Jack W. Dini
Livermore, CA
From: Plating & Surface Finishing, May 2005
What grade would you give someone who was correct 20 percent of the time? Not passing for sure. However, being right 20 percent of the time got some authors published in the prestigious journal Science. (1) They were trying to account for the decline in global temperatures from the end of World War II until the late 1970s. As an aside, in case you don’t remember, the 70s were the times we were supposedly headed for an ‘ice age.’ Newsweek highlighted this with an article titled, “The Cooling World.” (2) Anyhow, getting back to the present, it turns out that computer models have a difficult time producing cooling with the multitude of variables in the mix. The authors of the Science article, Delworth and Knutson, found that all they had to do was run their model many times, compare the output with observed temperature history, tweak some of the input, and go back for another run. After five such runs they concluded, “in one of the five GHG [greenhouse gases]-plus-sulfate integrations, the time series of global mean surface air temperature provides a remarkable match to the observed record, including the global warmings of both the early (1925-1944) and latter (1978 to the present) parts of the century. Further, the simulated spatial pattern of warming in the early 20th century is broadly similar to the observed pattern of warming.” (1)
In discussing this work, Robert Davis says the following, “Yes, it’s possible to get a model to reproduce anything you choose merely by tweaking a few parameters and running it enough times. But the model that reproduces the temperature history screws up precipitation, and the model that gets rainfall correct can’t generate the proper wind or pressure fields. The reason is actually quite plain: We don’t understand the physics of the atmosphere well enough to model climate change. That is the grim reality that at least four out of five climate models chose to ignore.”(3) John Christy adds: “Keep firmly in mind that models can’t prove anything. Even when a model generates values that appear to match the past 150 years, one must remember that modelers have had 20 years of practice to make the match look good. Is such model agreement due to fundamentally correct science or to lots of practice with altering (or tuning) the sets of rules in a situation where one knows what the answer should be ahead of time?” (4)
Science writer James Trefil echoes this thought. “After you’ve finished a model, you would like to check it out. The best validation is to apply the simulation to a situation where you already know the answer. You could, for example, feed in climate data from one hundred years ago and see if the GCM predicts the present climate. The fact that GCMs can’t do this is one reason I take their predictions with a grain of salt.” (5) A comparison of nearly all of most sophisticated climate models with actual measurements of current climate conditions found the models in error by about 100 percent in cloud cover, 50 percent in precipitation, and 30 percent in temperature change. Even the best models give temperature change results differing from each other by a factor of two or more. (6)
Reliability is in Question
While on the topic of global warming, which in a large part has been made a major scientific and political issue because of complex models, here are other examples of the poor predictability of some of those models:
•The models that served as the scientific background for the 1992 Rio Treaty implied that the world should have warmed 1.5 C since the late 19th century. In actuality, the world has warmed only 0.5 C, so the models were off by a factor of 3. (7)
•As computer simulations have become more sophisticated, projections of rising sea levels have become much smaller. A 25 foot increase predicted in 1980 fell to three feet by 1985 and then to one foot by 1995. (8)
•Computers forecast a warming of the troposphere of 0.224 C per decade, when actual measurements showed a warming of only 0.034 C per decade. Predictions were off by almost a factor of 7. (9)
•Computer models of ocean circulation did not predict temperature changes which occurred in the deep sea south of the Aleutian Islands. Keay Davidson observes; “At the very least, the findings indicate that computer models of ocean circulation—which are vital for monitoring climate change—are badly in need of a tune-up. The discovery was not explicitly predicted by any known computer models of ocean circulation.” (10)
•Carbon buildup has slowed during the past 10 years. Original predictions were that it would be up to 600 ppm by the year 2100, but that number has been reduced to only 500 ppm. (11)
•Atmospheric temperatures at the stratopause and mesopause regions (the atmospheric layers at about 30 and 50 miles altitude, respectively), at the Earth’s poles were found to be about 40-50 degrees F cooler than model predictions. (12)
•Jane Shaw reports that since “computers have to treat large areas of the earth as if they are on one elevation, their findings don’t give good descriptions of regions that may be hundreds of miles wide. Mountain ranges have an enormous impact on climate; their cooler air causes snow and rain to fall, drying out the air as it moves over the mountains. Yet most computer models do not distinguish mountain ranges from prairies. The building blocks for the models are not fine-grained enough; the mountains have to be flattened in the models and the valleys filled in. The predictions for the wet, mountainous forests of the Pacific Northwest are not much different than the predictions for the dry desert in Nevada. Because they are unable to make such distinctions, the climate descriptions may be distorted.(13) Here’s an example. Martin Wild and his colleagues recently proposed that melting over Greenland should remain negligible, even with doubled carbon dioxide.(14). Why the big difference from past assessments? The short answer is resolution as discussed above. Even the best models end up representing Greenland as a gently rounded mound rather than as a steep walled mesa. And, because melting takes place only as lower elevations, the area prone to melting gets exaggerated in the models.(15) So is Greenland really melting? Here’s some data that I bet you haven’t heard; the West Greenland Ice Sheet, the largest mass of polar ice in the Northern Hemisphere, has thickened by up to seven feet since 1980.(16)
Other Examples
Global warming isn’t the only situation where computer models exhibit shortcomings. The best model available at the time of the Chernobyl accident did not describe a major feature of the radioactivity deposition 80 miles northeast of the plant, and it was mostly in this region that children ingested or inhaled radioactive iodine and developed thyroid cancers.(17)
Predictions of the plume from the Kuwait oil fires (February 1991 to October 1991) were reasonably well described, but some individual deviations where air masses turned westward over Riyadh in Saudi Arabia were not well predicted even after the event.(17)
A program researchers were using for studying the effects of airborne soot on human health produced enormous results that went unchecked for years. A team in Canada estimates it will change its data on the impact of airborne soot on mortality downwards by 20-50%. Other groups throughout the world using the same tool are now redoing their calculations.(18)
Stuart Beaton and his colleagues note that an EPA model, which treats all cars of a given model year as having the same odometer reading, the same annual mileage accumulation, and an equal likelihood of emission control problems, has little success in predicting urban on-road vehicle emissions. This leads them to conclude, “lack of linkage between EPA’s model and real-world measurements leads to inappropriate policy decisions and wastes scarce resources. If we want to maintain public support for programs that claim to reduce air pollution, those programs must do what they claim in the real world, not just in the virtual world of the computer modeler.”(19)
Jerry Dennis reported this about the Great Lakes, “One recent computer model projected a period of drought and heat continuing through the twenty-first century, resulting in even lower water levels. Another predicted more heat and precipitation, resulting in the Great Lakes staying at the same level or even rising a foot or so above average.”(20) Take your pick.
A Sacrilegious Thought
Naomi Oreskes and her co-authors argue that large computer models with multiple inputs should probably never be considered ‘validated.’ They argue that verification and validation of models of natural systems is impossible because natural systems are never closed, and because models are always non-unique. “Models can only be evaluated in relative terms, and their predictive value is always open to question.”(21) They quote Nancy Cartwright who has said: “A model is a work of fiction.”(22)
While not necessarily accepting Cartwright’s viewpoint, Oreskes et al., compare a model to a novel. Some of it may ring true and some may not. “How much is based on observation and measurement of accessible phenomena, how much is based on informed judgment, and how much is convenience? Fundamentally, the reason for modeling is a lack of full access, either in time or space, to the phenomena of interest.”(21) It’s obvious that in some cases we still have a long way to go with modeling.
References
1.Thomas L. Delworth and Thomas R. Knutson, “Simulation of Early 20th Century Global Warming,” Science, 287, 2246, March 24, 2000
2.Peter Gwynne, “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, 85, 64, April 28, 1975
3.Robert E. Davis, “Playing the numbers with climate model accuracy,” Environment & Climate News, 3, 5, July 2000
4.John R. Christy, “The Global Warming Fiasco,” in Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, Ronald Bailey, Editor, (Roseville, CA, Prima Publishing, 2002), 15
5.James Trefil, The Edge of the Unknown, (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 46
6.Jay Lehr and Richard S. Bennett, “Computer Models & The Need For More Research,” Environment & Climate News, 6, 12, July 2003
7.Robert W. Davis and David Legates, “How Reliable are Climate Models?,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, June 5, 1998
8.“The Global Warming Crisis: Predictions of Warming Continue to Drop,” in Facts on Global Warming, (Washington, DC, George C. Marshall Institute, October 15, 1997)
9.TSAugust, www.tsaugust.org/Global%20Warming.htm, accessed January 19, 2004
10.Keay Davidson, “Going to depths for evidence of global warming,” San Francisco Chronicle, A4, March 1, 2004
11.Jane S. Shaw, Global Warming, (New York, Greenhaven Press, 2002), 23
12.C. S. Gardner, et al., “The temperature structure of the winter atmosphere at the South Pole,” Geophysical Research Letters, Issue 16, Citation 1802, August 28, 2002
13.Jane S. Shaw, Global Warming, 60
14.Martin Wild, et al., “Effects of polar ice sheets on global sea level in high-resolution greenhouse scenarios,” Journal of Geophysical Research, 108, No. D5, 4165,2003
15.David Schneider, “Greenland or Whiteland?,” American Scientist, 91, 406, September-October 2003
16.David Gorack, “Glacier melting: Just a drop in the bucket,” Environment & Climate News, 2, 6, May 1999
17.Richard Wilson and Edmund A. C. Crouch, Risk-Benefit Analysis, Second Edition, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001), 74
18.Jonathan Knight, “Statistical error leaves pollution data up in the air,” Nature, 417, 677, June 13, 2002
19.Stuart P. Beaton, et al., “On-Road Vehicle Emissions: Regulations, Costs and Benefits,” Science, 268, 991, May 19, 1995
20.Jerry Dennis, The Living Great Lakes, (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 137
21.Naomi Oreskes et al., “Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences,” Science, 263, 641, February 4, 1994
22.Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983), 153
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Water Can Be Too Pure
Jack W. Dini, Livermore, CA
(This appeared in Hawaii Reporter, January 24, 2007)
Can water be too pure? If you’re a farmer the answer is yes. Desalinated water is one example. The purity drawback is that desalination not only separates the undesirable salts from the water, but also removes ions that are essential to plant growth. When desalinized water is used to replace irrigation water, basic nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and sulfate at levels sufficient to preclude additional fertilization of these elements is missing.
An example is a new facility in Ashkelon, on Israel’s southern Mediterranean coast. Although the Ashkelon facility was designed to provide water for human consumption, because of relatively modest population densities in southern Israel, a substantial percentage of the desalinated water was delivered to farmers. Recent evaluation of the effect of the plant’s desalinized water on agriculture, however, produced some surprising, negative results. Water from the Ashkelon plant has no magnesium, whereas typical Israel water has 20 to 20 mg/liter of magnesium. After farmers used the desalinated water, magnesium deficiency symptoms appeared in crops, including tomatoes, basil, and flowers, and had to be remedied by fertilization. To meet agricultural needs, missing nutrients might be added to desalinized water in the form of fertilizers, adding additional costs. If the minerals required for agriculture are not added at the desalination plant, farmers will need sophisticated independent control systems in order to cope with the variable water quality. (1)
Farmers can also be affected by run-off water that is too pure. Snow-melt run-off from the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, or other mountains can be too pure. For irrigation to be effective it needs to penetrate into the soil supplying enough water to sustain the crops until the next irrigation and the most important factor for water penetration is salts (or lack thereof) present in the water and/or soil. A lack of calcium in the majority of soils due to snow-melt irrigation water, or poor quality subsurface water, is leading to serious problems in California. Danyal Kasapligil, agronomist in Fresno, CA, reports, “What we are seeing in the field is, not only are there more and more water penetration problems, but crop quality is also rapidly declining because of a lack of calcium in our irrigation water.” (2) Brent Rouppet adds that for irrigation water to penetrate deeply into the soil, the electrical conductivity of the water needs to be greater than approximately 0.60 dS/m (decisiemens per meter). Irrigation water with less than 0.60 dS/m conductivity contributes to loss of soil structure and increased water penetration problems. The snow-melt run-off from the Sierra Nevada Mountains is so pure that its electrical conductivity can be 0.02 dS/m, or less. This water lacks calcium, essential for good soil structure, and any calcium existing in the soil profile is over time leached below the root zone or used by the crops and is typically not being replaced in quantities required. (2)
Here’s another example where absolute purity of water can be a problem. Philip West of Louisiana State University notes, “With productive waters, it is quite apparent that absolute purity is out of the question. If the Mississippi River passing Baton Rouge and New Orleans consisted of distilled water there would be no seafood industry such as we now have in Louisiana. With copper ‘contaminating’ the water there would be no oysters. Traces of iron, manganese, cobalt, copper, and zinc are essential for the crabs, snapper, flounder, shrimp and other creatures that abound in Gulf waters. As unpleasant as it sounds, even the run-off from the fertilized fields of the heartland’s and the sewage discharges into the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi River systems pollute and thus ultimately nourish the waters.” (3)
One last item. Are you a bottled water fan? If so, you could be giving up a primary source of fluoride which is the public health system’s main weapon against tooth decay. What comes in the bottle has either been filtered to remove impurities or is spring water that is reputed to purer than tap water. But the filtering process also takes out fluoride. Not only does fluoride occur naturally in water, but about half the nation’s public water supplies are supplemented with additional fluoride. The recommended level of fluoride set by the EPA for municipal water systems is 0.7 to 1.2 parts per million (ppm). The maximum acceptable level is 4 ppm. If a water supply contains less than 0.7 ppm of fluoride, dentists recommend the use of a fluoride supplement, in tablets or liquid, from birth unto the later teen-age years. (4)
When researchers in Ohio sampled more than 50 brands of bottled water for fluoride content, they found that 90 percent of them had levels below the recommended range for dental health. (5) In South Australia, a study found a 71 percent rise in tooth decay in children which was attributed to the lack of enamel strengthening fluoride in the bottled water that has become so popular in the area. (6)
References
1. U. Yermiyahu et al., “Rethinking Desalinated Water Quality and Agriculture,” Science, 318, 920, November 9, 2007
2.Brent Rouppet, “Irrigation Water: A Correlation to Soil Structure and Crop Quality?” Crops, August 2006, Page 22
3.Raphael G. Kazmann, in Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Jay H. Lehr, Editor, (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 311
4.Marian Burros, “Eating Well; Bottled Water: Is It Too Pure?” nytimes.com, November 22, 1989
5.“Fluoride Alert,” Runner’s World, 35, 32, July 2000
6. Verity Edwards, “Bottled water a dental disaster,” Australiannews.com, August 2, 2006
(This appeared in Hawaii Reporter, January 24, 2007)
Can water be too pure? If you’re a farmer the answer is yes. Desalinated water is one example. The purity drawback is that desalination not only separates the undesirable salts from the water, but also removes ions that are essential to plant growth. When desalinized water is used to replace irrigation water, basic nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and sulfate at levels sufficient to preclude additional fertilization of these elements is missing.
An example is a new facility in Ashkelon, on Israel’s southern Mediterranean coast. Although the Ashkelon facility was designed to provide water for human consumption, because of relatively modest population densities in southern Israel, a substantial percentage of the desalinated water was delivered to farmers. Recent evaluation of the effect of the plant’s desalinized water on agriculture, however, produced some surprising, negative results. Water from the Ashkelon plant has no magnesium, whereas typical Israel water has 20 to 20 mg/liter of magnesium. After farmers used the desalinated water, magnesium deficiency symptoms appeared in crops, including tomatoes, basil, and flowers, and had to be remedied by fertilization. To meet agricultural needs, missing nutrients might be added to desalinized water in the form of fertilizers, adding additional costs. If the minerals required for agriculture are not added at the desalination plant, farmers will need sophisticated independent control systems in order to cope with the variable water quality. (1)
Farmers can also be affected by run-off water that is too pure. Snow-melt run-off from the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, or other mountains can be too pure. For irrigation to be effective it needs to penetrate into the soil supplying enough water to sustain the crops until the next irrigation and the most important factor for water penetration is salts (or lack thereof) present in the water and/or soil. A lack of calcium in the majority of soils due to snow-melt irrigation water, or poor quality subsurface water, is leading to serious problems in California. Danyal Kasapligil, agronomist in Fresno, CA, reports, “What we are seeing in the field is, not only are there more and more water penetration problems, but crop quality is also rapidly declining because of a lack of calcium in our irrigation water.” (2) Brent Rouppet adds that for irrigation water to penetrate deeply into the soil, the electrical conductivity of the water needs to be greater than approximately 0.60 dS/m (decisiemens per meter). Irrigation water with less than 0.60 dS/m conductivity contributes to loss of soil structure and increased water penetration problems. The snow-melt run-off from the Sierra Nevada Mountains is so pure that its electrical conductivity can be 0.02 dS/m, or less. This water lacks calcium, essential for good soil structure, and any calcium existing in the soil profile is over time leached below the root zone or used by the crops and is typically not being replaced in quantities required. (2)
Here’s another example where absolute purity of water can be a problem. Philip West of Louisiana State University notes, “With productive waters, it is quite apparent that absolute purity is out of the question. If the Mississippi River passing Baton Rouge and New Orleans consisted of distilled water there would be no seafood industry such as we now have in Louisiana. With copper ‘contaminating’ the water there would be no oysters. Traces of iron, manganese, cobalt, copper, and zinc are essential for the crabs, snapper, flounder, shrimp and other creatures that abound in Gulf waters. As unpleasant as it sounds, even the run-off from the fertilized fields of the heartland’s and the sewage discharges into the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi River systems pollute and thus ultimately nourish the waters.” (3)
One last item. Are you a bottled water fan? If so, you could be giving up a primary source of fluoride which is the public health system’s main weapon against tooth decay. What comes in the bottle has either been filtered to remove impurities or is spring water that is reputed to purer than tap water. But the filtering process also takes out fluoride. Not only does fluoride occur naturally in water, but about half the nation’s public water supplies are supplemented with additional fluoride. The recommended level of fluoride set by the EPA for municipal water systems is 0.7 to 1.2 parts per million (ppm). The maximum acceptable level is 4 ppm. If a water supply contains less than 0.7 ppm of fluoride, dentists recommend the use of a fluoride supplement, in tablets or liquid, from birth unto the later teen-age years. (4)
When researchers in Ohio sampled more than 50 brands of bottled water for fluoride content, they found that 90 percent of them had levels below the recommended range for dental health. (5) In South Australia, a study found a 71 percent rise in tooth decay in children which was attributed to the lack of enamel strengthening fluoride in the bottled water that has become so popular in the area. (6)
References
1. U. Yermiyahu et al., “Rethinking Desalinated Water Quality and Agriculture,” Science, 318, 920, November 9, 2007
2.Brent Rouppet, “Irrigation Water: A Correlation to Soil Structure and Crop Quality?” Crops, August 2006, Page 22
3.Raphael G. Kazmann, in Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Jay H. Lehr, Editor, (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 311
4.Marian Burros, “Eating Well; Bottled Water: Is It Too Pure?” nytimes.com, November 22, 1989
5.“Fluoride Alert,” Runner’s World, 35, 32, July 2000
6. Verity Edwards, “Bottled water a dental disaster,” Australiannews.com, August 2, 2006
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Scurvy and Paprika
Jack W. Dini
Livermore, California
What famous scientist do you think of when one mentions vitamin C? My guess is that it’s Linus Pauling because of his much publicized efforts at labeling vitamin C as a remedy for cancer and the common cold. The early history of vitamin C reveals that there were some other good scientists and interesting events that led to the understanding of this vital ingredient.
If you travel to Hungary, one item you might bring home with you is some paprika. At least that’s what a lot of folks did on my recent trip to that country. Hungary is famous for its paprika. What’s all this have to do with vitamin C? Think scurvy. Joe Schwarcz reports, “The first vitamin-deficiency disease to be recognized was scurvy, described as early as 1550 BC by the Egyptians in the Ebers Papyrus. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when long ocean voyages became common, thousands of sailors died from scurvy, which is characterized by spongy gums, loose teeth, and bleeding into the skin and mucous membranes. The first clue that scurvy was a diet related disease came from North American Indians who showed French explorer Jacques Cartier that a brew made for pine needles could cure the condition.” (1)
James Lind, a Scottish physician, had been inspired to work on this issue when he heard about a British Navy expedition that had gone terribly wrong. James Burke provides the story, “In 1740 Captain George Anson had sailed from England with six ships and over a thousand men. His mission: to head for the Pacific and clobber the Spanish wherever he found them. He did so, in spades, attacking Spanish ports and ships, laying waste right and left in the usual manner, and coming home four years later with so much treasure it took thirty wagons to haul it from the docks to the Tower of London for safekeeping. Every crew member walked off Anson’s ship rich for life. There was a lot more booty than originally planned for each man to share because, of the original six ships and one thousand crew, only one ship with 145 men made it back. Scurvy had killed the rest.” (2)
Lind proceeded to carry out what was probably the first properly controlled trial in the history of clinical nutrition. For fourteen days he kept six pairs of scurvy patients on the same diet, but gave each pair a different medicine: cider, elixir vitriol, vinegar, seawater, a ‘medicinal paste’ or oranges and lemons. The citrus fruit was the cure and in 1753 Lind published A Treatise of the Scurvy. (2) It took another 50 years but the British Navy finally got around to requiring sailing vessels to carry supplies of lemons or limes. Besides solving the scurvy problem, this led to the slang term ‘Limeys’ for British sailors. (1) The upside for the British besides the saving of many lives is that according to historians, many a naval victory claimed by the ‘Limeys’ resulted because these sailors, unlike their enemies, were protected form scurvy. (3)
So what was the magic ingredient in the citrus fruits? This gets us back to paprika since it played a key role in helping isolate the anti-scurvy factor found in citrus fruits. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi was a Hungarian physician studying plant chemistry around 1925. He noted a similarity between the darkening of damaged fruit and skin discoloration in patients suffering from Addison’s disease, an adrenal gland disorder. He had observed that certain fruits like oranges did not turn brown and their juice prevented others from discoloring. He isolated the substance that prevented browning and suggested the name “Godnose” for it. This wasn’t accepted very well so he changed the name to hexuronic acid. Szent-Gyorgyi wanted to do more research on this material but he needed large amounts of it. Along the way he accepted a university position in Szeged, which is the paprika capital of the world. As Joe Schwarcz reports, “To live in Szeged is to be surrounded by the sights and smells of paprika. Szent-Gyorgyi couldn’t help but wonder if paprika, like oranges and limes, might also contain his hexuronic acid. Did it ever! (3) (Fresh red peppers have more than seven times as much vitamin C as oranges, but the very high heat of drying destroys much of its vitamin C.)(4) Within a short time, Szent-Gyorgyi had isolated a kilogram of the stuff and determined that it was identical to the anti-scurvy factor found in citrus fruits. He rechristened it ‘ascorbic acid.’ Today we know it as vitamin C. Why name it vitamin C? Because the practice of naming vitamins by letter had been introduced some twenty years earlier and A and B were already taken. (3)
Some last words on Szent-Gyorgyi. He left an impressive legacy as a highly admired biochemist, winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his biological combustion discoveries. He is credited with saying. “Very often, when you look for one thing, you find something else.” (5)
References
1. Joe Schwarcz, The Fly in the Ointment, (Toronto, ECW Press, 2004), 122
2. James Burke, Circles, (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000), 235
3. Joe Schwarcz, That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles, (Toronto, ECW Press, 2002)
4. “Paprika”, http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/paprika/html
5. “Know Your Strengths”, http:www.dailycelebrations.com/063001.htm
Livermore, California
What famous scientist do you think of when one mentions vitamin C? My guess is that it’s Linus Pauling because of his much publicized efforts at labeling vitamin C as a remedy for cancer and the common cold. The early history of vitamin C reveals that there were some other good scientists and interesting events that led to the understanding of this vital ingredient.
If you travel to Hungary, one item you might bring home with you is some paprika. At least that’s what a lot of folks did on my recent trip to that country. Hungary is famous for its paprika. What’s all this have to do with vitamin C? Think scurvy. Joe Schwarcz reports, “The first vitamin-deficiency disease to be recognized was scurvy, described as early as 1550 BC by the Egyptians in the Ebers Papyrus. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when long ocean voyages became common, thousands of sailors died from scurvy, which is characterized by spongy gums, loose teeth, and bleeding into the skin and mucous membranes. The first clue that scurvy was a diet related disease came from North American Indians who showed French explorer Jacques Cartier that a brew made for pine needles could cure the condition.” (1)
James Lind, a Scottish physician, had been inspired to work on this issue when he heard about a British Navy expedition that had gone terribly wrong. James Burke provides the story, “In 1740 Captain George Anson had sailed from England with six ships and over a thousand men. His mission: to head for the Pacific and clobber the Spanish wherever he found them. He did so, in spades, attacking Spanish ports and ships, laying waste right and left in the usual manner, and coming home four years later with so much treasure it took thirty wagons to haul it from the docks to the Tower of London for safekeeping. Every crew member walked off Anson’s ship rich for life. There was a lot more booty than originally planned for each man to share because, of the original six ships and one thousand crew, only one ship with 145 men made it back. Scurvy had killed the rest.” (2)
Lind proceeded to carry out what was probably the first properly controlled trial in the history of clinical nutrition. For fourteen days he kept six pairs of scurvy patients on the same diet, but gave each pair a different medicine: cider, elixir vitriol, vinegar, seawater, a ‘medicinal paste’ or oranges and lemons. The citrus fruit was the cure and in 1753 Lind published A Treatise of the Scurvy. (2) It took another 50 years but the British Navy finally got around to requiring sailing vessels to carry supplies of lemons or limes. Besides solving the scurvy problem, this led to the slang term ‘Limeys’ for British sailors. (1) The upside for the British besides the saving of many lives is that according to historians, many a naval victory claimed by the ‘Limeys’ resulted because these sailors, unlike their enemies, were protected form scurvy. (3)
So what was the magic ingredient in the citrus fruits? This gets us back to paprika since it played a key role in helping isolate the anti-scurvy factor found in citrus fruits. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi was a Hungarian physician studying plant chemistry around 1925. He noted a similarity between the darkening of damaged fruit and skin discoloration in patients suffering from Addison’s disease, an adrenal gland disorder. He had observed that certain fruits like oranges did not turn brown and their juice prevented others from discoloring. He isolated the substance that prevented browning and suggested the name “Godnose” for it. This wasn’t accepted very well so he changed the name to hexuronic acid. Szent-Gyorgyi wanted to do more research on this material but he needed large amounts of it. Along the way he accepted a university position in Szeged, which is the paprika capital of the world. As Joe Schwarcz reports, “To live in Szeged is to be surrounded by the sights and smells of paprika. Szent-Gyorgyi couldn’t help but wonder if paprika, like oranges and limes, might also contain his hexuronic acid. Did it ever! (3) (Fresh red peppers have more than seven times as much vitamin C as oranges, but the very high heat of drying destroys much of its vitamin C.)(4) Within a short time, Szent-Gyorgyi had isolated a kilogram of the stuff and determined that it was identical to the anti-scurvy factor found in citrus fruits. He rechristened it ‘ascorbic acid.’ Today we know it as vitamin C. Why name it vitamin C? Because the practice of naming vitamins by letter had been introduced some twenty years earlier and A and B were already taken. (3)
Some last words on Szent-Gyorgyi. He left an impressive legacy as a highly admired biochemist, winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his biological combustion discoveries. He is credited with saying. “Very often, when you look for one thing, you find something else.” (5)
References
1. Joe Schwarcz, The Fly in the Ointment, (Toronto, ECW Press, 2004), 122
2. James Burke, Circles, (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000), 235
3. Joe Schwarcz, That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles, (Toronto, ECW Press, 2002)
4. “Paprika”, http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/paprika/html
5. “Know Your Strengths”, http:www.dailycelebrations.com/063001.htm
Many Weather Stations in the US Yield Incorrect Data
Jack Dini
Livermore, California
(This appeared in Hawaii Reporter, December 3, 2007)
Imagine if you were tasked with measuring and tracking the global average per capita income. Then imagine if one year, hundreds of your offices including many in Africa shut down, and so you would simply get no information from this region. Would you be surprised if you added up all your numbers that year and suddenly your ‘average per capita income’ was higher? Would you consider that data reliable? Christopher Horner asks, “Would you expect some media skepticism if suddenly people read your numbers and declared that the word was getting much richer?”
When an analogous course of events unfolded in the world of climate science, the skepticism was notably absent. When the Soviet Union was falling apart from 1989 to 1992 folks there didn’t much care about keeping temperature monitoring stations. Thousands were closed and it’s important to note that many of these were in cold regions. Others around the world closed at the same time. Could this have helped making the decade that followed the ‘hottest decade’ ever?
Have you read about this in the media? I doubt it, although the inadequacy of sampling has not gone unnoticed. A 1997 conference on World Climate Research resulted in the statement in a resulting book Adequacy of Climate Observing Systems, “Without action to reverse this decline and develop the Global Climate Observation System, the ability to characterize climate change and variation over the next 25 years will be even less than during the past century.” It also mentioned that “The climate research community relies on a number of disparate observation systems to assemble a data base that it uses to analyze climate variability and change. A few of these systems function well, but for the most, there are clear warning signals that much be heeded if climate variability and change is to be observed with sufficient fidelity over the next decade.” Today, more than ten years after these observations, it’s not clear much has changed.
Enter Anthony Watts, a northern California meteorologist who is garnering national attention for his project of checking the condition and placement of weather stations used to monitor the nation’s climate. To date, Watts and his volunteers have found and photographed over 500 of the 1221 stations. This information is available on Watts’ site, surfacestations.org. The concern is that objects near a station affect what thermometers record. Buildings, parking lots, air conditioners, and sewage treatment plants near weather stations may emit heat and ultimately skew readings. Photos show some stations placed in parking lots near cars, on rooftops, next to diesel generators, and at non-standard heights. Clearly, many are far from meeting the guidelines to qualify as properly maintained temperature stations.
Others besides Watts are concerned about locations of weather stations. One is Roger Pielke Sr., a highly published geologist. Pielke and his colleagues reported in a recent paper, “the use of temperature data from poorly sited stations can lead to a false sense of confidence in the robustness of multidecaddal surface air temperature trend assessments.” They concluded that there are large uncertainties associated with surface temperature trends from the poorly sited stations.
A last note on this topic- Assume that there was evidence that some weather stations around the country were underestimating temperatures. Noel Sheppard asks, “Would a media fixated on expanding climate change alarmism investigate and report this phenomenon to demonstrate that the planet was actually warmer than people think? ‘60 Minutes,’ ‘Dateline’ and others would have all done rather lengthy exposes into the matter, correct?”
Livermore, California
(This appeared in Hawaii Reporter, December 3, 2007)
Imagine if you were tasked with measuring and tracking the global average per capita income. Then imagine if one year, hundreds of your offices including many in Africa shut down, and so you would simply get no information from this region. Would you be surprised if you added up all your numbers that year and suddenly your ‘average per capita income’ was higher? Would you consider that data reliable? Christopher Horner asks, “Would you expect some media skepticism if suddenly people read your numbers and declared that the word was getting much richer?”
When an analogous course of events unfolded in the world of climate science, the skepticism was notably absent. When the Soviet Union was falling apart from 1989 to 1992 folks there didn’t much care about keeping temperature monitoring stations. Thousands were closed and it’s important to note that many of these were in cold regions. Others around the world closed at the same time. Could this have helped making the decade that followed the ‘hottest decade’ ever?
Have you read about this in the media? I doubt it, although the inadequacy of sampling has not gone unnoticed. A 1997 conference on World Climate Research resulted in the statement in a resulting book Adequacy of Climate Observing Systems, “Without action to reverse this decline and develop the Global Climate Observation System, the ability to characterize climate change and variation over the next 25 years will be even less than during the past century.” It also mentioned that “The climate research community relies on a number of disparate observation systems to assemble a data base that it uses to analyze climate variability and change. A few of these systems function well, but for the most, there are clear warning signals that much be heeded if climate variability and change is to be observed with sufficient fidelity over the next decade.” Today, more than ten years after these observations, it’s not clear much has changed.
Enter Anthony Watts, a northern California meteorologist who is garnering national attention for his project of checking the condition and placement of weather stations used to monitor the nation’s climate. To date, Watts and his volunteers have found and photographed over 500 of the 1221 stations. This information is available on Watts’ site, surfacestations.org. The concern is that objects near a station affect what thermometers record. Buildings, parking lots, air conditioners, and sewage treatment plants near weather stations may emit heat and ultimately skew readings. Photos show some stations placed in parking lots near cars, on rooftops, next to diesel generators, and at non-standard heights. Clearly, many are far from meeting the guidelines to qualify as properly maintained temperature stations.
Others besides Watts are concerned about locations of weather stations. One is Roger Pielke Sr., a highly published geologist. Pielke and his colleagues reported in a recent paper, “the use of temperature data from poorly sited stations can lead to a false sense of confidence in the robustness of multidecaddal surface air temperature trend assessments.” They concluded that there are large uncertainties associated with surface temperature trends from the poorly sited stations.
A last note on this topic- Assume that there was evidence that some weather stations around the country were underestimating temperatures. Noel Sheppard asks, “Would a media fixated on expanding climate change alarmism investigate and report this phenomenon to demonstrate that the planet was actually warmer than people think? ‘60 Minutes,’ ‘Dateline’ and others would have all done rather lengthy exposes into the matter, correct?”
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Polar Bears Are Not Disappearing- The Rest of the Story
Jack Dini
Livermore, CA
December 14, 2007
Abstract- There are a number of facts about polar bears that Al Gore and other alarmists haven't shared with us. Polar bears are not disappearing, are very mobile, and have survived through much warmer periods thana we are experiencing today.
Al Gore- “The melting of the ice represents bad news for creatures like polar bears. A new scientific study shows that, for the first time, polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers.”
Marlo Lewis- “I found the study. The study found four drowned polar bears in one month of one year after an abrupt windstorm. Have been drowning—that suggests an ongoing problem. Significant numbers suggests that it’s enough to affect the overall population dynamic. That’s an exaggeration.” Also, the sighting occurred in an area where polar bear numbers are increasing.
We’ve all seen the heartrending photo of a lonely bear apparently stranded on a melting ice floe. It’s become the poster centerpiece for environmentalists and the media. Time magazine chose this mammal as the cover boy for one if its issues (April l3, 2006) declaring: “Be Worried. Be Very Worried,” and Al Gore offered a computer-generated bear flailing about for icy salvation in his movie.
In April 2007 Time added, “With sea ice vanishing, polar bears—prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones are starting to turn up drowned.” “There will be no polar ice by 2060,” says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. “Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out.”
Let’s look at some facts that Al Gore and Time either missed or conveniently forgot to share with us. It’s true in Baffin Bay, one or possibly two subpopulations of polar bears out of twenty are declining. However, here’s the rest of the story-- more than half are known to be stable, and two subpopulations are actually increasing around the Beaufort Sea. In addition, the overall bear population has increased from about five thousand in the 1960s to twenty-five thousand today. But here’s the real kicker that you haven’t heard from our doomsayers—the two populations in decline come from areas where it has actually been getting colder over the past fifty years, whereas the two increasing populations reside in areas where it is getting warmer.
Here are some more facts about the region where bears are ‘declining.’ The best studied polar bear population, living on the western coast of Hudson Bay has seen its population decline 17 percent, from 1,200 in 1987 to under 500 in 2004. This is the group that has gotten most of the press. Yet, have you heard that the population of this group was only 500 in 1981 and that 300 to 500 bears are shot each year?
And speaking of shooting polar bears, in the Davis Strait of Nunavit, this topic is on the agenda because of too many bears. Nunavit is home to 12 of Canada’s 13 polar bear populations totaling an estimated 14,780. Dr. Mitch Taylor reports, “There are maybe even too many bears now. That’s not theory. That’s not based on a model. That’s observation of reality.” With this increase, folks could be looking at the possibility of increasing hunting quotas.
Talk to some Churchill, Manitoba residents, the so-called Polar Bear Capital of the World, and you also get a different view than Al Gore and Time present. These folks base their opinions on personal experience rather than fancy charts and computer models put out by scaremongers. And getting back to famous photograph mentioned earlier of the polar bear teetering precariously on an Arctic ice-floe in the depths of winter. Seems that the doomsayers forgot to mention that it was taken three years ago during the height of summer. Clearly, when the rest of the story is examined, the relationship between polar bear populations and temperature is the opposite of what we’ve been hearing.
Polar bears are also known to be very mobile. They wander thousands of miles every year on paths in enormous private northern arcs. At least one bear has been tracked pacing the ice 3,000 miles from Alaska to Greenland, then back. So, if one part of their territory is changing, they are quite capable of changing their routes and moving elsewhere.
One last item. Recent discovery of what may be the oldest known remains of a polar bear have been discovered in the Arctic. Professor Olafur Ingolfsson from the University of Iceland says this confirms that the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago. Between then and now there’s been at least one interglacial period (Eeemian) and it was much warmer than our present Holocene. Existence of polar bears today is proof that they survived long periods of time when the climate of the Arctic was much warmer than at present. So why didn’t they go extinct? A World Climate Reports suggests the most likely explanation is that they modified their behavior to adapt to the changing conditions, probably by spending more time on land foraging, hunting, and denning. There is evidence that these are precisely the kinds of adaptations that bears are making to best cope with today’s warmer climate. So instead of perishing, polar bears will be quite capable of adapting.
Livermore, CA
December 14, 2007
Abstract- There are a number of facts about polar bears that Al Gore and other alarmists haven't shared with us. Polar bears are not disappearing, are very mobile, and have survived through much warmer periods thana we are experiencing today.
Al Gore- “The melting of the ice represents bad news for creatures like polar bears. A new scientific study shows that, for the first time, polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers.”
Marlo Lewis- “I found the study. The study found four drowned polar bears in one month of one year after an abrupt windstorm. Have been drowning—that suggests an ongoing problem. Significant numbers suggests that it’s enough to affect the overall population dynamic. That’s an exaggeration.” Also, the sighting occurred in an area where polar bear numbers are increasing.
We’ve all seen the heartrending photo of a lonely bear apparently stranded on a melting ice floe. It’s become the poster centerpiece for environmentalists and the media. Time magazine chose this mammal as the cover boy for one if its issues (April l3, 2006) declaring: “Be Worried. Be Very Worried,” and Al Gore offered a computer-generated bear flailing about for icy salvation in his movie.
In April 2007 Time added, “With sea ice vanishing, polar bears—prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones are starting to turn up drowned.” “There will be no polar ice by 2060,” says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. “Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out.”
Let’s look at some facts that Al Gore and Time either missed or conveniently forgot to share with us. It’s true in Baffin Bay, one or possibly two subpopulations of polar bears out of twenty are declining. However, here’s the rest of the story-- more than half are known to be stable, and two subpopulations are actually increasing around the Beaufort Sea. In addition, the overall bear population has increased from about five thousand in the 1960s to twenty-five thousand today. But here’s the real kicker that you haven’t heard from our doomsayers—the two populations in decline come from areas where it has actually been getting colder over the past fifty years, whereas the two increasing populations reside in areas where it is getting warmer.
Here are some more facts about the region where bears are ‘declining.’ The best studied polar bear population, living on the western coast of Hudson Bay has seen its population decline 17 percent, from 1,200 in 1987 to under 500 in 2004. This is the group that has gotten most of the press. Yet, have you heard that the population of this group was only 500 in 1981 and that 300 to 500 bears are shot each year?
And speaking of shooting polar bears, in the Davis Strait of Nunavit, this topic is on the agenda because of too many bears. Nunavit is home to 12 of Canada’s 13 polar bear populations totaling an estimated 14,780. Dr. Mitch Taylor reports, “There are maybe even too many bears now. That’s not theory. That’s not based on a model. That’s observation of reality.” With this increase, folks could be looking at the possibility of increasing hunting quotas.
Talk to some Churchill, Manitoba residents, the so-called Polar Bear Capital of the World, and you also get a different view than Al Gore and Time present. These folks base their opinions on personal experience rather than fancy charts and computer models put out by scaremongers. And getting back to famous photograph mentioned earlier of the polar bear teetering precariously on an Arctic ice-floe in the depths of winter. Seems that the doomsayers forgot to mention that it was taken three years ago during the height of summer. Clearly, when the rest of the story is examined, the relationship between polar bear populations and temperature is the opposite of what we’ve been hearing.
Polar bears are also known to be very mobile. They wander thousands of miles every year on paths in enormous private northern arcs. At least one bear has been tracked pacing the ice 3,000 miles from Alaska to Greenland, then back. So, if one part of their territory is changing, they are quite capable of changing their routes and moving elsewhere.
One last item. Recent discovery of what may be the oldest known remains of a polar bear have been discovered in the Arctic. Professor Olafur Ingolfsson from the University of Iceland says this confirms that the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago. Between then and now there’s been at least one interglacial period (Eeemian) and it was much warmer than our present Holocene. Existence of polar bears today is proof that they survived long periods of time when the climate of the Arctic was much warmer than at present. So why didn’t they go extinct? A World Climate Reports suggests the most likely explanation is that they modified their behavior to adapt to the changing conditions, probably by spending more time on land foraging, hunting, and denning. There is evidence that these are precisely the kinds of adaptations that bears are making to best cope with today’s warmer climate. So instead of perishing, polar bears will be quite capable of adapting.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Double the Fun at the Honolulu Marathon
Jack Dini
Livermore, CA
December 11, 2007
I was alone, ahead of the pack for 11 miles during the Honolulu Marathon. How was this possible for someone whose pace is one mile in 20 minutes? Easy. Start early! Knowing that it was going to take me 9-10 hours to cover the course (new metal knee), I decided to avoid the masses at the start and begin the race at 2 AM, three hours before the official start time.
What fun! Along the way I passed many parties—after all it was still in the wee hours of the morning. A number of street folks (homeless) were kind enough to wish me well after asking when the race would start, and not a one panhandled me (quite different from what would have happened to me at 2-3 AM in San Francisco). Some folks on Ala Moana Blvd were waiting at different bus stops. I didn’t think they would ever see The Bus; at least I didn’t for 2 miles (40 minutes). Many volunteers were getting instructions and setting up their stations in a flurry of activity. And, of course, there were many police persons at the various intersections. Once, when a heavy rain stated falling, I was able to duck into one of the porta-potties and sit out the storm. After all, no one else was waiting to use my selected toilet since the other runners hadn’t yet started.
Around mile 10.5 the first wheel chair racer passed by in what looked like a high-speed chase to me. He was preceded by two bicyclists with flashing lights and bells and followed by two other folks on bicycles. I later learned that this was Masazumi Soejima of Japan who finished the race course in 1:33. That’s about a 17 mph pace, so no wonder I was impressed with the speed. Three other wheel chair racers passed before the first runners appeared. They were a group of four who seemed to just glide along. They were so close to one another that if one fell they all were going down. Very quite, effortlessly cruising along, they made it look much easier than it really is (to me, at least.). These four were well ahead of the rest of the pack but after another 30 minutes or so, the mob had caught up to me. From then on, the race seemed like a typical marathon—folks passing me left and right. Before I finished, just short of 10 hours, I’m sure most of the folks who didn’t start until 3 hours after I did had passed me by. So what? I had a great time, both at the front end and at the back.
Thanks Honolulu and all your volunteers for another great race.
Livermore, CA
December 11, 2007
I was alone, ahead of the pack for 11 miles during the Honolulu Marathon. How was this possible for someone whose pace is one mile in 20 minutes? Easy. Start early! Knowing that it was going to take me 9-10 hours to cover the course (new metal knee), I decided to avoid the masses at the start and begin the race at 2 AM, three hours before the official start time.
What fun! Along the way I passed many parties—after all it was still in the wee hours of the morning. A number of street folks (homeless) were kind enough to wish me well after asking when the race would start, and not a one panhandled me (quite different from what would have happened to me at 2-3 AM in San Francisco). Some folks on Ala Moana Blvd were waiting at different bus stops. I didn’t think they would ever see The Bus; at least I didn’t for 2 miles (40 minutes). Many volunteers were getting instructions and setting up their stations in a flurry of activity. And, of course, there were many police persons at the various intersections. Once, when a heavy rain stated falling, I was able to duck into one of the porta-potties and sit out the storm. After all, no one else was waiting to use my selected toilet since the other runners hadn’t yet started.
Around mile 10.5 the first wheel chair racer passed by in what looked like a high-speed chase to me. He was preceded by two bicyclists with flashing lights and bells and followed by two other folks on bicycles. I later learned that this was Masazumi Soejima of Japan who finished the race course in 1:33. That’s about a 17 mph pace, so no wonder I was impressed with the speed. Three other wheel chair racers passed before the first runners appeared. They were a group of four who seemed to just glide along. They were so close to one another that if one fell they all were going down. Very quite, effortlessly cruising along, they made it look much easier than it really is (to me, at least.). These four were well ahead of the rest of the pack but after another 30 minutes or so, the mob had caught up to me. From then on, the race seemed like a typical marathon—folks passing me left and right. Before I finished, just short of 10 hours, I’m sure most of the folks who didn’t start until 3 hours after I did had passed me by. So what? I had a great time, both at the front end and at the back.
Thanks Honolulu and all your volunteers for another great race.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Superfund Sites Yield New Drugs/Tourist Attractions/Physics Laboratory
Superfund Sites Yield New Drugs/Tourist Attractions/Physics Laboratory
Jack Dini
Livermore, California
In 1993 Travel and Leisure Magazine ran an article on the Continental Divide. It was tough on Butte, Montana: “the ugliest spot in Montana…despite a spirited historic district amid the rubble, the overall picture is desolate.” It called nearby Anaconda “a sad sack mining town dominated by a smelter smokestack.” (1) Today things are somewhat different for these two sites.
Butte, Montana- Lake Berkeley
Edwin Dobb reports, “At one time Butte provided a third of the copper used in the United States—all from a mining district only four miles square. Eventually open-pit mining was used and the pit became the world’s largest truck operated mine, along the way displacing some Italian and Serbo-Croatian neighborhoods. Mining came to a halt in the early 1980s, as did the pumps that had been sucking groundwater out of the mines for a century. The flooding began.”(2)
The 1.5 mile wide, 1,800 foot deep pit, part of the nation’s largest Superfund site, has been filling for the last 20 years with a poisonous broth laced with heavy metals—a legacy of Butte’s copper mining days. When mining officials abandoned the pit and stopped the pumps that kept it dry, they opened the spigots to about 3 millions gallons of water per day. Today, the lake is about 850 foot deep and contains more than 3 billion cubic feet of water. (3)
Lake Berkeley, also known as The Berkeley Pit, covers almost 700 acres of the former open-pit copper mine. It holds some 30 billion gallons of highly acidic, metal-laden water. It’s the country’s largest and most unusual body of contaminated water, with a pH of 2.6 and metals such as aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, copper, iron, manganese, zinc, and others. (1) Yet, as New Scientist reports, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” The contaminated lake designated hazardous is turning out to be a source of novel chemicals that could help fight migraines and cancer. (4)
In recent years more than 40 small organisms have been discovered in the lake and these hold much potential for agriculture and medicine. It’s even thought that some of these organisms can be employed to reclaim the lake and other similar contaminated waters by neutralizing acidity and absorbing dissolved metals.
Andrea and Don Stierle and their colleagues have found a strain of the pithomyces fungi producing a compound that bonds to a receptor that causes migraines and could block headaches, while a strain of penicillium fungi makes a different compound that inhibits the growth of cancer cells. In July 2006 the Stierle team revealed that a novel Berkeley Lake compound called berkelic acid from another new strain of penicillium fungus reduces the rate of ovarian cancer cell growth by 50 percent. (5)
How is this possible? Essentially, some organisms actually flourish in the presence of acidity and make use of some of the dissolved metals in the lake. These are called extremophiles (liking extremes), because they not only tolerate, but even thrive in extreme conditions. Extremophiles can tolerate heat, very cold climates, high pressure, and low pH and high pH solutions. Japanese scientist Koki Horikoshi has found a variety of chemically tolerant extremophiles in the deepest parts of the ocean; some of them can even degrade hydrocarbons while thriving in water containing up to 50% solutes such as toluene, benzene, or kerosene. (6)
Why do extremophiles show new antibiotic and anticarcinogenic activities? Best guess is that some of them have evolved powerful toxins to attack an enzyme associated with a particular fungal growth phase. Another possibility is that they are particularly adept at sticking tightly to surfaces and this is one of the attributes researchers look for in anti-cancer drugs. (7)
Anaconda, Montana—The Old Works Golf Course
Twenty-five miles down the road from Lake Berkeley is the town of Anaconda, another Superfund site. The Anaconda smelter was once one of the shining stars of the American mining industry employing thousands of people. The facility first began copper smelting operations in 1884 and the smelter rose quickly to national prominence because of its noticeable annual copper production. However, this all came at a price to the environment. The land was left gouged with mines and extensively contaminated with heavy metals. The Anaconda smelter was demolished after its closure in 1981. However, the smelter stack, the tallest and possibly largest free-standing masonry structure in the world, remains standing. The site is now a Montana State Park. (8)
And speaking of parks and tourism, these days the town of Anaconda has redefined itself turning to tourism and recreational pursuits to attract visitors and provide jobs for its citizens. A major attraction is the Old Works Golf Course built on the site of the copper smelter. Jack Nicklaus, hired to design the course, reportedly called the site the ugliest he had ever see. One of the most expensive golf course reclamation projects ever undertaken, the $15 million project included capping the entire area with crushed rock, clay, and topsoil. Lakes were created to catch and filter water, and plastic liners were installed to protect trees, greens, and bunkers. (9)
The course includes capped slag and tailing pipes and some of the landscape’s century old flues and smelting ovens. Sand traps are black, a clever use for more than 14,000 cubic yards of inert smelting slag ground to the texture of sand. Massive stone furnace walls line some of the fairways. For the non-golfer, a historic hiking trail highlighting Anaconda’s smelting heritage and giving hikers an insight into copper mining techniques of years past winds its way around the course.
Some Other Sites
The Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, site of a spill of six to seven tons of cyanide-laced tailings into a creek in 1998, has been selected as the preferred site for a $500 million Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. (10) Because of the up to 8000 foot depth in the mine, this would make it the best shielded laboratory in the world for neutrino studies and a major advance in sensitivity in the search for proton decay.
An artificial lake in El Salvador brimming with sewage and industrial waste is mystifying scientists by attracting thousands of migratory and sea birds. Built in 1974 to drive El Salvador’s biggest hydroelectric project, the 33,360 acre Cerron Grande reservoir collects some 3,800 tons of excrement each year from sewage pipes, as well as factory run-off and traces of heavy metals like chromium and lead. What surprises scientists is the fact that some 150,000 seabirds from more than 130 species have chosen to make the reservoir their home. At least 90 of the species are migratory birds arriving from as far away as Alaska. (11) Birds do not survive in Lake Berkeley. So what’s the difference between the two lakes? Could it be the 3,800 tons of excrement?
References
1. Florence Williams, “Butte, Montana, seeks a new life,” High Country News, Volume 25, November 29, 1993
2. Edwin Dobb, “New Life in a Death Trap,” Discover, 21, 86, December 2000
3. Mark Matthews, “Could a Toxic Lake Yield Life-Saving Microbes?” The Washington Post, March 8, 1999, Page A09
4. “Dirty old mine has rich seam of drugs,” New Scientist, 191, 19, July 15, 2006
5. Andrea A. Stierle, Donald B. Stierle, and Kal Kelly, “Berkelic Acid, A Novel Spiroketal With Selective Anticancer Activity From an Acid Mine Waste Fungal Extremophile, J. Org. Chem., 71, 5357, June 10, 2006
6. Carol Stone, “Extremophiles, Life at the Edge,” ChemMatters, 17, 14, December 1999
7. Michael R. Taylor, Dark Life, (New York, Scribner, 1999), 119
8. “Anaconda Smelter Stack,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnacondaSmelterStack
9. Alex Markels, “The Greening of America,” Audubon, July-August 1998, Page 42
10. Geoff Brumfiel, “Deep science strikes gold after latest site is named,” Nature , 448, 232, July 19, 2007
11. Alberto Barrera, “Contaminated Salvador Lake is Mystery Brid Magnet,” http://planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/42010/story.htm, May 21, 2007
Jack Dini
Livermore, California
In 1993 Travel and Leisure Magazine ran an article on the Continental Divide. It was tough on Butte, Montana: “the ugliest spot in Montana…despite a spirited historic district amid the rubble, the overall picture is desolate.” It called nearby Anaconda “a sad sack mining town dominated by a smelter smokestack.” (1) Today things are somewhat different for these two sites.
Butte, Montana- Lake Berkeley
Edwin Dobb reports, “At one time Butte provided a third of the copper used in the United States—all from a mining district only four miles square. Eventually open-pit mining was used and the pit became the world’s largest truck operated mine, along the way displacing some Italian and Serbo-Croatian neighborhoods. Mining came to a halt in the early 1980s, as did the pumps that had been sucking groundwater out of the mines for a century. The flooding began.”(2)
The 1.5 mile wide, 1,800 foot deep pit, part of the nation’s largest Superfund site, has been filling for the last 20 years with a poisonous broth laced with heavy metals—a legacy of Butte’s copper mining days. When mining officials abandoned the pit and stopped the pumps that kept it dry, they opened the spigots to about 3 millions gallons of water per day. Today, the lake is about 850 foot deep and contains more than 3 billion cubic feet of water. (3)
Lake Berkeley, also known as The Berkeley Pit, covers almost 700 acres of the former open-pit copper mine. It holds some 30 billion gallons of highly acidic, metal-laden water. It’s the country’s largest and most unusual body of contaminated water, with a pH of 2.6 and metals such as aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, copper, iron, manganese, zinc, and others. (1) Yet, as New Scientist reports, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” The contaminated lake designated hazardous is turning out to be a source of novel chemicals that could help fight migraines and cancer. (4)
In recent years more than 40 small organisms have been discovered in the lake and these hold much potential for agriculture and medicine. It’s even thought that some of these organisms can be employed to reclaim the lake and other similar contaminated waters by neutralizing acidity and absorbing dissolved metals.
Andrea and Don Stierle and their colleagues have found a strain of the pithomyces fungi producing a compound that bonds to a receptor that causes migraines and could block headaches, while a strain of penicillium fungi makes a different compound that inhibits the growth of cancer cells. In July 2006 the Stierle team revealed that a novel Berkeley Lake compound called berkelic acid from another new strain of penicillium fungus reduces the rate of ovarian cancer cell growth by 50 percent. (5)
How is this possible? Essentially, some organisms actually flourish in the presence of acidity and make use of some of the dissolved metals in the lake. These are called extremophiles (liking extremes), because they not only tolerate, but even thrive in extreme conditions. Extremophiles can tolerate heat, very cold climates, high pressure, and low pH and high pH solutions. Japanese scientist Koki Horikoshi has found a variety of chemically tolerant extremophiles in the deepest parts of the ocean; some of them can even degrade hydrocarbons while thriving in water containing up to 50% solutes such as toluene, benzene, or kerosene. (6)
Why do extremophiles show new antibiotic and anticarcinogenic activities? Best guess is that some of them have evolved powerful toxins to attack an enzyme associated with a particular fungal growth phase. Another possibility is that they are particularly adept at sticking tightly to surfaces and this is one of the attributes researchers look for in anti-cancer drugs. (7)
Anaconda, Montana—The Old Works Golf Course
Twenty-five miles down the road from Lake Berkeley is the town of Anaconda, another Superfund site. The Anaconda smelter was once one of the shining stars of the American mining industry employing thousands of people. The facility first began copper smelting operations in 1884 and the smelter rose quickly to national prominence because of its noticeable annual copper production. However, this all came at a price to the environment. The land was left gouged with mines and extensively contaminated with heavy metals. The Anaconda smelter was demolished after its closure in 1981. However, the smelter stack, the tallest and possibly largest free-standing masonry structure in the world, remains standing. The site is now a Montana State Park. (8)
And speaking of parks and tourism, these days the town of Anaconda has redefined itself turning to tourism and recreational pursuits to attract visitors and provide jobs for its citizens. A major attraction is the Old Works Golf Course built on the site of the copper smelter. Jack Nicklaus, hired to design the course, reportedly called the site the ugliest he had ever see. One of the most expensive golf course reclamation projects ever undertaken, the $15 million project included capping the entire area with crushed rock, clay, and topsoil. Lakes were created to catch and filter water, and plastic liners were installed to protect trees, greens, and bunkers. (9)
The course includes capped slag and tailing pipes and some of the landscape’s century old flues and smelting ovens. Sand traps are black, a clever use for more than 14,000 cubic yards of inert smelting slag ground to the texture of sand. Massive stone furnace walls line some of the fairways. For the non-golfer, a historic hiking trail highlighting Anaconda’s smelting heritage and giving hikers an insight into copper mining techniques of years past winds its way around the course.
Some Other Sites
The Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, site of a spill of six to seven tons of cyanide-laced tailings into a creek in 1998, has been selected as the preferred site for a $500 million Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. (10) Because of the up to 8000 foot depth in the mine, this would make it the best shielded laboratory in the world for neutrino studies and a major advance in sensitivity in the search for proton decay.
An artificial lake in El Salvador brimming with sewage and industrial waste is mystifying scientists by attracting thousands of migratory and sea birds. Built in 1974 to drive El Salvador’s biggest hydroelectric project, the 33,360 acre Cerron Grande reservoir collects some 3,800 tons of excrement each year from sewage pipes, as well as factory run-off and traces of heavy metals like chromium and lead. What surprises scientists is the fact that some 150,000 seabirds from more than 130 species have chosen to make the reservoir their home. At least 90 of the species are migratory birds arriving from as far away as Alaska. (11) Birds do not survive in Lake Berkeley. So what’s the difference between the two lakes? Could it be the 3,800 tons of excrement?
References
1. Florence Williams, “Butte, Montana, seeks a new life,” High Country News, Volume 25, November 29, 1993
2. Edwin Dobb, “New Life in a Death Trap,” Discover, 21, 86, December 2000
3. Mark Matthews, “Could a Toxic Lake Yield Life-Saving Microbes?” The Washington Post, March 8, 1999, Page A09
4. “Dirty old mine has rich seam of drugs,” New Scientist, 191, 19, July 15, 2006
5. Andrea A. Stierle, Donald B. Stierle, and Kal Kelly, “Berkelic Acid, A Novel Spiroketal With Selective Anticancer Activity From an Acid Mine Waste Fungal Extremophile, J. Org. Chem., 71, 5357, June 10, 2006
6. Carol Stone, “Extremophiles, Life at the Edge,” ChemMatters, 17, 14, December 1999
7. Michael R. Taylor, Dark Life, (New York, Scribner, 1999), 119
8. “Anaconda Smelter Stack,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnacondaSmelterStack
9. Alex Markels, “The Greening of America,” Audubon, July-August 1998, Page 42
10. Geoff Brumfiel, “Deep science strikes gold after latest site is named,” Nature , 448, 232, July 19, 2007
11. Alberto Barrera, “Contaminated Salvador Lake is Mystery Brid Magnet,” http://planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/42010/story.htm, May 21, 2007
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