erectus? It is convenient to think of erectus as a group of interbreeding populations living in East Africa about 1.2 million years ago. At some point after this date, some members of this population migrated to Indonesia and settled there. Some generations later, some more members of the population in East Africa, left for Europe and settled there. The rest of the population stayed in Africa. The three branches did not have any contact with each other thereafter. Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals and modern humans are the descendants of the populations which settled in Indonesia, Europe and east Africa respectively. That makes Homo floresiensis our distant cousin, not our ancestor.

Why would even experienced science reporting portals such as National Public Radio keep calling the Hobbit as our ancestor? Here are some examples from their article:

"Some scientists have said the Hobbit, found in Indonesia, is a weird human ancestor that somehow survived until some 12,000 to 20,000 years ago....."

"Regardless of whether the Hobbits are our ancestors or simply abnormal humans, they clearly defied steep odds to survive".

I think it has to do with the primitive traits shown by the Hobbit. Primitive traits are those aspects of our morphology or behavior that we inherit from our ancestors and are conserved, i.e. are not changed much. The Hobbit in aspects of its skull morphology and now the shape of wrist bones has retained and conserved traits that it inherited from its early Homo erectus ancestors in east Africa. Some time after the ancestors of the Hobbit had left Africa, evolution changed the shape of the wrist bones in some populations of erectus in Africa. This new wrist bone shape is said to be a derived trait with respect to early Homo. Populations carrying this derived wrist bone shape can be thought of as the common ancestor of the Neanderthals and modern humans. One such population migrated to Europe and evolved into the Neanderthals. Another population evolved into modern humans in Africa.

Hominids who carry ancestral or primitive traits are not necessarily our ancestors. Evolution is a branching process. An ancestral trait may be conserved during evolution in descendants of one branch of the family and modified by evolution in descendants of some other branch. The wrist bones in the human family illustrates this concept very well.

Sensing Corruption Remotely

Part 5 of the six part series on Pune city pollution and environment. Updated every Tuesday.

In this blog I integrate geology and high-resolution images with GIS, to showcase some example of poor urban planning and cases of violation of the urban development plan in Pune. The list of violations of building codes in Indian cities will be quite long. In recent months controversies over whether to build on the hills, and flooding of premises built too close to streams and rivers have caught the public attention. I have highlighted these types of violations since they require some geological knowledge and image interpretation skills to spot. At the end I will discuss some limitations of this approach.

Hill Top Hill Slopes:
Hills are measured in terms of gradient, which is merely the rise of the hill over the run. If you're going up 2 feet for every 100 feet you travel, you're on a 2% hill. For the purposes of urban zoning, the Pune Municipal Corporation Development Plan defines any hill slope with a gradient of 20% i.e. 11 deg or more as falling within a Hill Slope/Hill Top zone (HS/HT). According to the development control rules, owners of plots in HS/HT zones can have a built up area up to 4% of the plot area. Recently, all HS/HT were given protected status and all construction halted.

Construction on steep hill slopes can occur under a number of circumstances.

1) The slope was constructed upon at a time when the area fell outside the limits of the development control rules, i.e. outside PMC limits. This is a common situation in the fringe villages which only recently came under PMC jurisdiction.

2) The slope falls under HS/HT zone and has been encroached upon by slums. This situation is common for HS/HT zones under government ownership.

3) The slope falls under HS/HT zone and constructions have come up as per the development restrictions defined for HS/HT.

4) The slope is reclassified as not falling under HS/HT. Constructions on such misclassified slopes follow normal development control rules. This is a particularly insidious form of corruption of the urban development plan, since the "reclassification" allows plot owners to bypass the 4% rule and construct mansions on hills. Image below depicts this situation.

Source: Google Earth ; Image Copyright: 2007 Digitalglobe ; 2007 Europa Technologies; 2005 Google

The green line is the gentler slope. The yellow line is the steep rocky slope (HS/HT). The orange dotted lines outline a layer of black basalt rock. This layer can be traced from the upper left of the photo where it lies in the HS/HT reserved forest of Vetal Tekdi, along the entire length of the base of Chaturshringi hill. Since the basalt outcrop is horizontal the upper and lower dotted lines are analogous to contour lines. The gradient between them is the same along its entire length and should fall under the HS/HT zone along its entire length. On the lower right however one can observe massive constructions intersecting the basalt layer. The gradient at the site of these construction has been "reclassified" to residential to allow owners to maximize FSI (floor space index).

Encroachments of river banks:
During the recent monsoons, Ram Nadi, a tributary of the Mula river flooded its banks. Water entered the premises of several constructions built close to the banks. Residents, city government and the media suddenly woke up to the fact that these houses were built with scant regard to urban development rules, which mandate a no construction zone of 30 metres near water bodies. Below is an example of a clear violation of that rule. Image shows a section of the Mutha river near the bridge connecting Karvenagar and Sinhagad road.

Source: Google Earth ; Image Copyright: 2007 Digitalglobe ; 2007 Europa Technologies; 2005 Google

I have built a 30 metre buffer along the river banks (green band). River banks are the blue lines. Flow is from right to left. On the south bank (top of image) one can clearly see big apartment complexes falling within the 30 metre buffer. Red arrows outline the unnatural right angle the river bank takes, which means that the river bed has been encroached upon by dumping massive amounts of debris.

Blockage of natural drainage:
Hill slopes have natural drainage made up of small streams. A proper urban development plan should take into account such drainage and not allow constructions to block these streams. However, natural drainage everywhere in Pune has been built upon, simply by filling up these streams. Since during monsoons, water does not find a natural drain, this results in sheet flow of water onto the roads. The erosive power of this water is quite significant, resulting in the famous pot-holes of Pune. Below is an example of natural drainage which has been blocked by several constructions.
Source: Google Earth ; Image Copyright: 2007 Digitalglobe ; 2007 Europa Technologies; 2005 Google

Flow of streams is from left to the right of the image. If one follows the red arrows, you can make out the curvilinear outlines of a small stream which at places abruptly terminates against buildings. This stream joins another stream outlined with blue arrows and forms a bigger drain at the purple arrow. This then flows into the Mutha river. Such blocked streams have only recently caught the attention of the city government, which has promised to amend building rules to allow natural passage of this drainage.

Some technologies such as Google earth allows citizens to locate violations of the urban plan. One can use the distance tools to measure and also draw outlines of objects and save them in a geographic format. These files can be shared with other Google earth users. In this way, citizens can participate in discussions and debates on urban planning without needing expensive GIS software. They can also register complaints with the Municipal Corporation online. But the images are not really a monitoring tool. The images are 6 months to 3 years old. The city government however can use remote sensing as a monitoring tool, if they decide on purchasing high-resolution images every 3 months or so. A one meter resolution image covering Pune municipal limits should cost about Rs. 3-4 lacs. So a purchase budget of Rs. 12-15 lacs a year will give the municipality a powerful urban planning tool not just for spotting violations but also for other urban planning purposes. This off course has to be accompanied by a dedicated GIS staff, in which the city government has shown little inclination and interest.

Part1. Idling and Pollution
Part2. PMT buses and Pollution
Part3. Rickshaws and Pollution
Part 4. Urban Forests and Clean Air