Irony is Really and Truly Dead

What are the chances that we see the announcement of a trillion dollar cash infusion from the taxpayers to the large and largely insolvent financial institutions, in full view of our media, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day?

EPA’s Draft Toxicological Review of PCE and (Once Again) What’s Wrong with Risk Assessment?

I wasn’t sure I was going to play in this sandbox again. I’m not really involved with volatile organic compound risk assessments anymore. I’ve expressed the opinion that what we need is not another toxicological assessment, but some action to replace the highest-exposure uses with some implementable alternatives. Outside of the workplace, perc isn’t terribly high on the list of environmental health hazards. But there is a framework in place for replacing it with lower-toxicity substitutes which could be template for other, more hazardous, compounds.

But instead, we have a draft toxicological assessment that is intended to provide toxicity values on EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, which can then be used for risk assessments.

Just by eyeball, the estimated risks are similar to the last risk assessment conducted, done by Cal-EPA in the late 1990s. So, I’m not sure what’s been gained here – while it seems to be well-written, I’m wondering how this risk assessment is going to help us make faster or better decisions about managing PCE risks, given that it doesn’t say anything terribly different from what we knew a few years ago, and does not put much energy behind PCE risk-based decision making. In fairness, I should note that it’s not intended to be a policy document – its purpose is to make sure that good science and the right values are put up on IRIS.

At a high level, EPA’s assessment says that PCE is “likely to be carcinogenic” in humans by all routes of exposure and that the primary non-cancer toxic effects of PCE exposure in humans occur to the central nervous system, kidneys, liver and developing fetus. On the quantitative side, EPA judges the cancer potency of PCE to be slightly higher compared with its previous risk assessment, conducted in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Also, EPA judges PCE to pose slightly more of a non-cancer health risk, compared with previous assessments.

Once again, I’m wondering how we address what’s broken about risk assessment. I’m apparently not the only one:

However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment.

This is from the teaser from a forthcoming book from the National Academy of Sciences, Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment. This book promises to build off of the original framework for risk assessment, published in the book published in 1983 by the NAS, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The Red Book established a framework for much of risk assessment as it is practiced today Science and Decisions, “embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making.” Maybe it will contribute to “fixing” risk assessment. We’ll see. I’ve ordered a copy and will discuss it in a future post.

How to Read

It almost seems to be a redundant topic, but I found value in this post from the Copyblogger. The audience for it consists of the people who have managed to get past the gossip, innuendo, unsubstantiated opinions, disconnected facts and plainly incorrect stuff which makes up the preponderance of written material today. It expands from the topic of “information” (described by Wilson as “. . . a full, accurate, and properly nuanced body of knowledge about important matters. . .”) and goes to how to read for discovery and to achieve understanding.

The focus of the article is on reading to make yourself a better writer, however the concept can be expanded to reading to make yourself a better citizen and more enlightened voter. As David Brin points out, human nature always conspires against Enlightenment. And there is a substantial fraction of American citizens today who in on that conspiracy.

Geoengineering and Stewardship

Over on David Brin’s blog, there is some discussion of an interesting idea for greenhouse gas mitigation – modifying ocean chemistry to increase carbon sequestration:

Adding lime to seawater increases alkalinity, boosting seawater's ability to absorb CO2 from air and reducing the tendency to release it back again. The process of making lime generates CO2, but adding the lime to seawater absorbs almost twice as much CO2. The overall process is therefore 'carbon negative'. However, the idea, which has been bandied about for years, was thought unworkable because of the expense of obtaining lime from limestone and the amount of CO2 released in the process. Shell is so impressed with a newly developed approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. (Note an added benefit. Increased alkalinity would also compensate for potential acidification if iron is added to seawater to boost plankton and foodchain productivity in “desert” sea areas, pulling out even more CO2.)

This is from the post for August 24th – scroll down because there’s no permalink.

A paper published last year in Environmental Science and Technology (linked here) provides a feasibility study of the technology. As with any sequestration technology, implementation could be decades off, even if funded appropriately (and we’re talking trillions of dollars, euros or whatnots, here). However, Shell is supposedly funding a company to develop this technology.

Shell Oil has funded a proposal by Cquestrate to investigate atmospheric carbon removal by adding lime to sea water. This process is heavily energy intensive, but could still be cost-effective near oil fields that have un-utilized natural gas resources. Instead of flaring the gas, it could be harnessed to create lime from limestone. Notably, the company developing this proccess plans to use an “Open Source” development process so that anyone can use the technology.

It’s a neat idea of trying to solve this problem by crowdsourcing it. David Brin has offered up other examples of increasing online public participation in creativity and problem solving. Currently these have the feel of gimmicks, but they may be the seeds of ways for harnessing smart mobs, particularly if you start adequately compensating the smart people. Maybe it will become a trend that produces some robust collaborative tools. Returning to Cquestrate, the sense I get from the website is that this initiative doesn’t exactly have the billions it needs driving it – not if we’re going to get ocean sequestration technology going any time soon (I’m not going to say “greennwashing”, but I did think it just for a moment. . .).

When the topic of geoengineering comes up, there is the accompanying handwringing over making drastic and possibly irreversible changes to the planet:

The idea of deliberately tampering with Earth's climate system raises the specter of unintended consequences, especially because the interventions would be imposed on a climate system already significantly perturbed by the unintentional consequences of human activity. Many scientists are averse to opening that Pandora's box, preferring to mitigate climate through emissions reductions and worrying that those reductions might be undermined by a premature faith in a technical fix.

I suspect it’s too late to have those conversations. As James Lovelock has argued, we may already have significantly perturbed the self-correcting mechanisms governing planetary processes, to the extent that we humans now have stewardship over those mechanisms. We’ll need all of the luck we can muster – along with trillions invested in research and engineering (an effort that will make the Manhattan Project look by comparison like a junior high school science fair project) to pull off climate change mitigation. Just something to think about during this Presidential election season – I don’t think either candidate really gets it.

An Update (09/05/08):

Speaking of the need for extreme measures, I ran across this article today:

Political inaction on global warming has become so dire that nations must now consider extreme technical solutions - such as blocking out the sun - to address catastrophic temperature rises, scientists from around the world warn today.

Figures it would be in the Guardian – you can’t get a US newspaper to cut through the fog like this. It refers to a collection of papers published by the Royal Society, which can be found here. More on this topic soon.