Climate Change Skeptics

Paul Krugman has a piece on climate change on his blog at the NY Times. One commenter responds:

"One thing they are "gong" [sic] to do is point out that if the ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 is solely due to man-made combustion of fossil fuels, laws of chemistry and physics have been violated. For every molecule of carbon, two molecules of oxygen are consumed. Therefore, if the rise in CO2 is due to such combustion, then we should observe a decrease in atmospheric O2 by a factor twice as great. I have seen no evidence to suggest that global O2 is decreasing at all." (H. Muhlphart )

Ouch! My response:

No law of chemistry and physics has been violated by assuming that the increasing CO₂ comes from combustion of fossil fuels. The reason no decrease in O₂ is "noticed" is because the loss due to the formation of carbon dioxide is very small compared to the total amount of oxygen. If you increase the amount of CO₂ by 100 ppm (more or less what's predicted in the next 50 years), the decrease in O₂ is from 209,460 ppm to 209,360 ppm. That's the equivalent of being at the top of less than a 30 foot hill. You certainly don't notice any change in the oxygen levels between the basement and second floor of a house, do you?

And I didn't even bother with the notion that carbon dioxide "eats" two oxygen atoms no matter what carbon source you make it from - fossil fuel or respiration. Or that it's one carbon atom to one oxygen molecule. At this level of understanding of the basic science, you are not simply not entitled to an opinion on the matter.

Chemical Urban Legends: pH

What does the p in pH stand for?

The term pH has been in use for more than a century. It is a logarithmic measure of the hydrogen ion concentration ([H+]): pH = -log10[H+]. (Technically, there aren't bare protons (H+) floating around in solutions, but that wasn’t known when pH was introduced!) The original symbol used by Sorensen was p_H⁺.

Theories vary as to the origin of the p - most agree it means power but whether in Latin, French or German, seems in dispute. Thinking it would be either French or Latin as the original paper was published in French, I was surprised to find that it's neither, though the legend is both old and persistent. By 1920, many authors were assuming that it meant “power”, but Jens Norby returned to the original sources and points out that it was the arbitrary choice of the letters p and q for two variables in the work-up of the experimental data. The variable p eventually ends up in the formula arrived at for the concentration of the hydrogen ion.

The modern form pH was introduced in 1920, "as a matter of typographical convenience".

For the full explanation, see Jens G. Norby, The origin and the meaning of the little p in pH, Trends in Biochemical Sciences 25, 36-37 (2000). The illustration is a selection from the original paper: Sorensen, Compt. redn. du Lab. de Carlsberg 8 1-168 (1909).

Open Laboratory 2009

Open Laboratory 2009 - a juried anthology of the best of the science blogosphere from last year has appeared. Edited by scicurious, it's available here. I have a piece in it - a cleaner version of this post on the use of helium to preserve documents. I'm fascinated with the interplay between web and print that ultimately produces this volume.

Want a copy? Order one -- or if you're feeling lucky, de-lurk and leave a comment before March 5th and I'll draw a winner at random. The rest of the pieces look great - on everything from the flu to charismatic megafauna (whales and chimps) to the statistics of human milk production.

Nobel Conversations

I vividly remember the first time I met a Nobel Prize winner. I was a graduate student in my 3rd year, and Roald Hoffman had recently won the Prize in chemistry (1981). A group of us went up with our research advisor (who had worked with Hoffman as an undergraduate) to hear him speak at a symposium at USC. On the drive up we were briefed as to behavior - do not speak unless spoken to. Frankly, we were happy enough to be out of the lab as well as treated to lunch (and to a terrific speaker). Lunch was at picnic tables in an outdoor courtyard - the grad students all clustered at a table on the edge. Imagine our surprise (and delight) when Hoffman joined us at the table, and spent lunch asking us what we were doing for research, and what excited us most about chemistry. I, at least, left with the sense that I was an interesting part of the chemical community -- even if a very junior one.

The Noble organization and Honeywell are offering the opportunity to anyone to ask a question of Nobel winners. The next live broadcast is Tuesday, March 2 at 11:15am (-6hrs GMT), when you can hear Robert Grubbs, who won the chemistry prize in 2005 for his discovery of olefin metathesis (a method to rearrange carbon-carbon double bonds using metal catalysts). I wrote my oral exam proposal on olefin metathesis in 1982 - I was fascinated then, and am still, with these atomic level architectural changes.

The best part? You can ask questions - email them to question@honeywellscience.com or go through Twitter or Facebook.

Are scientists palatable?

In the early part of the 19th century, the word scientist had yet to be coined. As the scope of materials and phenomena that natural philosophers and historians dealt with increased, there was a growing sense that these terms were inadequate to describing the task of this new breed of inquirers. In the 1830s, the British Association for the Advancement of Science explored potential candidates, but ultimately rejected various proposed terms, including scientist:

"Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; savans was rather assuming,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist — but this was not generally palatable."

The need remained, however, and a decade later, William Whewell, a philosopher and biologist pushed the issue again: “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist.” This time it stuck.

Once the name stuck, an image quickly became attached -- wild hair, lab coats and odd apparatus all became part and parcel of what it means to be a scientist. My most recent Thesis columnin Nature Chemistry -- Men of Mystery -- takes up popular images of scientists, and considers the impact the images might have on public discourse about science.

UPDATED: See Snail's Tails post about philosophy and philosophical instruments. The ad for the "philosophical instrument makers" is fascinating!

Science blogging at its best: Open Laboratory 2009

In 2006, Bora Zivkovic brought us the first edition of Open Laboratory, a print collection of the best science blogging of the year. Now in its 4th year, the 2009 edition, guest edited by scicurious at Neurotopia is going to press soon. A record 760 posts were nominated, winnowed down to fifty by scicurious and her panel of judges.

One post of mine (The Pressure to Preserve) will be included! While you're waiting for this edition to come out, I heartily recommend browsing the earlier editions. Who says scientists can't write?

Chemistry on Holiday: Science Cookies

'tis the season for baking on the home front. It's been mostly biologically based leavening (yeast) at my house, but some strictly chemical rising has been going on as well. For an interesting mix of chemistry and biology in the kitchen check out Not So Humble Pie's science cookies: zebrafish, drosophila, gel electrophoresis and atoms are on the menu. Something to keep in mind for the next snow day around here...

Unfortunate Acronyms: PUS

When I was lecturing on lasers this week, I was surprised to discover how many of my students were unaware that laser was an acronym (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). Science is replete with acronyms - Ira Levine once essayed that if you knew enough acronyms you could pretend you knew computational chemistry - good, bad, really funny and occasionally unfortunate.

On my desk is a paper which refers (with as near as I can tell with a straight face) to "PUS research." Public Understanding of Science. I swear this is true.

If you've got a favorite one - funny, famous or truly unfortunate - leave it in the comments for all of us to enjoy...

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Related Posts
Science in the kitchen: Jello lasers
Romancing the stone (steampunk lit and lasers)

Sex and the scientist

(Cross posted at my other blog.)

I am in the midst of writing an essay for Nature Chemistry - about why people are so curious about stereotypes of scientists, but seem less so about other fields. There is the DAST (draw a scientist test), but not as far as I can discover similar instruments to assess the images of other professions. Where are the DATTs (draw a teacher test) and DACTs (draw a chef test)? On the other end of the cultural spectrum there is the Big Bang Theory.

The earliest anthropological study I can find dates to the late 1950s and is by Margaret Mead (yes, that Margaret Mead) and Rhoda Metraux under the auspices of the AAAS. They analyzed thousands of essays, drawn from a set of 35,000 written by US high school students. The 1 page essays were written in response to one of three prompts. Prompt I read "When I think about a scientist, I think of..."

What took my breath away was Prompt II (italics are not mine, but as given in Mead's original paper - Science 126, 384-390 (1957)):

If you are a boy, complete the following statement in your own words.
If I were going to be a scientist, I should like to be the kind of scientist who...

If you are a girl, you may complete either the sentence above or this one:
If I were going to marry a scientist, I should like to marry the kind of scientist who..."

Math Man points out that I did both.

UPDATE: So there is a draw-a-teacher test (DATt) (H/T to Neil who commented on drawing God - another area that has been explored by educators and psychologists)

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Images are from K.D. Finson, J.B. Beaver, B.L. Cramond, "Development and Field Test of a Checklist for the Draw-A-Scientist Test" School Science and Mathematics 95, p. 195 (1995).

Feeling quizical?

Pew tracks American's familiarity with the news of the day - my kids took the latest quiz (and each scored in the top quartile for adults and so were quite pleased with themselves). I played with something similar for science...it's definitely NOT rocket science, so if you've any science background at all -- you should score 100%.

If you're looking for the answers - they are here.