BBC, population control and internet babbling

This Monday, the BBC published an article on the elephant in the room of environmentalism - population control.

Basically, if the planet has a limited capacity then the more people there are the less they can consume each. At some point, there will be a requirement to match the number of people to consumption - and this will not necessarily be peaceful.

So, the article looked pretty sensible and rational, and then I got down to the comments... is the BBC trying to make North Americans look like frothing paranoid bigots, or could they not find enough frothing paranoid bigotry from the English (looking at the standard have your say comments, frothing paranoid bigotry really isn't in short supply in the UK), as the barking mad of the prairies were in full swing - "They're coming for our babies!". Oh dear. Fortunately, reading further down, the Obama-voting regions of the US demonstrated that sense and logic aren't strangers to the New World.

This is why this is such an emotive subject, and one that scientists will struggle with. Scientists are trained to deal in facts. Gather facts, build a hypothesis. If the hypothesis doesn't match the facts, can it be modified to do so? If not, abandon the hypothesis (admittedly some scientists are very loathe to abandon their favourite hypothesis)

However, not everyone is a scientist. Particularly on the internet, the model is opinion first, then find facts to back them up. Stop digging as soon as you find something that looks like a fact, even if it isn't (especially if it isn't, as digging more might damage it). If you can't find one, make it up, although finding one that someone else has made up means you can at least imitate the appearance of scientists by putting cites in. That, sadly, is the model that dominates on comments pages on websites such as the BBC and Guardian.

The power of FUD

There are plenty of people out there who like the status quo - largely because their current power relies on it - and who will view those who would change the status quo as their enemies, even if a change is necessary and indeed inevitable.

So it's a shame to see that one group of these people - those who wish to give the impression that scientists are divided over anthropegenic climate change, or that scientists are somehow much less trustworthy than the market and big business *coughsubprimecough* - seem to still be having rather a lot of success.

This is a bad thing because, of course, reality isn't democratic. You can't change the laws of physics, or their complex interplay, just because you don't like them or understand them. And a lack of action now will make things worse later.

Don't blame me for the polar bears

Smugly declaring - my CO2 footprint is 3 tonnes below the national average.

Well, OK, this is the UK national average, and we're not exactly the lightest treading nation in the world. And this was using the UK government's carbon calculator, which kindly does not include business travel in my travel footprint, allowing me to ignore every flight I've ever taken. And I don't own a car. So that's pretty much my entire contribution to saving the planet.

I'm still 0.3 tonnes above the target footprint, though, since all my household power is from fossil energy. I suppose the cycling does actually contribute a bit, as it means I'm using the washing machine more often as well. As for the green-ness of the home, well I'm renting. If I owned my house, I may well have put solar panels on by now.

Dirty nanotech

Carbon nanotubes are often touted as a major material of the future. One problem is that the manufacturing processes are somewhat inefficient, leading to a lot of byproducts, which an MIT/Woods Hole Institute study has shown are pretty unattractive things to go chucking out into the atmosphere as part of an industrial process.

They will be working with the already existing small-scale nanotube manufacturers to work out how this technology can be scaled up without adding to the environmental woes already inflicted by industry.

Guardian on nanotech at Imperial College

Nanotechnology and electron microscopy get an article in the Grauniad - but unfortunately it's not my University, it's Imperial College. Well, I guess it's less distance for a journalist to travel for starters. Plus they have results, while we only just opened (although we do have some very, very nice results already, but I'm not saying what they are until they're published)

Digs at journos apart, it is a good look at the sort of things that scientists can do, why we can do them now and couldn't before, and why it is important. Higher efficiency boilers are a good environmental thing after all, even before you get to the point that pure hydrogen fuel boilers produce no carbon emissions.

The electron microscope comes into it as to get these boilers to work needs lower temperatures, to get the lower working temperatures needs more understanding of the surface of the ceramic material, and to really do that they need to look at the atoms. Which you can if you have a very nice new transmission electron microscope.

They've also got their own spin-off company, Ceres Power - playing on the environmental aspect, I guess, as Ceres was the Roman goddess of agriculture. I'm guessing they had a good announcement of something last month, as their share price jumped up significantly in June, possibly connected to the Daily Telegraph's shares column listing in their green portfolio (the month would have started particularly well for chief science officer Professor Nigel Brandon, as he also got his Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Award that week)