Sticky Fingers: Changing Old Noise to New Data in the Course of Scientific Discovery

“I suppose you won’t be able to find one of your famous Clues on the thing?”

“Shouldn’t think so, sir. Not with all these fingerprints on it.”

Terry Pratchett, “Feet of Clay”

Captured in Pratchett’s satirical writing here is a key concept underpinning the advancement of science: In recognising the deficiencies of our understanding, we identify pathways to more fundamental, deeper insight.

A wonderful example of this can be found in the practical science of geochronology – our ability to directly measure the age of Earth materials in the millions and even billions of years, and put a timescale to the grinding wheels of geological process.

This field of science is itself only a little over a hundred years old, with its genesis probably traceable most directly to the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford – one of the great figures of 19th and early 20th century physics. Scientists don’t often ascend to the pantheon of cultural heroes, so the fact that Rutherford’s distinguished portrait graces the $50 note of his country of birth is probably as effective a mark as any of the degree to which he bestrode the world stage, and the respect in which he is still held.

With his finger on the scientific pulse of the Edwardian age – and in particular the atomic theory at the heart of his own cutting-edge research – Rutherford was quick to appreciate the significance of the new phenomenon of radioactivity discovered by his contemporaries Marie and Pierre Curie. In the words of the great man himself:

“The helium observed in the radioactive minerals is almost certainly due to its production from the radium and other radioactive substances contained therein. If the rate of production of helium from known weights of the different radioelements were experimentally known, it should thus be possible to determine the interval required for the production of the amount of helium observed in radioactive minerals, or, in other words, to determine the age of the mineral.”

Ernest Rutherford – Silliman Lectures at Yale, 1905

With those words, a scientific revolution began.

Rutherford quickly set to work encouraging collaborators in the fields of chemistry, physics, and geology to put that principle into practice, but it didn’t take long for the community to recognise that his original elegant concept wasn’t going to be the simple path to greater knowledge that they had hoped for. The problem was that helium – the simple, easily extracted product of radioactive alpha decay – wasn’t fully retained in the mineral structures they were testing. In the words of John Strutt, one of the key figures in this early research:

[helium ages provide only] “minimum values, because helium leaks out from the mineral, to what extent it is impossible to say.”

R. J. Strutt (1910), Proceedings of the Royal Society of London

Some process – unknown at the time – was allowing the helium to escape from the crystals. Like a water clock with a leak in it then, there was no true fundamental way to calculate age from the system.

The key to our story here is that the contemporary paradigm to which these scientists were working was that the only age that mattered was the time at which a sample crystallised – nothing else entered their world view. When helium dating returned values that were clearly far too young and inconsistent to reflect such formation ages, the method was consequently abandoned, with the scientific community pursuing other isotopic systems – notably the pairing of uranium isotopes with their ultimate stable decay product of lead – as the pathway to temporal understanding of Earth evolution.

90 years later at the turn of the 21st century though, helium dating was back on the scene and a hot property (quite literally, as it turns out – but more of that later) in the field of geochronology – and it remains so right up to the present day. Why? Have we just forgotten the lessons of the past?

To understand the answer to that question, you need to appreciate that an isotopic ‘age’ is fundamentally just a ratio of chemical species – namely the abundance of a radioactive parent isotope – the ticking clock of the system – and the product of its decay within your sample. Ultimately, this is just a number – nothing more or less…unless you have a physical event you can relate that number to. If I toss you a rock and say “this rock is 7 years old” – what does that mean? Is it 7 years since the rock crystallised? 7 years since it was knocked from a large boulder upstream? That it has spent 7 years tumbling back and forth in the surf? 7 years lying on the beach? All these ‘ages’ might have meaning – telling us something interesting about the history of this particular sample – but unless you know which one I mean, the manifold possibilities obscure the potential insight.

To address this confusion from the perspective of helium, let’s drill down from the scale of rocks and hammers to the sub-microscopic world of a crystal lattice. The comforting solidity and discrete character of the everyday is replaced by a dynamic constellation of atomic structures held in place by overlapping and interfering clouds of electrons and opposing forces – a seething maelstrom of movement and change. As those particles spin and vibrate, the force balances governing their interactions rise and fall, bonds parting and re-forming in the blink of a conceptual eye as their stability waxes and wanes. Take a moment to watch this video clip from Dr Erik Laegsgaard at Aarhus University.

Atomic Diffusion

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Scanning Tunneling Microscope imagery of atomic-scale diffusion in titanium dioxide, created by Dr Erik Laegsgaard, Aarhus University. Recorded at 300 degrees Kelvin, and at 8.6 seconds/frame.

Each of those glowing orange orbs is actually an atom of oxygen resolved by advanced scanning tunnelling microscopy of a sample of titanium dioxide. To my thinking, this movie is mind blowing – this is not a cartoon, or a fancy computer model – this is an actual resolved record of real individual atoms, in solid material, at room temperature. Reflect for a moment on just how we see those atoms behave as the movie advances through time. Rather than locked in place like mosaic tiles set in mortar, they skitter back and forth – momentarily held in the embrace of one bond, but then twisting away across the crystalline dance floor to some new partnership. The movement is random and unpredictable – particles as likely to jump one way as any other.

This atomic diffusion is what was responsible for Strutt’s anomalous ‘leakage’. Although the movements are individually random, if you’re building up an increased concentration of something (as with the helium produced by alpha decay in the example of our geochronometer), then you’re statistically more likely to have those random movements going out of the radioactive crystal structure than into it. It follows that this diffusion will prevent the build up of your daughter product (helium), keeping the isotopic age stuck stubbornly at zero.

So how then do we stop diffusion happening and allow our ticking clocks to record time? How do we set the geological stopwatch running? The simple answer is temperature – you cool things down. The rate at which diffusion occurs is proportional to temperature raised to an exponential power. In essence, this means that even a small change in temperature leads to a very large change in diffusivity, and the transition from rapid diffusion – so rapid that all the daughter product produced by radioactive decay is lost – to negligible diffusion where all that daughter product is retained – occurs across a very narrow temperature range.

Rather than the aberrant or spoiled data Strutt took them to be then, helium ages, once we understand this process and calibrate its thermal sensitivity, become sensitive records of the temperature change associated with dynamic geological history.

How does this help us?

When Gil Grissom finds a gun at the scene of a murder in CSI (yes, I know Grissom left the show after series 9, but I always thought he had excellent style as an on-screen scientist, and geologically speaking, his tenure is pretty much still within error of the present), his first thought isn’t “I must find out how old this gun is” – no – there are far more dynamic aspects of the weapon’s history he would like to see resolved. When was it bought? How long ago was it fired? Who pulled the trigger?

Similarly, if we focus purely on the crystallisation age of our samples, as Strutt, Rutherford, and their contemporaries were, there are many potential insights we will miss.

When were our samples last thrust beneath the crushing weight of an uplifting mountain range? When did they last feel the rush of superheated steam carrying rich mineral endowment through subterranean fluid conduits, or the frictional warmth induced by an active fault boundary radiating through the crust? When did erosion wear away its weighty overburden to exhume our rock from the hot interior of the Earth? With the thermal ages provided by helium dating and its correlatives, these dynamic episodes come within our grasp.

What was simply noise becomes, when we understand and can translate its origin, a sensitive new record of dynamic geological processes.

Unlike Pratchett’s protagonists, our FBI database is ready, and the fingerprints of geological systems are waiting to reveal themselves to our careful detective work.

Gold in the Custard – Hidden Elephants and the Art of Mineral Exploration

Why do elephants paint their feet yellow?

So they can hide upside down in the custard.

Although I confess a fondness for such absurdist humour, even I have to admit that this joke is pretty much pitched at a level such that only someone under the age of six could truly enjoy it for its comedic value. If you will indulge me though, it does possess a kind of simple beauty that can serve to illustrate a useful concept for us. The image of someone failing to recognize an elephant in their custard is both vivid, and clearly ludicrous – painted feet or not. But hold on there a second – let’s pursue that particular surrealist idea down the rabbit hole to see how deep it goes. What if, perchance, you’d been warned about those devious pachyderms and their propensity for hiding on the dessert cart, and you were so busy checking for them that you were trampled to death by a wildebeest that had camouflaged itself behind the rhubarb?

Consider the process of mineral exploration. There are very few parts of the world where you can genuinely be the first person to explore the landscape and assess its potential mineral endowment. Others have almost invariably been there before you, evaluated the economic potential of the geology, and moved on. The art of exploration then is to find things that others have overlooked – or perhaps not even known how to look for. To look at the landscape in a different way.

The discovery of the rich Telfer mine in northern Australia presents a salient example here.

Telfer’s mineral endowment is hosted in ancient sediments folded into a series of elongated domes, the strata dipping away in all directions. Structures like this are sometimes referred to as dolphin-backs for their resemblance to one of our cetacean friends breaking the surface of the water – an apt metaphor here given the whale-like size of the mineral resource. Although also host to significant copper and appreciable silver, it’s gold for which Telfer is best known – and in respect of that commodity the deposit is truly world class, with around 10 million ounces of gold produced to date and another 20 million in the ground in the currently defined resource. Surely a jewel in any portfolio, and one of the most productive mines in Australia throughout the past 25 years.

Aerial oblique view of the Telfer Dome in 1976, prior to the start of major excavations of the deposit. Image is drawn from the archives of Newcrest Mining Limited, and was published in Ferguson et al. (2005) – ‘Mineral Occurrences and Exploration Potential of the Paterson Area’ – Report 97 of the GSWA.

By official reckoning though, at least three resource companies evaluated the Telfer deposit and walked away before Newmont Australia made the call and pegged it. How could they have missed this opportunity?

Therein lies the tale.

As with many major finds from the glory days of trail-blazing back country prospectors, the details of Telfer’s discovery have always been a little murky, and remain vigorously argued in some quarters up to the present day. What is not in debate, however, is that the first non-indigenous explorer to recognise the dome and consider its mineral potential was a Frenchman named Jean-Paul Turcaud, back in 1971.

Turcaud, had he but realised, was probably nine tenths of the way to what surely would have been a discovery of epic scale for an independent prospector, and rendered him an Australian legend, perhaps even a fitting subject for a heroic movie. Hollywood producers would have loved the story of a pioneering iconoclast who single-handedly opened up a whole new mineral province. Of course, they would have tried to make the main character American, and given him a wise-cracking but essentially lovable sidekick – but if the Turcaud of our alternate reality – his ‘Sliding Doors’ moment having gone the other way – balked at these narrative improvements, he could just have financed the film himself.

Turcaud recognised the spectacular folded form of Telfer’s dome structures, and appreciated the potential influence of such geological architecture on the concentration of ore minerals. He sampled the gossans – weathered remnants of mineralised veins – that ringed the amphitheatre of the main dome – including the spectacular 10m thick horizon that later became the economic heart of the Telfer mine – and then he took his observations (and his samples) to the major mining companies acting in Australia at the time, a couple of whom – Western Mining Corporation and Anglo American – were interested enough to come up into the remote country, inland from Port Hedland in the far north of Western Australia, with the field-hardened Frenchman and look over the ground for themselves.

But they all passed on the opportunity. They literally walked the ground over one of the largest gold deposits ever discovered – a deposit already broken open by erosion and exposed at the surface like an earthworm popping up at a convention of hungry sparrows. They sampled the major ore-bearing horizons, had them assayed for their mineral content…and then walked away saying “not for me thanks Jean-Paul”. Why?

Because they forgot about the possibility of the wildebeest in the rhubarb.

Neither Turcaud nor – perhaps more indictably – the corporate geologists he took to the prospect, checked their samples for gold. Seriously.

Turcaud viewed the rich potential of the ground at Telfer with blinkers on, intellectually weighed down by a restrictive exploration model focused around base metals – copper, nickel, zinc, lead – the mineral darlings of the age, driving an exploration boom in Australia in the early 1970s. He was assuredly an excellent prospector – rugged, driven, and with enough understanding to appreciate the potential of good ground when he saw it. But he wasn’t a scientist, and lacked the curiosity and depth of knowledge that might have allowed him to make a leap of insight and realise that he was, quite literally, standing on a gold mine.

To be charitable, this might not be such an obvious failure as it seems at first viewing. Although there is significant coarse gold in the oxidised surface layers of the deposit, most of the gold at Telfer is so fine grained as to be invisible to the naked eye, and locked up inside sulphide minerals – principally pyrite. A real trick for young players then – the gold is IN the fools gold.

Never the less, it does represent an epic failure of imagination – pretty much the geological equivalent of checking your boots for scorpions and then being bitten on the toe by a red back spider. Any exploration geologist worth their salt could have picked up the presence of the coarse gold in 10 minutes by panning the streams dissecting the dome. And should have done if they had even contemplated the possibility.

So just how much gold was there?

Well, the question isn’t quite as simple as that – it’s not just a case arriving in the Great Sandy Desert with an armoured car and loading it up with bullion. Mining is an industrial process – in both its scale and its essential form. First and foremost, you need the capability of moving massive quantities of rock. Even at the appreciable grades touching 10g of gold per tonne they were taking off at Telfer in the first year of operations, you’re still talking about almost 3 tonnes of rock for every ounce of gold – and that’s just the ore. On top of that there’s all the overburden you need to strip off to get to that paydirt. So you’re talking about putting in serious infrastructure – roads or rail lines to move material and people in and out, accommodation for a workforce, water – and waste water treatment facilities – crushing plants and treatment mills to extract the minerals, and tailings dams to hold the processing waste.

When the money men who make such decisions green-light the massive investment spend on this kind of a project, it’s usually based on some serious forward planning around recovering costs and moving into nett profitability over the course of many years to decades. Once they broke ground at Telfer, Newmont Australia made back their capital costs within 10 months…at a gold price averaging around $US90 per ounce. Yes, there’s not a zero missing there. Looking from the perspective of gold currently fetching somewhere north of $US1600 an ounce, you get an idea of just what a rich prize this deposit was.

We’re not done yet though – the true beauty of Telfer as a cautionary tale is that it also provides us with an act 2 – an example of scientific exploration done the right way.

Having located their whale, Newmont pursued the logical follow up questions with vigour – where has all this gold come from? And how do we find some more?

One of the earliest major targets they identified was a granite body just beneath the surface, a few km to the south of Telfer. Gold mineralisation is commonly associated with intrusive rocks in one way or another, so the recognition of this granite in their geophysical surveys piqued the interest of the company’s exploration team – could this be the goose that had laid Telfer’s golden egg?

Well, no, unfortunately that particular idea didn’t work out. Not only is the granite very low in contained gold – too low to produce a significant ore deposit – it is also younger than the mineralised veins at Telfer, so there is no way it could have been involved in their development.

The morally uplifting kick to the parable though is that when they came up empty on their gold model, Newmont didn’t just pack up their drill stems and go home. No – they scanned the horizon to see what other beasts could be lurking on the dessert table, assaying their samples for a broad range of elements that might be carried by granitic magma. And lo and behold, it turned out they had drilled into one of the world’s largest tungsten deposits – a deposit now looking all the more strategically attractive for being one of the few major sources of this industrially important element outside Chinese control.

Turns out that even when you’re absolutely sure there are no scorpions in your boots, it might just pay to give them an extra shake.

Statement of interest – My position at the University of Western Australia is funded by a research contract with Newcrest Mining Limited, the current owners of the Telfer deposit.

Rosetta Stones and Rugged Men

The Rosetta Stone – prize exhibit of the British Museum…and extended scientific metaphor.

There are all kinds of arguments to be made about the imperial history that saw Britain amass the huge treasure trove housed in the British Museum, and whether ‘finders keepers’ should actually be a valid point of international law. Unarguably though, this is one of the most glorious and inspiring concentrations of culturally significant historical artifacts in the world. And amongst all this splendour, the most visited antiquity is not some golden treasure or grand architectural marvel – but a relatively humble slab of rock – the Rosetta Stone.

When I first visited the museum (the stone has been behind glass since 2000 – as my teenage daughter would say, “you do the math”) this artifact was tantalisingly exposed to the world, lying in a steel cradle where I could have reached out to gently touch its ancient surface – had I dared risk that most severe of British reprimands, a stern and indignant tutting from an aging volunteer guide.

The stone itself is a slab of fairly fine grained dark granodiorite, a broken fragment of a previously larger tablet inscribed with a decree issued on behalf of Ptolemy V in 196 BC, commemorating his ascension to the Egyptian throne and proclaiming his divinity. Both the simple elegance of the stone and the content of the inscription though are pretty much run-of-the-mill absolute ruler of the ancient world stuff – they certainly don’t explain why this artifact is so inspirational and universally recognised (and consequently – human nature being what it is – was also the subject of a long running trademark dispute – recently settled – between Google and the software company Rosetta Stone Ltd).

No. The Rosetta Stone has entered our lexicon as the ultimate cypher – the key to breaking the deepest of codes – reviving a dead language.

The Ancient Egyptians were a famously literate society. We’re not talking the mass literacy of the modern world of course, with only around 1% of the population – at a generous estimate – able to read and write. This is a rate put to shame by even modern laggard states like Burkina Faso, where literacy extends to 21.8% of the population – the lowest rate in the world by current UN reckoning. Egypt’s 1% though stand out through the mists of history for having produced, among other milestones in the development of civilization, one of the earliest true traditions of narrative literature, recorded in an array of letters, poems, and commemorative autobiographical texts celebrating the careers of prominent officials. Above and beyond these temple walls and epic monumental writings of storied fame though, the Egyptians left a record of the day to day function of their highly ordered society – of harvests and recipes, contracts and legal disputes – on papyri and tablets that, crucially, have stood up to the ravages of time in the hot dry climate of the Nile valley and its surrounding deserts to preserve a historical record unique in its depth and completeness.

The important element for our story though is that when first re-discovered by the explorers and enquirers of an enlightened Europe intent on understanding and controlling (and returning to our opening discussion of the British Museum, often exporting) the mysteries of the world, this treasured store of information was locked away – hidden, denied to the hopeful scholars – behind the apparently impenetrable barrier of lost language – with understanding of both hieroglyphic (the famed pictographic writing of Pharonic tombs and Hollywood blockbusters) and the simpler demotic version of Ancient Egyptian erased by the shifting sands of time.

Where the Rosetta Stone enters the picture is that it’s pedestrian message of glory and Ptolemaic divine rule is inscribed not once, but three times in different languages – those two lost Egyptian scripts, and, crucially, the very much alive (at least for upper class educated Europeans who had been to the right schools) ancient Greek – for which we can thank the fact that the Ptolemaic dynasty was actually founded by Macedonian general Ptolemy Soter in the carve-up of Alexander the Great’s empire in 323BC. Even in its broken state (none of the three versions of the inscription is complete), this combination provided a starter’s kit for the eventual translation of the previously lost Egyptian languages. The Rosetta Stone, in essence, provided a single example of spectacular clarity that made sense of a much larger array of other information, unlocking that vast catalogue of previously indecipherable records.

The concept of a cypher along these lines – an example of disproportionate significance and worth – is not uncommon in observational science. We often look to sites and specimens where relationships or natural processes seem expressed with unusual clarity or simplicity in order to illustrate our ideas or to use as the basis of discussion.

This is not a new idea – indeed, it’s as old as the science of Geology itself. James Hutton – the 18th century Scottish polymath who surely boasts a claim as strong as any to be the intellectual father of my field of work – didn’t try to explain his theories on the dynamics of the world by picking up the nearest pebble. On the contrary – he was renowned for taking friends and dignitaries on field trips to view exceptional exposures he had located that seemed to present particularly clear examples of the phenomena he was discussing. His Rosetta Stones.

Even today, we look to such unusual examples where the complexity and vagaries of natural history seem momentarily brushed aside to reveal unambiguous evidence of a physical process in action. If I had a dollar for every grant proposal I’ve been asked to review that promised one area or another would represent an ‘ideal natural laboratory’ in which to investigate some geological phenomenon…well, it might not allow me to retire comfortably to the south of France, but I could probably endow a small academic prize – perhaps in original science writing avoiding the use of meaningless and hackneyed phrases.

The corollary to the importance of such examples though is the critical question – where should we look for our Rosetta Stones? To give away the ending here, the smart money is on “anywhere and everywhere”…but the interesting thing from my point of view as an educator is that this measured insight is often very difficult to impart. Rather, there is a persistent belief that the importance of an outcrop is (or at least, with a plaintive appeal to cosmic justice, should be) in inverse proportion to the ease with which it can be accessed.

Release a group of students into the wild on a mapping exercise – especially, it should be said, young male students, and their first reaction usually isn’t to sit down and plan an efficient programme of work. It’s to decamp to the highest, most rugged, least accessible area of the field.

At the heart of this challenge lies some pretty fundamental human psychology. We love stories – and whatever we might tell ourselves, we spend much of our lives with an ear half tuned to an internal narrative of how our actions stack up. “I had to ford the river in spate, vanquish the dragon, then climb to the highest room in the tallest tower” is just more appealing than “well, I just poked about under the bush and there it was.”

Which leads me to the rugged man maxim – an empirical law derived from observation of generations of young Earth Science students in action. In its purest form, this represents a belief that the most important outcrop in a district – the most informative, the most significant to unravelling the ambiguous twists and turns of geological history – will be found at its pole of inaccessibility: the hardest point to reach. There is an important coda to this as well – to the effect that If possible, it should also be raining when you discover it.

Besides giving rise to a host of sore and sun-burnt students though, does the Rugged Man Maxim stack up when it comes to results? All those trips I took to Andalucian Accident and Emergency departments trying to help testosterone-fuelled young men explain in broken Spanish just where the thorns were lodged – were they actually associated with greater understanding on the part of the bandaged apprentice geologists, and higher marks in their mapping projects?

I think we all already know the answer to that question.

Certainly, physically and logistically challenging fieldwork can produce results of great significance and enrich our understanding of fundamental questions. But the importance of a locality does not derive from its accessibility or spectacular grandeur – it is incidental to it.

The Burgess Shale was discovered in 1909 by paleontologist Charles Dolittle Walcott in a remote mountain pass high in the Canadian Rockies. As well as giving Walcott and later workers an excuse to spend summers working far from the madding crowd in as jaw-droppingly spectacular a wilderness setting as you could hope to find, the exquisitely preserved 505 million year old fossils extracted from the shale provided a new window on life in the ancient Cambrian oceans – a Rosetta Stone that changed and enhanced our understanding of a host of other, less complete and more poorly preserved fossil fauna.

At the other end of the scale, you can get to the La Brea Tar Pits in urban Los Angeles on the Metro Rail – but that doesn’t stop the Pleistocene fossil fauna preserved in the tar being any less inspiring and scientifically significant in its own way, as the best known and most exquisitely preserved record of the extinct mammalian megafauna of North America.

Neither methodical and thorough investigation nor boundless investment are guarantees of significant discovery, and equally, sometimes it really is simply enough to be in the right place at the right time – as in 1928 when William P. “Punch” Jones and his father were playing horseshoes in Peterstown, West Virginia, and happened to turn up a 34.48 carat alluvial diamond, the largest such gem found in the United States to date.

Fundamentally, there is no justice in the layout of the world and its scientific treasures. The key exposure that will lay clear the mysteries of a study area may well sit under a poisonous thorn bush atop the windswept peak of the highest mountain in the district. But it’s just as likely to be in a carpark next to an excellent little cafe where you can enjoy an iced coffee and a gourmet pie after you’ve knocked it off.

And at the end of the day, it’s not the detail of the story that counts – it’s how you tell it.

Old Men and the Sea – the curious persistence of willful disbelief in Anthropogenic Climate Change

Imagine yourself, for a moment, adrift in a storm-tossed wooden lifeboat. Yours is the only vessel in sight – the only refuge in the heaving sea stretching to the horizon all around you. With a sinking heart – rightly concerned by the potential consequences – you realise the water level in the bottom of the boat is rising. You have nowhere else to go.

Now, the environment in which you find yourself may well be the source of this water – the persistent rain, the sea spray washing over the sides, perhaps even marine bivalve Teredo navalis – shipworms, as they were known in the days of grand wooden ships plying the seven seas – chewing their way through the hull of your fragile boat. That doesn’t mean that the signal fire you lit in the stern might not also be causing a leak. It’s not like you have a leakage budget to work within – “it’s okay, I’m going to take on a gallon of water an hour, so I can shave some more wood out of the sides and stoke the fire, and the rain will ease up to compensate”. Aware that fire is known to consume wood, and that, as my boat is made of wood, I could reasonably infer that my cheery blaze might be a factor – and one over which I had control, the prudent thing to do until I was pretty darned sure of things would be to douse it.

Of course, despite my obvious and melodramatic allegory here, we’re not really talking about drifting lifeboats. Rather, in a summer in which the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has found it necessary to add new colours to the temperature scale on their national synoptic charts, changing climate is probably a fair topic for engaged conversation.

Although I’m a professional scientist, and try to keep myself pretty well informed, I’m under no illusion that I can offer a fair and valid critique of understanding in this area. If that’s what you’re after, I heartily suggest you check out the US Global Change Research Program (www.global change.gov). Me? I’ll put my hand up right now and tell you I don’t fully understand the physics of greenhouse warming, the consequences of changing landscape albedo to a solar energy budget, the details of orbital precession, or the design and function of supercomputer models of climate sensitivity. Unlike a number of (usually self nominated) commentators on climate science though, my philosophy in these circumstances is not to go ahead and shoot my mouth off anyway – at least not without a few glasses of good wine inside me – so this is not principally an essay about the rights and wrongs of understanding on anthropogenic climate change.

Instead I want to talk about the (to me, anyway) curious fact that vested interests and enthusiastic amateurs from all walks of life – politicians, newspaper columnists, school teachers, Jeremy Clarkson – seem possessed of an unshakeable belief that their understanding of climate change and its causes should be given equal weight to, say, Roger Revelle, or the IPCC.

I’m not talking here about debate over how we, individually and as a society, should respond to climate change – what steps we should take, how the cost should be borne. Here opinion and debate clearly should be entertained as we move towards a social contract. But the facts of the matter, the understanding of physical phenomena, does not submit to willpower or popularity. You don’t get to vote by SMS on whether anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are a driver of dangerous levels of climatic warming or just a combination of snuggly global duvet and healthy plant food.

By way of analogy to the problem here – diesel has a greater energy content than unleaded petrol. I know that’s true because I read it on the internet. Logically then, if I start putting diesel into my car, it will be more powerful and go further on a tank. Right?

The fact that I used the word logically probably tells you everything you need to know about why it’s important that I listen to my mechanic rather than trying to fix my car myself.

Actually that’s probably a good metaphor to pursue. Think about it – if this was your car we were talking about (and I might venture here that the climatic system of our entire planet might be a bit more important than that – even if you do wash yours more often than I manage and rotate the tires every 6 months) I doubt you’d be up for self diagnosis – or even taking the advice of Alan Jones – when your engine started knocking. No. I suspect that, like me, you would far rather trust the judgement and experience of auto mechanics who have trained for years and devoted themselves professionally to the diagnosis and correction of engine problems. Even if you did roll up to the workshop door with a worrying knot in your stomach over what they might find under the hood, and just how eye-wateringly expensive it might be to fix.

Yes, some mechanics are better than others, and there may even be shonky ones out there that don’t know what they’re doing, or worse, who are criminally intent on defrauding you by exaggerating or inventing problems. If you do your research though, and find out who other mechanics respect and what they think of each other’s work, I’m pretty confident you could probably do a good job of picking the right person to deal with any engine trouble you might have.

The problem, in its essence, is that opinion is a complex and chimeric beast. It covers a spectrum from tastes or preferences, through views on issues of common concern – the ethical and political questions of the day, to views grounded in technical expertise – and here I’d include legal or scientific opinions. The common thread is that all these areas admit a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty – but not all are equal.

You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. It would be ludicrous for me to tell you that you were wrong to prefer sticky date pudding to cheesecake. Where this issue starts to go off the rails though is that we sometimes take opinions of the second (ethical) and even the third (expertise-based) sort to be unarguable in the same way such questions of taste are.

The silly – even embarrassing – thing here, at least for somebody coming from a Western philosophical tradition, is that Plato pretty much had this distinction sewn up 2400 years ago.

Today though all too often – whether by design or, I suspect usually more likely, ignorance, we seem to have forgotten this lesson.

Bob Brown, former leader of the Australian Greens and Federal Senator, argued long and vociferously against nuclear power throughout his career, despite not being a nuclear physicist. All well and good – but Meryl Dorey – leader of the Australian Vaccination Network (don’t be fooled by the name – this is a group vehemently opposed to childhood vaccination in all its forms) has used Brown’s record to argue that she should, in a similar vein, be listened to in regards to the healthcare of our children, despite having no medical qualifications of any stripe. The crucial difference between the two is that Dr Brown never represented himself as an authority on the physics of nuclear fission. He was always, entirely appropriately, commenting on policy responses to science, not the underlying scientific understanding. Dorey, in contrast, essentially tries to represent that her views should factor in debate regarding the biomechanics of vaccination and immune response itself – that her personal biases should be weighted equally to expert and scientifically validated opinion.

So – back to climate change – let’s take on board Plato’s distinction for a minute and ignore the opinions of the Nick Minchins and Lord Moncktons of the world. What do professional climate scientists – those experts who have devoted themselves to understanding the detailed interactions of climatic systems and earned the respect of their critical peers – understand to be happening to our climate?

First and foremost, our planet is warming up. Using any of a wide range of indicators (ocean heat content, sea surface temperatures, sea level, temperatures in the lower and middle troposphere, the rates at which glaciers and ice sheets are melting), the overall temperature of the Earth and the corresponding energy in our climate system are increasing.

According to a study recently published by a team of scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, there are now on average five times as many months with record-breaking high temperatures at measured locations worldwide as could be expected without significant and ongoing warming occurring. In parts of Europe, Africa and southern Asia, the figures are even worse – with instances of record-setting monthly temperatures exceeding statistical expectation by a factor of ten.

While there are a number of influences on the climate system, such as changing levels of solar radiation and abundance of atmospheric aerosols, independent climate researchers also almost universally conclude that this warming has been produced dominantly by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with a significant proportion of this emitted by human activities.

Now remember, that’s not me saying this – these are the expert opinions of the big beasts at the climate science waterhole with the expertise and experience to give their opinions real weight. These are the people we should be listening to.

In a recent essay on Science Communication (‘Three Monkeys, Ten Minutes: Scientists and the Importance of Communication Skills’ – WordPress, 18 October, 2012), I used the metaphor of taking sides in a scientific debate you don’t understand being like weighing in to an argument in a language you don’t speak – a Frenchman and a German speaking in Spanish, let’s say – on the basis of liking one participant’s accent more than the other. In the field of climate change, the position of someone who would deny the reality of anthropogenic warming is even more tenuous, because as the debate stands its like 97% of the Spanish speakers in the room (everyone except Pierre’s mother and the crazy old guy whose brother was killed in the second world war and hates all Germans with an unquenchable rage) agree that our French friend is wrong-headed and it’s Heidi we should listen to…but still there are people willing to back up the Frenchman with an unthinking “yeah, what he said” against all comers.

To come full circle to our fragile boat alone on the stormy seas – although the consequences of putting out my fire if it wasn’t reducing my vessel’s seaworthiness might be unpleasant (I’d be wet and cold – and frightened, alone in the vast empty expanse of the ocean), the consequences of not taking action if my hypothesis ultimately proved correct would be much, much worse.

More importantly, although I would really like to know exactly where the water was coming from and which source was the most important (sorry, scientific curiosity has me in its thrall), my first reaction wouldn’t be to set up an interim enquiry and design some experiments. No. Me? I’d start bailing.

Leading Horses to Water

The embrace of remote delivery and engagement is held to offer a revolutionary opportunity in higher education. This vision is not a new one, however, with the winds of pedagogical change heralded since the era of chat rooms and dial up modems – management guru Peter Drucker famously writing in 1997 that:

“[T]hirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It’s as large a change as when we first got the printed book.”

Well, “So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it…” – so said (or more accurately, sang) Kermit the Frog in 1979’s ‘The Muppet Movie’ – and as students of the great green sage will be well aware, the next line is “I know they’re wrong, wait and see.”

So is online learning really the way of the future? A paradigm shift in the delivery of teaching that will allow instruction and educational inclusion of the world’s masses with greater efficiency and ever decreasing cost? Or is the digital education revolution, like Kermit’s rainbow, a mere illusion – a destination that will ever recede from us as we seek to approach it? Fundamentally, we’re halfway through Drucker’s 30 year revolution now, and I don’t see anyone tearing down statues of Johannes Guttenberg (to replace them with what, I wonder? A bronze casting of a 30 year old IBM 286?) just yet.

My own engagement with online educational tools stretches back to the early years of the 21st century soon after I arrived on the scene as a newly minted, enthusiastic lecturer determined to change the world and enrich the intellectual life of generations of engaged and grateful young students.

In those days, whiteboards, chalkboards, and slide and overhead projectors (anyone under the age of 30, go ask your parents about that one) were the tools of the trade, but Al Gore had been busily inventing the internet for a while, and tech-savvy early adopters were exploring its potential in all manner of fields.

As I immersed myself in my first year of classes, I soon found keen young students asking – with all the bright eyed intensity of true believers fresh from Scientology boot camp – whether notes would be made available online. Clearly, the thinking ran, If only they could read the notes on the internet, everything would be alright and knowledge and understanding would pass directly into their cerebral cortices and become part of their being.

Young, innovative, and eager (not to say desperate) to please as I was, I took up the challenge and worked to create learning materials to support my courses, doubling my workload to lay out packages of notes, study guides, and additional readings.

Students expressed their gratitude, colleagues slapped me on the back, line managers signed off on my probationary progress reports and labelled me an innovator. And then along came integrated online learning platforms – and suddenly my eyes were opened.

Unlike traditional resource provision approaches (reading lists, tutorial guides, reserved library materials and the like) student use of resources on most dedicated online learning platforms (or Virtual Learning Environments – VLE – as they’ve become known more recently) can be immediately and directly monitored at an individual level – meaning I could see exactly who was accessing the material, and when. What this brought home to me was that for all their professed desire for more support (and the time invested by me as tutor in preparing material), few students (very few) actually used the support opportunities when they were made available to them.

With the benefit of hindsight, this is no different in its fundamentals to classmates from my own University days who would invest themselves in compiling complete lecture notes – begging, borrowing, and in a few (with the distance of years, rather amusing) cases, stealing to cover the gaps in their trusty ring binders resulting from illness, employment commitments, or benders in the local beer garden – and then never look at them again. This in itself though is probably a truth we would do well to put at the forefront of any discussion of education – the techniques may change, but the fundamental nature of students does not.

Initially I was a bit depressed by this realisastion. All that work. All my good intentions. I’d built my learning outpost, General Store, Saloon, hitching posts and all – and all I had to show for it was a few tumbleweeds blowing down Main Street.

It’s worth noting at this point that geniuses do not necessarily make great educators. If you can immediately grasp the crux of a problem and see the solution in your mind, guiding someone else through the process of building understanding can be a great challenge.

Fortunately I’m not weighed down by the burden of genius. I work hard to understand the derivation and logic of the subjects I teach, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to communicate that vision to others. As my initial disappointment receded, the clouds parted to reveal a beam of revelation – here, in this direct real-time tracking of student engagement, was a beautiful metric by which to gauge my success as a teacher.

What I had done in crafting my learning support materials to my own inner vision clearly wasn’t working for my students. If they had all thought like me and engaged with materials in the same way, this approach would have been great – but the students were not little carbon copies of me (a fact that I’m sure many of them would thank the fates for if they cared to contemplate the point) – each having their own motivations and approaches to learning.

So how to improve the situation? Given the diversity of approaches to learning materials among the student population, I saw two potential avenues – either I could take a page out of Duke Orsino’s play book in Twelfth Night and make my doublet of changeable taffeta by trying to be all things to all people, or I could try to shape student engagement and encourage a greater proportion of the class to pursue an active model of learning that would have them use the materials I provided in a more productive way.

To this latter end, I set about developing a series of online self testing modules to go along with the course materials I had prepared – the key element of which was the inclusion of questions that couldn’t be answered without specific readings and exercises having been completed. A simple lesson perhaps, but an important step for a lot of students; just turning up to class will get you so far, but engaging with the support materials will provide a different level of understanding. One that will be assessed. Yes, more work for me as teacher. Again. But with the attraction this time that rather than just being offered one more source of passive information to ignore, the students were encouraged to confront expectations of independent work and active learning – with my hope as an educator being that something of this would carry over to the more traditional aspects of the academic programme.

Nice virtuous circle of logic – so did it succeed? Yes, okay, I admit to the bias of a proud parent watching over how my little creation worked out there in the real world of manifold distractions and student inertia – but the metrics looked pretty good right from the start, with student use of my online resources increased dramatically compared to previous years. Qualitatively too, from my perspective the ethic of interactive and independent learning engendered seemed to carry over into the contact hours in the classroom, with greater attendance, more questioning of lecture material, and – joy of joys – even conversations with students about wider issues and applications of the concepts we were covering. For any educator, that is a powerful and reinforcing payoff. And at the end of the course, yes, student exam marks increased significantly too.

It was by no means a revolutionary breakthrough, I’m sure – but it was enough to make a difference.

So where does this take us in relation to the impact of online education?

Ultimately, tools are merely a means to an end, and need a skilled practitioner to wield them and a dedicated mind to plan their application. You need look no farther than Cecilia Gimenez’s globally derided fresco ‘restoration’ in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in Borja, Spain, to appreciate the undeniable truth that the same tool that in one hand can create a masterpiece might in another produce nothing more than a crude caricature. Same subject, same setting, same intention – but Elías García Martínez’s original Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) became, under Gimenez’s brush, what Spanish commentators jokingly renamed Ecce Mono (Behold the Monkey).

Online learning does provide a powerful pedagogical tool that can change the relationship between educator and student. Using such online approaches though is no more likely in and of itself to improve educational outcomes than waving a paintbrush is to produce a masterwork.

Even magic bullets need someone to fire them in the right direction.

French String – Mathematics, Linguistics, and the Nature of Reality

“Daddy,” my eldest daughter asked me, some years ago now (at a time when Europe was but a short train ride away and a welcome escape from the grey winters of Surrey), “What’s the Spanish word for thank you?”

“Gracias.” I replied, pleased by her inquisitiveness “And denada means you’re welcome.”

Warming to the conversation, she went on “Oh. And what’s thank you in French?”

“Merci.”

“And what do they say for you’re welcome?”

I paused for a moment (but only, it must be said, a moment) reflecting on the fact that I had no idea how to express that concept – my ability with the French language extending little further than ordering coffee and croissants for breakfast – before telling her, with all my fatherly sincerity “The French have no phrase for that.”

Now yes, I admit it was a cheap knee-bend to Francophone stereotypes, and a ‘Dad joke’ to cover my linguistic ignorance…and it was probably inappropriate for me to let an impressionable child go on believing this for as long as I subsequently did.

But it does introduce an interesting and important concept – our ability to describe something has no bearing on its reality. Even if my statement were true and the French had, through some curious artifact of linguistic heritage, failed to develop a phrase capable of expressing gratitude, it would not change the fact that such feelings could – and do – exist. Language describes reality. It does not – outside of the most extreme hardline views of social constructivism – define it.

Mathematics too is essentially a language – a language, moreover, that we can use to describe the physical reality of the universe. Most of the time. As with the example of spoken language above though, the critical caveat is that however well mathematics describes physical behaviour, again, it does not define it.

Sir Phillip Bin, the fictional hero of Mark Evans’ radio comedy ‘Bleak Expectations’, muses wistfully on the days before Sir Isaac Newton ‘invented’ gravity, when people falling from great height would ‘simply drift gently and harmlessly to the ground’.

Such satirical diversions aside, Newtonian mechanics works pretty well in describing the interactions of macroscopic objects under the conditions of our everyday experience. But gravitational attraction between two bodies doesn’t fall off in proportion to the square of the distance between them because that’s the way the equation is written – rather, the equation seeks to empirically describe the behaviour that occurs.

As Einstein recognised in his theories of general and special relativity, under certain circumstances – far removed from the world of everyday experience – objects behave in ways that are incompatible with Newtonian physics. In formulating expressions to account for this relativistic behaviour, Einstein did not change the nature of the universe – he simply gave us a new form of language by which to describe the poetry of our existence.

Similarly, the remarkable duality of electrons – whereby they can be shown through physical experiment to possess the characteristics of both a continuous wave function and a discrete physical particle – is only a paradox in the context of the ways in which we have come to describe these sub-atomic features. Fundamentally, the electron is what it is, and if theories are unable to fully account for its behaviour, it is a reflection of the inadequacy of our mathematical approximations for reality, not proof of some cosmic trick set up by Penn and Teller to titillate their Vegas audience on the quantum scale.

Perhaps the most interesting example of this concept in action, however, is the search for an ultimate physical ‘theory of everything’. The properties of electromagnetism, strong nuclear and weak nuclear attraction, and gravity – the fundamental forces that define and control interactions of matter and energy throughout the universe – converge at high energy, and it is theorized that all four derive from a common underlying property. But just what this is remains a point of hard debate, as none of the individual equations that are so successful in describing the behaviour of each of these forces on the macroscopic level of the everyday can adequately cope with the conditions of this theoretical point of convergence.

This does not mean that there are somehow four separate overlapping layers making up the Universe that don’t quite fit together perfectly where they join, like some kind of badly put together set of existential DIY shelves. Rather, the theory runs that there is one reality, where all aspects of the physical behaviour that we observe in the universe must somehow derive from the fundamental character of matter and energy. The failure lies in the mathematical language in our possession – it’s not just that it’s tricky to calculate the results, standard mathematics is literally unable to describe reality under those conditions.

The ‘theory of everything’ that can account for the emergence and existence of these separate forces is one of the great challenges at the business end of modern physics where the big kids of theory get serious. Tackling this problem however requires not just a dab hand with a slide rule, but the creation – literally – of entirely new forms of mathematics, incorporating additional physical fields and interactions, and even extra dimensions of space.

For the record, I should confess that I’m not one of those big kids – a real physicist would have stolen my mathematical lunch money and sent me crying for home long before we even got to string theory – which I understand is regarded as one of the more accessible (and promising) of these approaches. As secret shames go, I can appreciate that this is not exactly stupendous, but I’ve been happily married for 16 years and don’t get out to as many wild parties as I used to.

The point is, I’m fine with that. I don’t need to understand the higher order branches of mathematics – the high linguistics of the Physicist’s art – to appreciate the reality and significance of what they are trying to achieve in understanding the nature of reality. I wish them well, and look forward to the day that Google produces a Mathematics-English translator so I can appreciate the beauty of their work.

I’m sure even the French would be grateful for that.

A Rosy View from the Patisserie: Copper Resource Peaks and why they keep failing to materialize

Malleable, relatively stable, and second only to gold in its electrical conductivity, copper is used extensively in electronics, communications, machinery, and plumbing – the cornerstones of western society. Given this significance, it is perhaps not surprising that this metal and its finite reserves often figure prominently in discussion of resource limitations on the horizon of the modern age.

In his April 2012 review of post-global financial crisis metal consumption around the world, Gary Gardner of environmental research organisation the Worldwatch Institute presented a cautionary tale on this score, suggesting:

“…a potential future global population of 10 billion people could consume 1.7 trillion kilograms of copper total, [which is] greater than the estimated global in-ground stocks of 1.6 trillion kilograms.”

While certainly arresting in its implications, warnings such as Gardner’s are hardly new. Environmental analyst Lester Brown suggested in 2007 that “Based on reasonable extrapolation of 2% growth in demand per year, copper might run out within 25 years”. While Brown’s prominence as an environmental advocate might leave him open to accusations of a biased perspective, the same cannot be argued of Megan Clark – who contributed a headline of her own that same year: “Over the next 25 years, world consumption of copper will exceed all of the copper mined today”. Clark, as then Vice President for Technology at BHP Billiton, and now Chief Executive at the CSIRO, Australia’s peak government scientific research organisation, could certainly not be accused of standing as an apologist for the anti-industrial lobby.

The logic of cautionary warnings on copper consumption is circumstantially compelling. Demand for copper globally is growing – driven in particular by rapid industrialisation in the developing world. Average copper consumption per year in developed countries is around 10 kg/person. In developing countries it is only one fifth of that level. The difference lies not in the extremes of consumerism, but the infrastructure underlying the key lifestyle differences between developed and developing nations. Forget cars and cappucinos here – we’re talking washing machines, fridges, mains electricity, and indoor plumbing. For burgeoning urban populations in the developing world to meet these basic elements of a western middle class lifestyle (assuming – and it is an important assumption that we shall return to – that they do so by the same technological route), copper consumption must rise accordingly.

And yet, despite these well-reasoned foundations, predictions of the imminent exhaustion of global copper reserves and an inexorable decline in production have proven wide of the mark time and again. As early as 1924, US geologist and copper mining expert Ira Joralemon was predicting darkly that:

“… the age of electricity and of copper will be short. At the intense rate of production that must come, the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years….Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die.”

World markets today though – for all the rising demand – are not decrying a shortage of this strategic metal. Prices are not rocketing skyward as nations and industries compete for declining stocks. Quite the reverse.

In 1980, economist Julian Simon made a widely publicised wager with Paul Ehrlich, author of the influential environmental essay “Population Bomb”. In this bet, Ehrlich, perhaps channelling the catastrophist spirit of 18th century English scholar Thomas Malthus, backed the price of a package of industrially important metals – copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten – to rise by 1990 because of increasing population pressures depleting resources. Simon, holding the other side of the wager, predicted that the price of the metals would instead decline, because any imminent resource scarcity would spur greater innovation, leading to the discovery of new sources and technologies to increase the efficiency of supply. Ehrlich famously lost the bet, with prices on all five metals falling in constant 1980 dollar terms – and indeed, for three of the five in absolute (unadjusted) dollar terms.

What’s going on? Global population increased over the ten years to 1990, as did urbanisation, and per capita consumption of these industrially sensitive metals. How were we able to swim against the tide of supply and demand like this?

Well, we didn’t. Fundamentally, while demand has been increasing throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries, supply has increased even more to tip the economic scales back the other way. As you can see here, even as global demand and production have ramped up over the past 50 or so years, estimated stocks – measured as the number of years declared and proven reserves will last at current rates of use – have remained more or less constant.

Ratio of global declared copper reserves to rate of production over the years 1900-2010. This ratio provides a measure of the number of years of supply remaining at current rates of use. Figure produced by MinEx consulting from production data sourced from the United States Geological Survey, and reserve data calculated by MinEx.

How does that work? Some of the additional reserves come down to increased exploration – deeper, further, by more efficient techniques, and in new regions – locating new ore bodies. A far greater source of additional resource however comes from changing commodity prices and more efficient mining and processing techniques quite literally inflating the size of existing deposits. Alchemy? No – to put it simply, what is ore? Ore is mineralised rock from which the resource content can be economically extracted. The key here is ‘economically’. If the value of the resource changes – the price goes up or the cost of producing it falls – so does the definition of what constitutes ore – which is effectively what someone will go to the trouble of digging up and processing to make it available to the market. And there is more low grade material out there than high grade. A lot more. As we see in this figure – again compiled by MinEx consulting – decrease your copper resource grade cut-off by a factor of 2 and you typically increase reserves of the metal on the order of 10-fold.

Variation in estimated resource tonnage (in millions of tonnes of contained metal) with cut-off grade for 48 copper deposits around the world. As the boundary of what is economically viable to extract falls, so the volume of rock qualifying as ore and the corresponding tonnage of the resource increase. Graph produced by MinEx consulting, March 2010.

So are we to be saved by the glories of economics? Will a virtuous circle of supply, demand, and value keep us in a red blush of coppery happiness indefinitely?

Well, in the words of US Economist Kenneth Boulding, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”

When you dig a little bit deeper (metaphorically speaking), the primary limiting factor in this equation is not actually the availability of copper itself. If we chose to, we could go on extracting the stuff for centuries to come without pausing for breath, pulling ever lower grades from ever larger holes in the ground. Rather, the issue is externalities – a useful economic parameter describing costs incurred by someone who did not agree to the causative action, and not transmitted through prices.

Fundamentally, copper mining is of direct benefit to the miner – who makes money from the process – and to the purchaser of the metal, who gets a raw material supplied to meet their needs. A much wider segment of society though experience detrimental effects as a result of the mining that, while typically not formally costed in the economic transaction, are still very real and can accumulate to significant effect.

Copper for example – as with any mined resource – incurs a significant ecological footprint, amounting to some 35-45,000 litres of water and 15-30 GJ of energy used and 3-6 tonnes of CO₂ emitted per tonne of metal produced at current grades. In Chile – admittedly a country with a mining-intensive economy – copper alone accounts for 11% of total national energy use – 32% of electricty use and 6% of all fuels – and the government was forced to call for water use efficiency pacts with copper mining companies during national shortages in 2009.

Increased scale or intensity of mining under such conditions imposes a cost on all of society, in the form of price rises and shortages of other key commodities. Societal tolerance of these costs is not infinite – miners cannot simply keep digging ever deeper (literally, this time) and expect the society in which they operate to accept the externalities arising as a consequence. Even Clive Palmer might balk at the prospect of shipping Queensland out to China in its entirety – even if it would solve the problem of where to put his railway.

Jared Diamond writes eloquently of the host of civilisations throughout human history that have grown, prospered, and then hit a wall of resource limitation that has brought them crashing to the ground

With this sort of history in mind, Paul Ehrlich – never one to go quietly, it must be said – wryly opined after losing his famous wager “The bet doesn’t mean anything. Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor.”

So yes, resource limitations may indeed yet come back to bite us as societal tolerance of mining is exhausted.

What would be the consequences then if this were to happen – if something like copper were to become a resource deficit for our society? For a resource limit to move from inconvenient to truly devastating, that resource must be more than desirable, it must be irreplaceable and core to social function. Looking to historical examples of resource exhaustion, the flourishing Southeast Polynesian society of Mangareva Island was doomed to inevitable collapse after deforestation robbed the inhabitants of the capacity to build the ocean-going canoes necessary to maintain their regional trade network. Severe drought – admittedly adding to an already overstretched agricultural system – seems to have been the proximate cause for the spectacular collapse of the Mayan civilisation. The Maori of New Zealand though, after driving the giant flightless Moa to extinction, simply moved on to other endemic protein sources that, while less awe inspiring in stature, were nevertheless adequate to support their population density.

Likewise, the critical question in our case becomes – if we do run out of copper, what are the implications of this for our society? As already discussed, we love this soft red metal for a host of reasons. Is it truly irreplaceable for any of these manifold uses though?

The stability and conductivity of copper make it ideal for use in electrical wiring – but not uniquely so. Aluminium may be slightly more brittle, but it is an able substitute, and has proven eminently suitable for cabling and wiring. The malleability and low reactivity of copper make it ideal for use in pipes and plumbing – but again, not uniquely so – with plastic pipes every bit as effective – in some applications even more so. Indeed, in each and every one of the categories dominating our use of this metal, viable alternatives exist that could step up to the plate should an existential crisis arise that removed copper from our society tomorrow.

To put this in some kind of perspective – I like croissants. I can’t think of a nicer way to start the weekend (or to be honest, any morning I can get away with it) than a couple of these delicious pastries and a freshly brewed coffee at my favourite beachside cafe. But if they suddenly ran out – if every French baker the world over were laid low – perchance by some virulent cheese-borne virus engineered by the militant wing of the British National Party – robbing us of these wonderful buttery treats – it wouldn’t be the end of the world. It might not be quite as nice, but I could always have toast with my morning coffee – or even move on to an entirely new resource family and try muesli.

So it is with copper. This metal has many fine properties that have allowed it to make an important and highly valued contribution to the fabric of our industrialised society – but even if a shortage were to develop, viable alternatives exist for all its major uses. They may not always be as effective as copper, and certainly no single resource stands out as able to fill all of the niches that copper is applied to, but nevertheless, there are no yawning gulfs that threaten to bring any of the pillars supporting western society crashing to the ground.

Cuddles and Rainbows, or Extra-Crispy? The implications of Climate Change through Geological Time

Marking lab reports for an Environmental Science course I started teaching this year, I found it interesting that several students, after examining evidence of changing sea level and ice volume in the geological record, expressed a view that ice sheet collapse and rapid resulting sea level rise in the coming century are not causes for concern because they are natural phenomena. The logical mis-step here seems to be an equation of ‘natural’ with ‘good’ or ‘harmless’. Cyanide is a naturally occurring compound, but I think we would all be concerned if it was found in our drinking water. Salt water crocodiles are natural phenomena, but I sincerely doubt that a reasonable person could fail to be thoroughly exercised if they found one in their swimming pool.

My students are not alone though in taking climatic comfort from the geological record.

The idea does have some logical basis to it – but like all scientific concepts, the key is to look at the pragmatic implications of the arguments. Climate does change naturally over timescales of thousands to millions of years, for reasons well understood by scientists – subtle variations in our planet’s orbit, variations in the output energy from the sun, and variation in the intensity of global volcanism, amongst others.

Indeed, records of climatic conditions locked within geological strata show that the current climate is not the warmest in our Earth’s history – with global temperatures estimated to have been 6°C warmer 50 million years ago during the Eocene period, and as much as 8°C warmer 510 or so million years ago in the Cambrian. Nor are levels of CO₂ – probably the most widely discussed of the ‘greenhouse gases’ contributing to recent anthropogenic warming of the planet – the highest they have ever been, with levels 2-4 times as high as at present for much of the past 500 million years.

More to the point, as we see here in this widely re-published figure from a study by paleoclimatologists Lorraine Lisiecki and Maureen Raymo, if we assume (possibly somewhat charitably – the figures are pretty loose on this) that anatomically modern humans have been around for the order of 200 thousand years, the temperatures recorded over that period indicate that we must have responded to, and survived, major climatic swings and attendant consequences in sea level several times in the past.

A record of climatic change over the past 5 million years, compiled from analysis of sedimentary cores. Reproduced from Lisiecki & Raymo (2005). “A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ18O records”, Paleoceanography 20.

So is climate change all just cuddles and rainbows? Probably not, unfortunately. The fact that we as a species have lived through significant swings in climate does not mean it was necessarily a pretty period in our history. Nor that the same approach would necessarily be effective today.

The dinosaurs, after all, lived through a lot of change in their 160 million-odd years of planetary dominance, but that didn’t buy them any extra credit at the end of the Cretaceous.

Yes, our unparalleled abilities to reason and invent give us advantages over species pushed to the edge during previous periods of global change. But only – and this is a critical point – only if we use them.

To quote human induced global warming skeptic par excellence Ian Plimer on the subject of climate change in the geological record:

“Climate change has been with us for the 4,500 million year history of planet Earth. This is what climate does. It always changes. Changes in our lifetime may be natural”.

Again I sense here the implication that natural is synonymous with harmless – nothing we should worry about. Leaving that aside though, whether or not climate changes naturally is actually a distraction from the real question here – which is whether human activity is producing climate change of a magnitude too great and on a timescale too short to allow effective adaptation. If I might return to the opening paragraph of this essay to construct a somewhat fatalistic analogy, the fact that my taking cyanide would probably prove a lethal mistake does not make me bullet-proof. Just because natural processes produce changes in climate that may be deleterious to human societies on a local to global scale does not mean we shouldn’t be deeply concerned about the fact that human activities appear on the balance of evidence to be producing the same sort of effect, but on an even faster time scale.

To return to the inimitable Professor Plimer, writing here in his recent guide to refuting climate change ‘How to Get Expelled From School’ – a gift that keeps on giving to those in search of a quotable line:

“…a clever teacher would put you in your place and may suggest that the ideal temperature for an Eskimo is not the ideal temperature for someone living in the jungles of Borneo. You could then come back and suggest that this shows that humans can adapt to a great range of temperature so why worry about a warmer world”.

Leaving aside Plimer’s choice of the derogatory term Eskimo, the Inuit people of Arctic Greenland and Canada actually do offer a nice little case study of how to respond to climate change…albeit not conforming to the ‘business as usual’ agenda Plimer seems to be pushing.

Greenland’s arctic landscape was settled by Norse colonists from Iceland in the 10th century, at the height of an interval of unusually warm temperatures known as the Medieval Warm Period. For a time, the settlers prospered and built a flourishing community, but as temperatures fell at the end of that warm interval, the Norse stuck rigidly to their European diet and farming methods. In the face of the deteriorating climate, the Norse colonists’ lifestyle became progressively more marginal and eventually untenable, with both of their settlements dying out some time around the mid 1500’s. At the same time however, Inuit people, with a lifestyle and technology adapted to the cooler conditions continued to live successfully in the same landscape. So yes, humans were quite capable of adapting to changed conditions in climate – but those that tried to resist change and pursue traditional lifestyles in the face of climatic variations were eventually overwhelmed by the changes.

William Nierenberg – American physicist and co-founder of right wing think tank the George C. Marshall Institute seriously proposed in the 1980s that the effects of climate change could be dealt with by migration.

Now, although records of prehistoric movements are imperfect and fragmentary, it does seem likely that this is indeed how people responded to the previous episodes of climate change we see in the geological record. Take this one through to its logical conclusion though – a successful strategy for a nomadic species of a few hundred thousand souls ten thousand years ago may not be the first plan to reach for when you have an urbanised population pushing 7 billion divided into geographically based nation states all looking to find a climate refuge. Let’s be honest here, mass immigration of a coherent social group into a region already settled by a long established population hasn’t turned out to be such a great recipe for convivial relationships and lasting happiness in the Middle East.

This idea is elevated from Alan Jones mouthing-off-without-concern-for-the-facts territory to dangerously loopy by the fact that Nierenberg was speaking not as an individual, but as Chair of the US National Academy of Sciences Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee, and a key science adviser to the Reagan administration.

Fundamentally, migration as a response to climate change in the modern world is all very well if you have a summer home on Lake Michigan, but I have a sneaking suspicion Nierenberg wasn’t talking about opening his doors to Mexicans and Brazillians whose countries had gone from regular to extra crispy. As public information campaigns go, Nierenberg’s suggestion ultimately falls into the same tragicomic category as the 1950s ‘duck and cover’ ads in the USA suggesting school children should shelter under their desks in the event of Nuclear attack.

Yes, climate change has occurred through geological time – and even through human history and pre-history. There is also, however, a long record of buses driving down Stirling Highway just outside my office – so regularly, believe it or not, that you could almost think they operate to a timetable. And yet, despite that routine nature and predictability, I would still counsel you against standing in front of one as it hurtles down the road.

Fairy Tales on Shaky Ground – Scientific understanding and the Italian court system

On the 6th of April, 2009, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake centered 9.46 km beneath the Abruzzo region in central Italy devastated the city of L’Aquila, ripping the historic heart out of the city and killing 309 people. While the physical scars from this tragedy are fading, cultural aftershocks are still rippling through the scientific community, and reached a peak unexpected by many this week with the conviction of six Italian scientists and a former government official for involuntary manslaughter.

The seven – members of the Italian National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks at the time of the earthquake – were sentenced to 6 years in prison, and ordered to pay court costs and damages amounting to some 7.8 million Euros.

Their conviction was based principally on a number of statements made six days before the damaging tremor, downplaying the likelihood of a major earthquake. Given the manifest impossibility of reliably predicting Earthquake occurrence with our present understanding of seismic processes, the legal precedent for this is presumably drawn from the Brothers Grimm, with imprisonment the prescribed punishment for failing to spin straw into gold.

Earthquakes are caused by the release of energy as fractures propagate through rocks. They are focused in particular regions where creeping deformation deeper in Earth leads to the build up of stress in the more brittle rocks near the surface. Once a fracture has occurred, the crack remains a discontinuity – a weakness – and tends be a site of further failures in the future.

If you live near such an existing fracture – or fault – the likelihood of experiencing an earthquake increases dramatically. This much we can say with confidence. Certainly, in the long view, no-one can claim to be surprised by the damage wrought on L’Aquila, given the city is built on an ancient lake bed known to provide a geological framework that amplifies the local effects of seismic waves, and has been devastated by earthquakes on no fewer than seven historical occasions, in 1315, 1349, 1452, 1501, 1646, 1703, and 1706.

But when will the next Earthquake happen? Now this – the 7.8 million Euro question – is the holy grail of seismic hazard research, and to date, there is no answer. Anybody who tells you differently is probably emailing from Nigeria to offer you ‘the investment opportunity of a lifetime’.

Despite all the work by teams of dedicated and sometimes brilliant researchers over the past century or so, all the collection of data and analyzing of patterns – even for the San Andreas Fault in California, probably the most intensely monitored fault zone in the world – no distinctive and reliable precursor patterns for major earthquakes have ever been recognised.

To hold someone responsible for failing to predict an earthquake on the basis of preceding activity makes all the statistical sense of having your first tip on Melbourne Cup day romp home, doubling down your house on the trifecta in the next race, and then suing your bookie when the horses fail to place.

So how can this miscarriage of justice have occurred? Why weren’t the charges thrown out at the earliest opportunity?

Fundamentally, as I wrote last week (Three Monkeys, Ten Minutes – Scientists and the Importance of Communication Skills – WordPress 18/10/2012):

“Society is complex, and people hold views for all manner of reasons – personal, cultural, logical, or religious, among others. We [as scientists] do not have to share those views, but we do need to appreciate and respect their reality”

When I wrote those words, I hadn’t expected to be confronted by such a glaring (and dark) example of this relationship at work quite so quickly. Scientifically, the question of earthquake prediction doesn’t even get off the ground, but to a broader population un-tutored in statistics and the language of scientific uncertainty, a population here stung by a great tragedy and searching for someone to blame – a sadly common human trait – the Committee’s statements painted them with a target.

People are incredibly good at recognising patterns. This, as much as anything, is the key to our astonishing success as a species. Unfortunately, the flip side to this is that we look for – and expect to see – patterns even when they are not there. This makes us very bad at evaluating the true risk of rare events.

James ‘the Amazing’ Randi is conducting a long term demonstration of this phenomenon. Every morning he writes on a card “I, James Randi, will die today”, which he then dates, signs, and keeps in his pocket in the knowledge that it will one day (may it be far in the future) be a fitting final demonstration of how apparent correlation can be manipulated to lead our minds astray.

Richard Feynmann related a similar story in his memoir “Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynmann” – where he writes of hearing the phone ring in his University dormitory and having a sudden premonition that his grandmother had died. She hadn’t. The phone wasn’t even for Feynmann, and his grandmother continued in rude good health for some time to come. The point is, we have such thoughts and intuitions all the time – for the most part, they don’t turn out to be correct, but occasionally the fates line up. When they do, the glorious pattern-seeking engines that are our brains get a kick of reinforcing dopamine to say ‘job well done’ and we forget about the 999 previous times it hasn’t worked and start to see a correlation.

If you live near a fault line, you will, inevitably, experience earthquakes. Sometimes big ones, often small ones. Sometimes a large one will be preceded by small ones. But usually not. The stochastic patterns – one earthquake here, two the next week, none for six months – have no significance.

There is a real tragedy at L’Aquila, and there are people who should be held to account. But they are not the scientists who gave an accurate representation of the processes at work beneath the town, and the statistical meaninglessness of looking for patterns in the tea leaves of local seismic activity. Rather, the guilty parties – those who should have known better – are the officials and engineers who built structures – schools, gymnasiums, dormitories – in the city that were not designed or constructed to withstand the well known and historically proven earthquake risk.

So, we find ourselves at the end of act 1 in our re-imagining of Rumplestiltskin – the Miller’s daughter has proven unable to spin her straw into gold and the King is about to imprison her in the highest room of the tallest tower. Perhaps in act 2, Uri Geller will step up to the title role and offer to solve her problems by magic in exchange for first authorship on the resulting scientific paper.

Three monkeys, ten minutes – Scientists and the importance of communication skills

Science and technology have changed almost every aspect of the way we live our lives over the past 100 years, and are at the heart of many major challenges we face today.

Science, however, is nothing more, nor less, than a process by which we seek to understand the forces that shape and control the universe around us, and understanding is not the same as a need (or permission) to act. We can produce fresh water through desalination, or treat waste water (yes, sewage) to the point where it is potable. We can produce genetically modified crops and organisms resistant to disease. Even engineer changes in the system of climate. We know public health would be improved if we banned tobacco. But should we? Do we want to?

How we act on scientific understanding is in essence a social compact between scientists, policy makers, politicians, and the public. At the heart of this is a need that these groups understand one another.

Now, scientists are not so irredeemably bad at the communication game as some stereotypes (such as Scott Adams’ acerbic put-down above) would have us believe. A core part of the scientific process is the need to clearly and persuasively explain ideas to others, and to engage in and foster discussion, testing, and criticism of those ideas. This can take the form of conference and symposium presentations to our peers, tutorial sessions for students, written papers – but however it takes place, an ability to communicate is a key pillar of the scientist’s skill set.

Stephen Hawking is acknowledged as one of the most significant and influential thinkers in late 20th and early 21st century Physics. His mind is capable of soaring on phenomenal flights of mathematical and scientific creativity beyond the realms of thought commonly occupied by many. Were it not for the technological aids that allow him to communicate electronically, however, many of those beautiful theoretical constructions would have remained locked away inside his progressively failing body. A poignant, albeit extreme, variation on George Berkeley’s philosophical construction “If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?”

All successful scientists, certainly, must either become good communicators, or develop symbiotic relationships with colleagues able to support them in that domain. Fundamentally, brilliant ideas are not enough – if you are not able to clearly and persuasively explain your idea, it will go unremarked – Science will not grow and prosper from your contribution.

Where scientists may sometimes fall down in the communication stakes is an over-specialisation. We invest so much in developing an ability to discuss and exchange ideas at a high level with our peers that the communication of ideas to non-specialists may become neglected.

Unfortunately, nowhere outside of macroeconomic modelling equations do ‘the general population’ actually behave as perfect, rational beings. Society is complex, and people hold views for all manner of reasons – personal, cultural, logical, or religious, among others. We do not have to share those views, but we do need to appreciate and respect their reality if we are serious about influencing policy decisions. It’s not enough to expect the general populace to accept a paternalistic “trust me, I’m a scientist” as a reason for following your advice. It’s also not among the most successful of pick-up lines.

In the words of Jesse Shore, National President of the Australian Science Communicators:

“…few people base their decision making on just being presented with good science. The communicator’s message must have meaning, be useful and acknowledge the needs, aspirations and concerns of each intended audience.”

It is in this context that a Scientist failing to represent their work to the general population becomes significant – a weak link in the nexus required for the hard-won scientific understanding of natural systems to play a significant role in the development of meaningful policy.

Ceding the communications role to the existing media system may not always be a helpful substitute either. Conventional reportage is built not around nuance and weighted discussion, but the manufacture and presentation of conflict and controversy – which is doubly harmful for complex issues. If you don’t understand the methods used or the calculations undertaken to reach a scientific conclusion, taking sides in the debate – or basing a serious policy decision on it – would be like listening to a Frenchman and a German arguing in a third language you yourself have no understanding of (those dashed Europeans can be so clever that way), and concluding “I agree with the French guy because his accent sounds sexier.”

This is why the scientific community should appreciate – even treasure – those scientists and writers able to genuinely translate our work – to explain complex ideas and arguments to others without diluting their meaning. Simon Singh, Robert Winston, the late Carl Sagan…maybe not Simon Winchester, who has a nice turn of phrase, but to my thinking a tendency to undertake diversions off-topic that detract from the flow of thought (for anyone who may have read any of my previous posts, yes, I know – pot, kettle, black) – for these are our ambassadors – our public face.

This is also why we should welcome and encourage the incorporation of communication skills teaching into science degree programmes. This addition has recently become a core element of the new degree structure at the University of Western Australia where I work – not without some controversy among both staff and prospective students. Personally, I have never needed convincing in regards to the importance of training scientists in this area. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that no-one who has ever marked undergraduate essays from science students who have NOT taken a communication skills course could ever query that suggestion.

Beyond my self-serving investment in the idea, however, is a more serious foundation. By training future scientists in the skills and strategies of communication – or at the very least making them aware of the significance of this area – we can work to close this gap and see a better informed discussion of scientific subjects in the broader public sphere.

Increasing the fundamental communications skills of our scientific graduate cohort has additional benefits too. This is about more than just making your ideas sound impressive. Learning to structure an essay, or mastering the rhetoric of a compelling argument can in themselves make our students better scientists – providing a mental template for the robust logical interpretation of ideas. You can collect all the data you want, allow your thoughts so roam as wide and soar as high as the limits of infinity, but like an inversion of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it is the act of precisely describing your findings clearly to others that ultimately crystallizes them – pinning them to the page and making them real.

So my fellow scientists, let us value and applaud the communicators in our midst and work together towards a future of better informed, relevant debate of scientific ideas within the social landscape. To take the discussion full-circle then – we might not be able to touch Shakespeare, but at the very least, let’s all try to up our Monkey Quotient a few notches.