Rarer than gold.

I went back to university today and, aside from being shocked at how early I had to get out of bed, I spent a large portion of the day learning about rare earth elements

Rare earth elements (REE from now on) aren't a particulaly new concept to anyone who has done a bit of chemistry or geology, they're the elements that sit on their own at the bottom of the periodic table with 'funny' names. What might surprise you is A) how rare they are and B) just how much we use them for.

Rather than write a lengthy explaination I'll let Molycorp, the company that essentialy discovered their uses describe what REE do:

If you can ignore the corporate tone and overemphasis on 'green' uses of REE then you should realise just how useful these elements are. This is one of the reasons they are so precious. The other is that, as the name suggests, they are rare, very rare in fact. Until the mid-1980s the USA (the Mountain Pass mine, California specifically) was the only place that they were mined. Now China is the world's leading exploiter and exporter of REE and aside from them there are very few other countries (Vietnam, Thailand and Estonia for example) that boast the natural deposits that harbour REE.

The mining process is, environmentaly speaking, catastrophic so you might wonder why do it? The answer is in the value of REE. As the list of things which these elemtns are integral to suggests, REE are worth staggering amounts of money. In 2011 for example Europium Oxide prices reached a peak of $1266/kg...

Being vanishingly rare there is now a danger that REE demand could outstrip supply unless new sources are found. As such the search for new REE deposits is increasingly frantic and the countries that posses them will find themselves owning not just rocks of great monetary value but also considerable influence over others. Next time you put on a pair of headphones, which contain stationary magnets made of the REE Neodymium, it is worth noting that you are, in a way, contributing to a power struggle over the most unconventional of natural resources.

Transocean cough up

The owners of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which you should remember as the epicentre of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill back in 2010, have paid out a $1.3 billion settlement to the US government as, for want of a better phrase, blood money. Vernier based Transocean, who are the world’s biggest offshore drilling firm had expected to be made to pay anywhere up to $2 billion due to their culpability in the explosion - caused by a wellhead blowout - that killed 11 people and lead to America's worst oil spill. Despite not being as bad as the company feared, $1.3bn is still a vast sum of money and the speed at which this has happened may well set a precedent in the future.

                        

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska leading to the oil spill that previously held the title 'America's worst', yet it was nearly two decades until ExxonMobil finally paid up. In 2008 the case 'Exxon Shipping Co. vs. Baker' was finally settled with the oil company paying $500 million in damages. This time round not only was the time frame much shorted but the damages themselves significantly larger (Exxon has initially been told to pay $2.5bn, a figure later reduced at appeal).

Does this signify a change in attitudes towards such environmental disasters? Perhaps. There are a number of differences in circumstances, for example Transocean is not an American based company while ExxonMobil is and perhaps benefited from some leniency as such. Also Transocean has not decided to appeal its punishment but has simply taken the fine and moved on. Perhaps the company is eager to avoid the massive bad press and boycotts that ExxonMobil experienced in the years following the spill in Prince William Sound.

However the level of public and political anger in the US post-spill may well have brought about the beginnings of a change in attitude towards the companies responsible for environmental disasters. Now that Transocean have been tackled BP are due to be taken to court this month for their culpability in the spill. Once that ruling has been made it will be possible to see more clearly if anything has changed. BP may also be a foreign based company but it has invested over $50 billion into the US energy industry in the last six years. Should they be dealt a large fine it may set a precedent that, however important you are as a company, if you spill oil you will be made to pay.

'Fossil' coral have their uses

From the Scripps Institution of Oceanography comes excited news on the climate conundrum that is El Nino, more correctly known as ENSO.

Anyone who has studied climate science will know that ENSO has always been a bit of an enigma, especially when it comes to the role it is playing in current climate change. More than other oscillations (such as the North Atlantic Oscillation) ENSO affects global climate and its presence in climate records can often be a smokescreen behind which the real climatic story lies. A recent study may have gone a long way clarify ENSO in the context of recent climate patterns.

The study, published in Science, processes data from fossil corals – I use the term loosely, the oldest sample used was 7,000 years old which is half a geological heartbeat – to reconstruct tropical climate in fine detail. With over 15,000 samples analysed it hasn’t been a short term project but the results would appear to have been worth it.

The data shows that 20^th century ENSO events have been of higher magnitude than those of the previous 7,000 years as preserved in the coral samples. However it also reveals that a similar level was reached, albeit for a short period of time, 400 years ago and that in general there is a high degree of variability in ENSO magnitude (described as a ‘noisy background’).

On one hand this suggests that current ENSO levels may not be linked to anthropogenic climate change. However there is also no denying that, as the project’s lead scientist states ‘…the 20^th century does stand out, statistically, as being higher than the fossil coral baseline’.

What is important about this new work is not that it confirms ENSO’s relationship to recent climate change (it doesn’t) but that it has generated a record of ENSO variation of unprecedented detail which will be invaluable in future work. It may be especially useful in helping to calibrate climate models which have previously projected a different pattern for ENSO.

(Here is what Science has to say about the study and here isthe study itself, from the January 2013 issue of Science)

Changing minds takes time

You may remember my piece of Hurricane Sandy and the subsequent summary of a peer reviewed scientific paper on the link between climate change and hurricanes. For those of you who don't a simply summary is that I am with science and Michael Bloomberg in being as certain as I can be that climate change will increase the ferocity and number of hurricanes that make landfall, with what can only be negative consequences for us.

It will not surprise you to know that I  possess no ability to influence public opinion anywhere in the world (yet) and as such while I find the results of a recent poll of Americans on climate change infuriating I wasn't exactly expecting the post-Sandy world to have changed when it comes to what is perhaps science’s hardest issue to communicate since evolution.

Look at the numbers. The poll (published in early December 2012 by Quinnipiac University) consulted a sample group of 1,949 registered American voters concluded that:

37% of voters think that Hurricane Sandy was a result of climate change.

51% of voters think the two are not related.

Of the same sample group, 66% of people are 'very' or 'somewhat concerned' about climate change.

The middle number is the most worrying. Hurricane Sandy was caused by a cocktail of environmental factors including extremely low barometric pressure and the collision of the original hurricane with a second storm moving east over America. Technically its causes (or direct causes at least) were the similar to every other hurricane. Climate change, particularly in regard to elevated ocean surface temperature acted as what George Lackoff has described as a 'systematic cause', a less obvious cause working through a network of more direct ones. In other words you could argue that the 63% of people who don't think Sandy was caused by climate change or are undecided are in at least some sense correct. It is the 51% of the population who refuse to believe, in the face of evidence, that the two are unrelated that is galling.

It isn't particularly complicated science. Anyone who has, for example, studied geography past the age of thirteen will probably have learned that hurricanes need a very specific sea surface temperature to form (26.5 degrees Celsius to be precise) and that for a hurricane to remain strong and continue to grow sea temperatures beneath it need to remain high (this is the reason hurricanes start to die out after they achieve landfall, they’re running on an empty tank). They will probably also know that climate change is resulting in raised sea surface temperatures. On the most basic levels then it isn't hard to see there might be a link, and yet 51% of voters in the country that leads the free world have missed a trick. Why?

Well of course not everyone has studied geography or even science at a high school level and even those who have may well have been taught differently to a pupil in school now. Go back to the nineties and anyone going through school would have been exposed to a very different grasp of climate change that the one possessed by science today.

You can also blame politics. The survey showed that 55% of registered Democrats and 30% of independents believed in a link opposed to 14% of Republicans. Stereotypically the Republican Party is often viewed as 'anti-environment' and it certainly seems that which political party you follow influences your view on climate change in relation to hurricanes.

Of course the main reason is still science's inability to communicate.  There is a store of convincing scientific evidence supporting climate change and while this may be enough for the scientific community persuading the wider public is a far more arduous task. We (scientist and campaigners) need to make the case for climate change as a whole crystal clear, give it figureheads and spokespeople and most importantly of all stand up to the sceptics who, to put it bluntly, are lying to people often because of their own vested interests. I am not suggesting that people with serious scientific concerns about the evidence for climate change should be ignored, that undermines the principles of open debate that science functions on, but I would challenge anyone to find a qualified climate scientist who is a sceptic and not also funding by the energy industry. Arguments that everything from sun spots to extended natural variability are causing climate change also need to be refuted and refuted publicly at that.

Once people are 'clued up' on climate change then the rest will follow. Inroads have been made, with the 66% of voters now concerned about climate change a 12% rise on the figure from 2009. The more people we can convince that climate change really is here to stay the more people we can educate on its effects, from increased hurricane strength to drought and everything in between. But changing minds takes time, which is the one commodity we are fast running out of.