Crystal Ball Session: Predicting Future Science Policy Crackups

I'm going to throw out a long shot and say carbon sequestration. If the next president actually decides to start managing our CO2 problems, this is likely to become a big issue. Ocean carbon sequestration - the idea of pumping captured CO2 into the sea -might be particularly volatile from a political standpoint.

Annually, somewhere between two and three gigatons of Carbon are naturally sequestered in the oceans. This is accomplished by means of what biologists call the biological pump. The biological pump is a process wherein microorganisms photosynthetically fix CO2 and where organic carbon is converted to CO2 by microorganisms in the sediment -- a process known as mineralization.

Phytoplankton fix 50 gigatons of Carbon each year, 70 to 80 percent of which remains in the ocean's surface waters. The remaining 20 to 30 percent sifts down into the deep ocean to be mineralized. In the next 1,000 years, 85 percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide will be absorbed by the Earth's oceans. Though, in theory, the entire sum of carbon mass present in the planet's fossil fuels could be sequestered in the deep waters of the ocean (5,000 to 10,000 gigatons), currently, only surface waters take up atmospheric carbon.

When CO2 is fixed and dissolved into the ocean, carbonic acid is created. Already, since the industrial revolution, the pH of ocean surface waters has declined by 0.1. A doubling in the preindustrial atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will eventually decrease the pH of surface waters by 0.3. This pH decrease may very well wreak havoc on the ocean's coral reefs and cause cascading breakdowns in shallow-water ecosystems.

In short, lots of carbon in surface waters = bad news. However, because of the ocean's high alkalinity, if you had a way to spread all this anthropogenic carbon evenly through the ocean's deep waters, you could pump a hell of a lot of it down there with out significantly changing the pH. According to the Department of Energy, if a sequestration program were undertaken, twenty-five percent of the United States' sequestered carbon could be put into the ocean.

This means a total of 75 million tons per year or 0.2 million tons per day by 2025. All this is still less than 1 percent of the natural daily uptake of atmospheric carbon by the oceans. In fact, the same amount of carbon dioxide it would take to double atmospheric concentrations would increase ocean concentrations by less than two percent.

And although carbon would not stay sequestered in the oceans forever, it would be there quite a long time. The deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean reach the surface once every 250 years. In some parts of the Pacific, the same process can take as long as 1000 years. Worldwide, the oceans have a mean ventilation time of 550 years. So, ideally carbon could stay sequestered for centuries.

Of course the technology to spread CO2 evenly through the deep ocean is still a pipe dream, but the DOE is already investing millions of dollars a year in it, and that figure could ramp dramatically if there were ever a political will to do this sort of thing.

Of course, release points for CO2 could have particularly nasty biological effects. Hypercapnia and torpor caused by excessive CO2 exposure may increase mortality rates of animals living near a release site, even if pH changes don't. And even if mortality rates don't increase, local environmental changes caused by the CO2 may depress the metabolism of organisms around the release site, limiting their growth and reproductive success.

Changes in pH will certainly effect microorganisms as well. Many microorganisms in the deep sea have adapted to use ion motive forces other than hydrogen. Because of the shift in available ions, much of their genetic machinery will not work in low-pH environments. Bacteria in ocean sediment, however will be less affected. They will cause carbon-killed organisms to decompose, the scent of which may attract more animals to the release site. However, one of the main byproducts of decomposition by these bacteria will be hydrogen sulfide. The organisms that normally oxidize this hydrogen sulfide will be inhibited by their new low-pH environment. So, a plume of hydrogen sulfide may eventually join the plume of CO2 extending from a release site.

Good times, and lots of technical problems to solve that will set environmentalists' teeth on edge - assuming we decide any of this is a good idea in the first place.

Further reading:

Carbon Sequestration Research and Development, Chapter 3: Ocean Sequestration
http://www.ornl.gov/carbon_sequestration/chap3.pdf

Final Report: Direct Ocean Sequestration Experts Workshop
www.netl.doe.gov/coalpower/sequestration/pubs/peterfin.pdf

Tamburri, et. al. "A field study of the effects of CO2 ocean disposal on mobile deep-sea animals."
http://www.mbari.org/ghgases/peerart/co2-rel2b.pdf

Josh Braun, your ornl link give me a 'not found' error.

Fresh Water. If not in the next presidential term, then the one after that. It's a global issue, but it'll come to blows first in the Middle East and the good old US of A.

And speaking of water, ocean sequestration is a terrible idea, Josh! Having grown up the Great Lakes, I witnessed first-hand several extreme perturbations of the freshwater ecology that began with relatively slight human-induced changes. We're not smart enough or subtle enough as a species to tinker with natural equilibria. Better to cut emissions dramatically, ramp up terrestrial sequestration (plants, that is), and let the system adjust by its own infinitely complex methods.

Not for next year, and not for five years, but in, say 15-20 years time: robots. Or more precisely, the next wave of robots, capable of automating more than a rigidly controlled factory environment, and capable of doing so a lot cheaper than the current state of the commercial art.

No, I'm not saying you'll have robots doing eveything a human can. But I believe around that time is the cutoff point where a potentially large number of low-skill manual jobs could be profitably (both in money and in "minding time") done by autonomous machines. Cleaning, hospital orderly services (a lot of which is simply moving things around from place to place), routine maintenance and inspection - anywhere the job is largely to move things around or assembling things, anything flexible but within a fairly closed envelope. The robots will mostly, of course, not be humanoid; think hospital beds that know who their occupant is and where they should be at a given time, or a sewing machine that knows about models and sizes and can do the whole manufacturing itself as long as someone (another machine) supplies it with materials.

This, I think, will be pushed by two trends: robots are getting better, and getting better faster than they were just ten years ago. The second trend is India, China, Vietnam and the other countries now doing a lot of low-cost work "growing up" economically and thus no longer as comparatively cheap as they are today.

It'll be just like the "the robots are taking our jobs" scare in the 70's and early 80's, except this time there's some substance to it. It will tend to have the same effect as outsourcing, but be more visible since you actually are seeing autonomous machines increase around you. And it will tend to impact the low-skill service sector - the area that has grown to accomodate people now being displaced by outsourcing - raising questions about where people with no specialized skills or high-level education are supposed to be working.

I am probably off-base in at least half a dozen ways in this. Still, I think this is a distinct possibility.

Sorry about that. The current URL for the chapter is:

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/sequestration/publications/1999_r…

Note that it's getting a little dated. I'm sure there're a lot of new developments.

Also, an updated link for the DOE workshop report:

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/sequestration/publications/Project_Reports…

I see a seismic shift that moves the fault line, puts the lunatics back on the fringe, and reframes the science policy interface as a problem of restoring integrity to public discourse. The talking heads who helped to destroy it will be flipping burgers and those for whom they claim to speak will be speaking for themselves - on the blogs. I can't see the current controversies ever being resolved any other way.

Hair cloning. Hair transplantation for baldness is limited by supply. Within our lifetimes, I predict baldness will not be a sign of middle age, but of lack of wealth.

I question the assumption that a future president will somehow resolve the issues around global warming. I certainly hope any future president is rational enough to accept the scientific consensus on AGW, but even so, that leaves the most fundamental issue unresolved. That is what to do about it. Many potential approaches will involve dislocations to existing business practices, possible loss of profits, even companies ceasing to be financially viable. They might also incluce changes in lifestyles, even, potentially, quite substantial changes in social structures (for example, discouraging suburban development and encouraging urban development, redirection of funding from highways to other forms of transit). The second battle in the war will be trying to resolve policy issues.

Sequestration ??? Business as usual??? We drive. We fly. You die. We all die.

Global heating going non-linear trumps everything - period.

If you don't stop doing it, you won't go blind, but you may die.
Last month James Hansen and his colleagues described our planet with these words, "perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control." Abstract and entire paper here; http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2007/Hansen_etal_2.html

Should the next pres succumb to the political pressure to "do something" about AGW (as looks likely given the slate of front runners at the moment) I suspect that action will not be deemed sufficient by the hard line environmental lobby such as the NRDC, Green Peace etc.

I anticipate more Kyoto-like agreements that make for good press releases but have little punitive measures to back them up. When the economic reality of large scale (20 to 50 %) reductions in CO2 are sized up by government and industry leaders I suspect there will be little enthusiasm for the kind of sacrifices necessary to meet these goals.

Feel good, do nothing initiatives like tax breaks for hybrid vehicles and perhaps punitive taxes on SUVs will be prescribed in moralizing tones. Those awful fluorescent light bulbs will be foisted on us with increasingly strident vigor. I'll wager we will have a new cabinet type position, perhaps Climate Czar.

This will not satisfy the AGW faithful. If the next administration is Republican things will follow the current pattern of ever increasing cataclysmic predictions from the usual cabal of doomsayers accompanied by hectoring from the environmental lobby and sensationalist press.

The real screeching will come if a Democrat is elected and he/she doesn't make sweeping reforms to every aspect of the American economy. I think this is likely since nothing short of a complete restructuring of at least the energy sector would satisfy the true environmental elite.

Much as the gay/lesbian community felt betrayed by Clinton's acquiescence on the gays in the military issue I suspect that there will be a substantial backlash against any Democrat that fails to make radical changes of the sort that would be needed to reduce CO2 emissions by the amounts demanded by the environmental lobby.

In twenty years when CO2 has risen to 500 ppm and there is no catastrophic effect I'm sure the James Hansen's and Michael Manns of the world will have found a new cause for concern and political action. There will be no apologies or mea culpas only claims that the "real problem" was much more nuanced than first thought. There will be the same political battle lines and little change in political rhetoric. Only the name of the threat will have changed.

Now a true "futurist" would be able to name this as yet unforeseen menace. Any little league Nostradamus out there care to step up to the plate?

Space policy:

What about the Space Station? And what to do about Bush's vision of returning to the Moon and onto Mars? Will the next president ditch the dream in favor of robotics and space-based surveillance of the Earth, as many experts have suggested?

1. Global population reduction.

2. Genetic preservation of species near extinction.

3. Human cloning.

4. Protecting the Earth from catastrophic asteroid and comet impacts.

5. Nuclear waste storage.

Thanks for the outpouring of responses!

Just to start out: Saying global warming would be "resolved" was a hypothetical I needed to pose the question I wanted to pose. That said, I don't think it's at all unlikely that during the next president's term we will have a globally accepted treaty or arrangement for emissions reductions.

As for the responses: Let me be provocative. I asked where the crackups would be. Most of you answered as if I asked what would be important issues.

These are *all* important issues. (Well, maybe with the exception of hair transplantation.) But which ones will get highly politicized, and draw mass media attention, sustained over years?

I think that's a different question. So far, the one that seems to have the most potential there among the suggestions I've seen is robotization of the workforce--but, again, that's not something we're expecting in the next president's term.

I could also see global population or water supplies or something related to cloning exploding again. Some of the other stuff, although important, is probably a bit too much on the wonky side....

Speaking for my field (I do research on fuel cells), I would say a pressing debate in the next decade will be alternative energy sources. As global politics become even more affected by the fact the fossil fuels are limited, the push will be even stronger for finding efficient and sustainable energy sources. Either big advances will have to be made in energy sources such as solar, biomass, or electrochemical means (batteries and fuel cells), or the world will be forced to dramatically cut back on its lifestyle in order to live within its means.

A corollary of this problem will be the development of even more energy efficient products. And not just electronics that use less electricity to operate. I'm also talking about products that take less energy (or resources) to produce.

Even further down the line we will have to seriously deal with waste disposal and recycling technology. As we run out of landfill space and as the third world starts deciding to no longer accept our toxic waste, we will have to develop products that can be easily recycled or broken down. If not, we will, again, have to change our lifestyle.

The question will be what people can and cannot do while we wait for scienctists and engineers to come up with technical fixes. Will a small group of wealthy nations be allowed to continue their wasteful ways at the expense of the rest of the world? Or, will the rest of the world start shutting off the spigot of their natural resources to force the wealthier nations to curb their consumption?

All of this can be filed under sustainable development.

As a sidenote: I think eventually someone somewhere in the next century will figure out how to fabricate some simpler organism (e.g., a virus) from the bottom up. This person will be labeled a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, and our definition of "life" will be challenged. This will undoubtedly leak into the abortion debate.

At the risk of giving away an idea for a science fiction story, I think experimental brain surgery has a slight chance of replacing torture as an information extraction tool and a moral question: Whether to use it or not and if so when.

Our knowledge of the brain is growing and it might be possible to damage a brain so it can't lie or refuse a question. It would leave you completely uncreative and emotionally dead I think. This might sound absurd, but brain damage can do weird things to people and according to This article:

When people lie, they use different parts of their brains than when they tell the truth, and these brain changes can be measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. The results suggest that fMRI may one day prove a more accurate lie detector than the polygraph.

What if you got rid of those areas of the brain?

Chris, thanks for clarifying what you are looking for.

My choice is an old one that seems to be returning. Nuclear power (fission, not the still-pie-in-the-sky fusion).

Here's what I wrote in my 1995 book Catastrophe! Great Engineering Failure--and Success (click my name for more details), marketed for ages 9-14 but often bought as a present for new engineering grads. (The spelling of Chornobyl is the preferred transliteration for my publisher, W. H. Freeman.)

Still, sometime in your lifetime, the question of nuclear power is likely to arise again. The designs will be safer, the plans for waste disposal will be better, and the concerns about other sources of electric power will grow.

Both sides will argue that we have learned the lessons of TMI and Chornobyl. One side will say that the lessons teach us that nuclear power plant technology will always be too risky to try. The other side will say that we have learned the lessons of failure and that we can succeed in spite of the risks.

Coming to the right decision then will be no easier than it is now, nor will it be any less important. TMI and Chornobyl are two spectacular failures from which we will be learning for a long time.

My crystal ball was pretty clear 12 years ago, except for the thinking that disposal would not be as much of an issue. (For those who are concerned that I am lumping TMI and Chornobyl together, be assured that the rest of that chapter makes clear the huge difference in engineering design issues in the two cases.)

This time, my crystal ball says we're in for a fight that pits environmentalists against each other. It's a necessary fight, in my opinion, and it should be interesting to watch.

Some sort of bioethics debate. For example, we'll uncover a disease gene or a "gay" gene or something that identifies and allows intervention in people's lives. The argument will begin with the value of "reducing suffering" compared to the harm created by identifying and intervening. A big issue will be who gains and who loses. Questions will be something like: "should we identify carriers when they're kids (or embryos) and permit decisions based on results?"

The controversy will include debates about whether testing should be allowed/required, who should be informed, and whether intervention is useful/appropriate/evil. Issues that will be intermingled will be societal vs. individual benefits and rights, privacy, ethics of intervention, and accuracy of the information (risk/consequences of false positives).

Ouch.

I vote for overpopulation and personalized health care (ie treatments determined by specific features of an individual's DNA), both cover both medical and sociological issues, which are always great material for news/controversy.

Space policy:
What about the Space Station? And what to do about Bush's vision of returning to the Moon and onto Mars?

Only comedians will remember it.

First, space exploration does not capture the minds of people or policy makers in a way that encourages politicians to spend the huge amounts of money necessary for such idealistic missions. Second, even if the money were available, robotic space exploration is vastly cheaper, and cases for human exploration are rapidly becoming less and less convincing, as the abilities of robot probes expand exponentially, while the abilities of human explorers increase slowly at best. Furthermore, if the Bush administration's efforts to remove climate science from NASA are not successful, the next administration may conclude that that is NASA most valuable service, and manned space exploration should be sacrificed to provide more funding for climate science. Beyond the fact that climate science has much more public appeal, the ability to make detailed regional projections of the effects of global warming may be only a few years out, and in a world were the regimes of most crops are shifting poleward at irregular paces, such projections have the potential to make huge differences in agricultural yields - preventing malnutrition and death, and potentially improving agricultural exports. Human space exploration has no similarly clear offer of benefits.

The romantic science fiction and space exploration fan that I was as a boy is deeply saddened by this, but I see no way around it.

I think we'll see a greater number of science policy debates, and the larger numbers will make it difficult for any one issue to seem as important AGW does today.
I'll mention one that hasn't come up yet in this thread: There may soon (10 years) be a concrete and more-or-less complete explanation of why people believe in religion. That will cause a great deal of controversy - the present evidence that the brain is entirely material is already causing plenty of controversy.

Energy.

Exploration, discovery, production, cost, security, infrastructure, consumption, efficiency, dependence, environmental impact, socio-economic impact, and on and on...

Energy issues are ubiquitous - and in an ever shrinking, connected, and globalized world; the (gross) imbalances are becoming ever more apparent. Whether manifested through climate change or the obvious dichotomy if a costly Iraq war while the Darfur crisis is all but ignored; energy - and the pressures to obtain or control it will dominate the world stage going forward.

Energy will be needed to solve many of the problems mentioned above - to turn salty seas into safe drinking or irrigation water, to power the robots, etc. But if it's not done 'right', will kill the planet via climate change, or very nearly do the job through energy related war and strife.

And in the near-term, discovering and agreeing on the 'right' way to address global energy issues to mitigate climate change will be but the tip of an extraordinarily ugly iceberg. For example the US points to China's and India's 2.2 billion emitters and cries foul, demanding they take actions to cut, cut, cut. But then China points right back at the USA's (as well as other nations') very high per capita as well as per unit GDP emissions and demands their right for an equitable standard of living, etc. This issue will be very difficult to address and the science (or rather engineering) involved on how best to battle the problem is nowhere near the consensus enjoyed by anthropogenic climate change itself.

But moving on from climate change we have the hyper-impoverished sub-Saharan Africa desperately in need of affordable energy to solve the myriad issues daily threatening millions of lives. Then there's Russia - planning to further develop its nuclear power infrastructure so they can sell even more gas to Europe - for the right price of course (or else). This has many European countries - particularly those of the former Soviet block - more than a bit nervous.

What concerns me the most are the major energy companies. The size and influence of these multi-national behemoths are comparable, if not greater than, many nations around the world. And to whom are they held accountable?

Climate change is the current manifestation of a much broader issue, but the global energy market is, without a doubt, the man behind the curtain.

My guess is issues surronding transhumanism. By transhumanism I mean our identities and sense of what it means to be human becoming less constrained by biology. This is a rather vague concept covering many areas including genetic engineering, robotics/cyborgism (personally I want bionic eyes to replace my crappy biological ones), stem cell research, artificial protheses, online communities, mobile phones...

I think there are already signs pointing in this direction. For example, in Australia during a recent debate about stem cell research, some politicians accused scientists of wanting to create animal-human hybrids. What scientists actually wanted to do is use rabbit eggs to grow stem cells instead of human eggs.

Such issues will be especially troubling for the christians that believe we were created in God's image.

1. We will be so successful at reducing CO2 that plants will be starved of the molecule and the florasphere (it's now a word) will collapse, resulting in the faunasphere (yep, another new word) dying of starvation.

2. In 2010 a physics major will ask, "How can superstrings vibrate when they're the fundamental building blocks of the universe?" This will lead to a line of inquiry which discovers what superstrings, branes, and all that are made of. This leading to an understanding of the universe which, by the start of the 22nd century, will produce new discoveries, corrections to the General and Special Theories of Relativity, whole new fields of scientific inquiry, and new technologies. It will also mean the end of quantum mechanics and 11 dimension space.

3. In 2025 physicists will realize that General Relativity means that gravity is not a force, but the consequence of the curvature of space-time caused by mass. That objects are not being pulled to a larger object by mythical gravitons, but proceeding in the direction they had been before, only the direction has changed direction.

As a consequence of this understanding physicists will realise that there are only three forces --- electro-magnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear, that we've had the theory of everything for some time now, and it means bupkis.

4. In 2060 the last company claiming to upload minds into computers will be shut down by the government and its officers charged with murder for hire.

Plausible but not perfectly-resolved claims that a genetic basis had been determined for some violent psychotic behaviors (or any other criminal behavior) will result in crackups over whether offenders are less culpable than criminals without the genes, whether offenders should be treated instead of punished, and whether people with the genes but with no proven convictions should be subject to special observation or even mandatory treatment (not to mention the fetal screening/abortion thing).

Similar issue if the same effect can be seen from brain trauma or neurological disease.

I have to agree with KLB8S. As a product of the Great Lakes region, fresh water has always seemed quite abundant to me. However, I've seen the damage of invasive species, pollution, and water level regulation first hand, and I don't see solutions in the near future. The US and Canada share 20% of the world's fresh water in the Great Lakes, and even these mostly civil countries have had their share of dust-ups over diversions, interbasin transfers, and environmental concerns. In the African Great Lakes, which are shared between several countries, the potential for conflict is even greater. As for rivers, most of the big ones flow through numerous nations (the Danube drainage basin includes 18 countries!), and effective agreements to manage the entire river as a system are few and far between. Water is important in so many ways - for drinking and sanitation, as a transportation route, as a source for food, as a purification system for human waste, and as a recreational area - trying to preserve and satisfy all of these uses will be at the minimum a difficult prospect.