As we discuss the optimal path forward for the next 30 years to get to net-zero carbon emissions for the energy sector, one big variable is the real-world potential of geothermal energy. Right now in the US geothermal produces 0.4% of our electricity. That is almost negligible, and is not going to help get us to our goal without an order of magnitude or more increase. What is the probability that we can bring significant geothermal online within 20-30 years?

Producing electricity at large scale is mostly about turning turbines, which rotates a magnet within a coil of conducting cable which generates electrical current in the wires. Turbines are turned by two basic methods – mechanical or with steam which in turn is generated by some heat source. Hydroelectric and wind turbines rotate the turbines through mechanical power. Burning fossil fuel or nuclear power plants produce heat to create steam. Solar photovoltaics are the exception because they directly turn sunlight into electricity through the photoelectric effect. But direct solar capture can use sunlight to once again heat a target, create steam, and turn a turbine.

Geothermal energy uses steam created by the natural heat below the surface of the earth to turn a turbine to make electricity. In a recent TEDx talk, Matt Houde who is the cofounder of a geothermal energy company points out that there is enough heat in the ground to power our world for a billion years. It’s a practically unlimited energy source. Why isn’t that, then, problem solved – all the energy we can need for the foreseeable future (arguably longer than human civilization is likely to last on earth) is right beneath our feet? The problem is – that heat is hard to get to.

From my reading it seems that there are three types of geothermal energy depending on our ability to access the heat. Current geothermal, the kind making up that 0.4%, takes advantage of natural hot spring that reach near or at the surface. Boise Idaho, for example, directly heats building from natural hot springs. You can also use near surface heated water to create electrical power. This was the low-hanging fruit of geothermal, but if we want an order of magnitude increase we need to develop what is called advanced geothermal. This approach uses technology developed by the fracking industry to drill down to the heat, inject water if necessary (if water is not already present), and then use that heated water to drive turbines.

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Evolution requires that speciation events occur – events in which one species becomes two. All that is required for a speciation event to occur is that two populations of the same species stop interbreeding. There are two basic types of speciation: allopatric, where the populations are physically separated by geography, and sympatric, where they live in overlapping ranges but either can’t or don’t interbreed. For the purpose of speciation, interbreeding means producing fertile young.

Allopatric speciation is easy to understand. Most species have a large enough range that they are spread out into definable populations. They may even develop definable characteristics. Populations on the edge of a range, say a prairie species pushing into the desert, will likely develop some adaptions not possessed by the main population. At some point these adaptation may push the population into a range that does not overlap with the parent population. It also may happen that environmental change may doom the parent population to extinction, but the subpopulation’s adaptations allow them to survive as a new species. Sometimes geography simply changes, physically separating species (canyons open up, mountains rise, rivers change their course, land masses move).  Sometimes physical separation may be abrupt, such as when plants and animals find their way to islands and set up a new population, adapting to the new environment (like the Galapagos).

Sympatric speciation has been trickier to understand. Pollen will spread, animals will interbreed. It’s what they do. Research has focused on genetic events that make two populations unable to interbreed, because their offspring would be infertile. This will happen after species diverge sufficiently, but how will they diverge in the first place if they are exchanging genetic material? There must have been some genetic event, even in an individual, that instantly created genetic incompatibility. In plants this is commonly autopolyploid speciation, where the chromosome number is accidentally doubled during reproduction. The offspring cannot interbreed with the parent species because of chromosome number incompatibility. This is why some plants, like potatoes, can have very high numbers of chromosomes.

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Archaeologists have uncovered a large cache of over 50 small bronze statues in the ruins of an ancient temple in Tuscany. The find dates from the second century BCE to the first century ACE. It is being reported as the greatest bronze statue find in 50 years, one of the greatest finds ever, and a significant window into that period of history.

The statues themselves range from small representations of specific body parts, to statues representing the gods and up to a meter in length. These statues were deliberately tossed into a thermal spring within the temple, where they sunk to the bottom and were covered in mud. The mud preserved the statues in relatively good condition for the last two thousand years. Many of the statues also have writing on them, in either Roman or Etruscan. Archaeologists believe that these statues were offerings to the gods intended for healings. The body parts represent the ailment that the offerer wishes to be healed. They also found over 5,000 gold, silver, and bronze coins that were tossed into the spring over those three centuries.

Essentially, this thermal spring and temple were the equivalent of a spa for the wealthy. Bathing in hot springs was a common luxury for the wealthy of the time, and this temple was also clearly not a public place. Rather, this was likely a private location for the wealthy and elite. The bronze statues would have been very expensive, only affordable just to be tossed into the waters by the very wealthy.

It’s easy to become smug from our modern perspective about the primitive behavior of making offerings to imaginary gods in hopes of being healed. But I think the opposite reaction is more appropriate. Certainly making such offerings in the genuine hope of being healed is pure superstition, and also completely useless in terms of effecting real change to one’s health. Given the primitive state of medicine at the time, however, it was also pretty harmless (and an archaeological boon, it turns out). Even the wealthy and powerful did not have access to what we could consider basic health care, and so tossing expensive bronze statues was the best they had.

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Whenever I write about climate change here, the deniers show up spouting dubious (to say the least) claims. In my opinion, this is a manifestation of a deliberate political strategy, one that we see with other topics. The strategy is to make up blatant lies, or at least claims without the slightest regard for whether or not they are true, and then spread them through ideologically friendly outlets. Sometimes this may involve amplifying claims that emerge from the most extreme “fever swamps” promoting that ideology. Just keep throwing crap against the wall, and some of it will stick. When these notions make their way into the mainstream media, they are quickly debunked. But by then it’s too late – the damage is done. Long after the false claims are soundly refuted, the rank and file believers will still be quoting them. They are now part of the narrative.

This means that for science communicators and skeptics (but also mainstream journalists), we need to have a working knowledge of these common false claims that are circulating, so that we can respond to them quickly when they emerge. One of the reasons I allow such comments to continue in my blog is because that is one of the ways that I can see which claims are circulating. I don’t mind if they come here – we can handle it. Normally I handle the claims in the comments, but occasionally there is a critical mass of nonsense that is more efficiently dealt with by a post. Here are some recent claims.

Volcanoes emit more greenhouse gas than human activity.

This is an old one, but has remarkable persistence. These claims go through a selection process. Claims survive not because they are true, but because they resonate. In this case, the volcano claim fits the overall narrative that meager human activity is nothing compared to the awesome scale of nature. They want to portray the very idea that we can alter the climate as ridiculous.  Fact, however, get in the way of this narrative.

According to the US Geological Survey:

Published scientific estimates of the global CO₂ emission rate for all degassing subaerial (on land) and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year.

That sounds like a lot, but human activity releases 35 gigatons of CO2 each year. That means that human activity releases more than 100 times the CO2 as does all volcanic activity. When I pointed this out in the comments, these easily verifiable scientific facts were dismissed as a liberal conspiracy. Another strategy is to simply shift to another claim, without ever admitting that you were wrong on the first one. In this case just shift over to methane – but that is a loser argument also. Of all the methane released into the atmosphere each year, 60% is due to human causes. All natural sources amount to only 40%, and volcanoes are a minority of that. Most methane on Earth comes from biology.

I do admit it still surprises me when this one is trotted out, because these are easily checkable basic facts. This is a good way to completely squander one’s credibility. I think this says something meaningful about the intellectual process that is being employed by those dedicated to the denial of global warming.

Climate models are simplistic and wrong.

Dismissing climate models is a more complex matter to refute, because this is more than just looking up a couple of numbers. First there is the notion that climate scientists, in producing their models which predict anthropogenic global warming, did not consider natural factors. This is, of course, absurd, and represents non-experts criticizing an entire world-wide community of experts from a profound level of relative ignorance – and doing it with confidence and arrogance. This almost always comes without citations, or by citing only known outliers.

Climate models, from the beginning, have sought to include the latest science available and account for all possible factors. Over the last 50 years climate models have been steadily modified, to account for new scientific data as it comes in. In addition, models have to account for future behavior, such as how much CO2 will the world emit in the future. So they can only give ranges of outcomes based upon explicitly stated assumptions about human behavior in the future. Often models are used to project what will happen under various scenarios – continuing our current trends vs changing course.

One of the best ways to determine how well models predict the climate (how “skillful” they are, in the jargon) is to see how past models predicted later climate change. This has been done multiple time. Here is a 2019 review of 17 climate models. They found:

We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.

That last bit means the difference between projections of CO2 emissions vs actual CO2 emissions. The bottom line is that the model basically work, and they are continuously getting better as they incorporate the latest science. Computers are also getting more powerful, allowing for more complex climate simulations. But still you will frequently hear things like, “Maybe it’s the sun. All those scientists never thought of that.”

A recent commenter brought up one I had not yet heard – neutrinos warming up the inner Earth and all that heat rising to the surface through ocean vents. The commenter also explicitly states that climate models do not include natural sources of warming. Sure, there is geological sources of heat that affect the climate – and climate scientists are well aware of this factor.  Geothermal ocean heating is a known factor. It has a relatively small magnitude, and there is no reason to think that it has suddenly changed in the last 50 years. But the notion that climate scientists are not away of geothermal heating is just silly.

CO2 causes greening which absorbs excess CO2.

The basic notion that increases in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increases plant growth is true. CO2 is an important metabolite for plant growth. But the full story is more complicated, and turning this into a net benefit from climate change is simply not true. The increase in productivity does occur, but also results in a depletion of other nutrients, such as nitrogen, from the soil. It therefore is not sustainable in natural settings (i.e. not farmland where nutrients can be added). Also, plants are not adapted to higher CO2 levels and so they get diminishing returns from higher CO2.

But the main reason this is not a valid argument against the need to mitigate climate change, is that it ignores all the other effects. Increasing temperature and worsening droughts are bad for agriculture. Shifting climate also shifts growing zones away from where they are currently located. Also, the effect on different crops varies. Wheat will benefit, but corn production will drop, while some other crops will see no immediate change. This will be highly disruptive to agricultural infrastructure. Also, as warming continues, the effects of increased temperature and drought will overwhelm any positive effect from CO2.

The notion that plants will simply absorb any excess CO2 is also profoundly naive and just factually incorrect. There is a carbon cycle, which already includes plants absorbing CO2. But plants don’t just sequester CO2, they absorb and emit CO2 in a continuous cycle. The more CO2 there is in the system, the more CO2 there will be in every part of the system (plants, the ocean, the atmosphere, in minerals, etc.). This is already accounted for in climate models.

But sure, we should maximize biomass to help mitigate CO2 release, and stop doing things like cutting down the rainforest. But this is not going to compensate for the 35 billions tons of CO2 humans release every year.

So how are we doing? We’ve been talking about mitigating climate change for literally decades, and the world is currently meeting for the 27th climate summit, COP27. It feels like all we get is dire news about how miserably we are collectively failing to do anything about climate change, but the real news is actually mixed. In some ways we are better off then we were 1-2 decades ago, in others things are worse. Let’s review.

The good news is that the projection of how much the climate will warm on average is better today than it was a decade ago. Warming is measured as the average temperature increase above pre-industrial levels, usually expressed in Centigrade. Right now we are at 1 degree C above baseline. A decade ago if you looked at projections as to where we were headed, the “business and usual” projections were for 3-4 degrees C by the end of the century. Today, the same projections predict only about 2.4 degrees. Business as usual means that we keep going the way we are, including already funded pledges from countries for action to mitigate CO2 release.

It’s also not hard to do better than 2.4. A recent study published in nature extrapolates climate change for a range of scenarios, starting with what they call nationally determined contributions (NDC), which are essentially pledges as of COP26. This is one step beyond business as usual because it includes all pledges, even those not yet funded. They also consider peak warming and warming by 2100. If we reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions temperature will eventually come down, as the effect of GHGs is not permanent. The NDC scenario has peak warming of about 1.8 degrees, but then coming down to about 1.7.

They also include a range of models, from various degrees of NDC to NDC+ and NDC++, including greater mitigation efforts sooner. In the NDC+ range warming will peak at 1.6 but then come down to 1.4. In the most aggressive scenario, NDC++ we can theoretically limit peak warming to <1.5 C, which is the stated goal of the Paris agreement. This entire range of scenarios, even just the NDC where we keep already made pledges, is not horrible. It keeps peak warming below the 2.0 C level where we think the inflection point is for irreversible (on a human timescale) negative consequences.

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A recent study asked subjects to give their overall impression of other people based entirely on a photograph of their face. In one group the political ideology of the person in the photograph was disclosed (and was sometimes true and sometime not true), and in another group the political ideology was not disclosed. The question the researchers were asking is whether thinking you know the political ideology of someone in a photo affects your subjective impression of them. Unsurprisingly, it did. Photos that were labeled with the same political ideology (conservative vs liberal) were rated more likable, and this effect was stronger for subjects who have a higher sense of threat from those of the other political ideology.

This question is part of a broader question about the relationship between facial characteristics and personality and our perception of them. We all experience first impressions – we meet someone new and form an overall impression of them. Are they nice, mean, threatening? But if you get to actually know the person you may find that your initial impression had no bearing on reality. The underlying question is interesting. Are there actual facial differences that correlate with any aspect of personality? First, what’s the plausibility of this notion and possible causes, if any?

The most straightforward assumption is that there is a genetic predisposition for some basic behavior, like aggression, and that these same genes (or very nearby genes that are likely to sort together) also determine facial development. This notion is based on a certain amount of biological determinism, which itself is not a popular idea among biologists. The idea is not impossible. There are genetic syndromes that include both personality types and facial features, but these are extreme outliers. For most people the signal to noise ratio is likely too small to be significant.  The research bears this out – attempts at linking facial features with personality or criminality have largely failed, despite their popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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The allure of the myth of Atlantis is understandable, and it has been promulgated in popular culture for over a century. As evidence of the draw of this topic is the comments thread to my discussion of the Richat Structure and why it is not Atlantis. People clearly want to talk about it.

The status of Atlantis as a real archeological location can be quickly summarized – there is absolutely no evidence. There are no artifacts, there is no cultural history, there are no ruins, there is simply nothing. This is not surprising, since there was never any reason to expect that Atlantis was real in the first place. The notion of Atlantis as an ancient civilization was clearly an invented mythology of Plato. This was largely understood by scholars throughout history. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the notion Atlantis might be a real place became popular. Enthusiasts at the time expected that within 50 years or so we would have museums full of Atlantean artifacts. That never came to be – and here we are well over a century later and we don’t have a single shard of pottery.

I’ll come back to the lack of evidence in a bit, but first let’s review why Atlantis is clearly an invented mythology. The first historical mention of Atlantis as a place comes from Plato’s two works, Critias and Timaeus. There is a prior mention of the name Atlantis but not as a reference to a place. All other references come after Plato and trace back to Plato (who lived between 428 and 348 BCE). Plato used the idea of Atlantis as an evil empire that was at war with the virtuous Athens. This was a device to discuss the nature of the perfect virtuous city (Athens). Atlantis, in Plato’s telling, may have began as a virtuous city, because its citizens were partly descended from Poseidon, but as their part god blood was diluted over time their more aggressive and base human nature took over and they became corrupt.

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The notion of near death experiences (NDE) have fascinated people for a long time. The notion is that some people report profound experiences after waking up from a cardiac arrest – their heart stopped, they received CPR, they were eventually recovered and lived to tell the tale. About 20% of people in this situation will report some unusual experience. Initial reporting on NDEs was done more from a journalistic methodology than scientific – collecting reports from people and weaving those into a narrative. Of course the NDE narrative took on a life of it’s own, but eventually researchers started at least collecting some empirical quantifiable data. The details of the reported NDEs are actually quite variable, and often culture-specific. There are some common elements, however, notably the sense of being out of one’s body or floating.

The most rigorous attempt so far to study NDEs was the AWARE study, which I reported on in 2014. Lead researcher Sam Parnia, wanted to be the first to document that NDEs are a real-world experience, and not some “trick of the brain.” He failed to do this, however. The study looked at people who had a cardiac arrest, underwent CPR, and survived long enough to be interviewed. The study also included a novel element – cards placed on top of shelves in ERs around the country. These can only been seen from the vantage point of someone floating near the ceiling, meant to document that during the CPR itself an NDE experiencer was actually there and could see the physical card in their environment. The study also tried to match the details of the remembered experience with actual events that took place in the ER during their CPR.

You can read my original report for details, but the study was basically a bust. There were some methodological problems with the study, which was not well-controlled. They had trouble getting data from locations that had the cards in place, and ultimately had not a single example of a subject who saw a card. And out of 140 cases they were only able to match reported details with events in the ER during CPR in one case. Especially given that the details were fairly non-specific, and they only had 1 case out of 140, this sounds like random noise in the data.

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A panel of 386 experts from various disciplines and 122 countries have put together a consensus statement on how the world can best deal with the continued challenge of COVID-19. The statement contains 57 specific recommendations that had >95% consensus from the panel, with most having >99% consensus. This is like an M&M rounds for the world’s COVID response. In medicine we have morbidity and mortality rounds where we review both statistics and individual cases with bad outcomes. The point is to explore those cases and determine what went wrong, if anything, and how individually and systemically we can prevent or minimize future similar negative outcomes. This panel did the same thing for our COVID response.

Such endeavors are not about placing blame. We can leave that up to the politicians looking to score points. The purpose is to map out a future course, to take specific actions that will minimize future death and negative health outcomes from the COVID pandemic, which is (despite what you may want to believe) not over. The SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to spread throughout the population, and continues to mutate with variants and subvariants increasingly able to evade prior immunity (from infection or vaccination). As predicted the pandemic is slowly morphing into an endemic infection, like the flu, that will simply be with us indefinitely. But infections are still at pandemic levels.

The focus of the recommendations is on how governments can enact policy and allocate resources to better tamp down infections and reduce negative outcomes. This is needed, because government responses were mostly a failure. This doesn’t mean that the US and other governments didn’t do anything useful. They did. But from the perspective of what a fully prepared optimal response would have been, the actual response, in my opinion, was basically a failure. It’s not like we didn’t see it coming. Even now, after everything the world has been through, our preparedness and response is less than ideal.

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It’s that time of year again – the time when we debate, yet again, whether or not we should get rid of shifting the clocks twice a year and if so, which time to make permanent, DST or standard time. It does seem like this debate has been heating up in recent years, but it is unclear if we have a political consensus sufficient to make a change. In March of this year the Senate actually passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make DST permanent. However, the bill has stalled in the House. In previous years such measures have simply died in committee. This time around it just seems like politicians have more important things on their plate.

DST was first instituted in the US in 1918 as a wartime measure, to reduce energy costs by extending light in the evening when people are active. The measure was brought back during WWII, after which it was left to the states whether to keep DST. In 1966, however, the Uniform Time Act was passed to encourage all states to adopt DST. Initially DST was instituted for 6 months of the year, from late spring to early fall. In 1974 DST was made year round, but this led to immediate complaints that children were going to school in the morning and parents were going to work in pitch dark, and the measure was repealed the next year. DST was also extended in 2007 until just after Halloween, ostensibly to make trick-or-treaters safer walking the streets. But there have also been significant industry lobbies. The candy industry lobbied hard for DST to extend past Halloween. But many industries, from golf to barbeque supplies, make more money from extended DST. Now DST is 8 months out of 12.

The question remains – which option is best: to keep the current system where we change between DST and Standard Time twice a year, to make DST permanent, or standard time permanent? There is no one objective answer because every option has trade-offs.

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