Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: Science

  • My Hay Field Lacks Carbon

    It is amusing to listen to folks who seem to have all the answers on C02 and global warming, but have no concept of soil fertility and agriculture. My hayfield lacks carbon in the soil – and soil carbon has a very high correlation with soil fertility.

    My field was a lake up until a bit over a hundred years ago. Before it was a shallow lake, it was a glacial lake. Before that, it was covered by really thick ice. That means the soil is all glacial silt and clay, and it doesn’t have much carbon. Back when they used dynamite to drain the lake, they probably thought it would be easy to make a field – fairly flat, no stumps to grub out, and few rocks. The problem was that there wasn’t much organic carbon, some of the clay was a calcium sulfate rich vertisol, and the soil is pretty marginal. Ideally, it would have been in small grain crops every year over the past century, with the straw plowed in – but it hasn’t been. The other problem with glacial silts is that the soil is pretty well compacted.

    Basically, the field was covered by a glacier until ten thousand years ago, then covered by water until a hundred years ago. Modern technology (at the time dynamite) made it possible to drain the lake and turn it into a field. At the time, soil science was in its infancy – a hundred years later, we had a lot better understanding of the problems that I still face.

    Low soil carbon means less microbial action in the soil – and this field never had the chance to accumulate organic carbon. It has needed systematic agri2cultural management to build more carbon into the soil – and perhaps, if it gets those treatments over the next century, we may be able to get the top six or seven inches of soil up to one or two percent organic carbon. Fortunately, the ground is flat, so erosion has not been a problem.

    It’s sensitive to overgrazing – particularly in the dry, saline areas. I was lucky enough to encounter a Russian Wild Rye variant 40 years ago that wasn’t particularly susceptible to overgrazing by horses and cattle. It has spread, and, with a bit of encouragement, will continue to grow in the saline areas. In the wet ground, there is Reed Canary Grass – these two grasses aren’t preferred by cattle and horses, but we’re learning that goats really like the hay. There is definitely a learning curve to managing the soil that makes up my hayfield.

    So I think I have it down – in some areas, Timothy. In others, Garrison Creeping Meadow Foxtail, Reed Canary, Wild Rye along with Wheatgrasses and Idaho Fescue. It’s looking like a mix that cattle will eat, but goats love.

    Soil management in this case is a question of developing more organic carbon. After puttering with the field off and on over 65 years, my grandson introduced me to a key component – his two little goats love the hay we produce.

  • Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity

    I’m looking at reports of Artificial Intelligence citing things as fact “that ain’t necessarily so.” The basis for scientific method is to test assertions, that we need to verify our beliefs – testability is the determinant. Time was that bad air was believed to be the cause of malaria – we now know it’s a Plasmodium that is spread by mosquitoes. There are times when common sense just doesn’t go far enough to predict how changing one thing will affect the whole.

    I recall the lessons of the Kaibab deer – a spot where reduced predators and domestic grazing competition allowed the deer population to grow to a level where they were starving. The first level interpretation was that reduced predation would result in more deer. True enough. The second level thought was that the greatly increased deer population would exceed the Kaibab’s food production. True enough – and matching Thomas Malthus essay. Still, eighty years after these more obvious results were observed, later researchers were discovering the long-term effects that the huge deer populations had on the area’s Aspen trees. Biological intelligence and natural ignorance can combine very effectively.

    There’s the example of anthropic climate change – the basic number can be calculated. A gallon of gasoline is equivalent to about 30,000 calories or 114,000 British Thermal Units. Since we’re using – or to use a more nuanced word, burning – about 100 million barrels of oil annually, those calories pretty well have to be warming the planet. That conclusion is fairly obvious for biological intelligence. It’s probably just as obvious to artificial intelligence. Likewise, it’s fairly obvious that, without humanity and our recent technological progress, we wouldn’t be burning nearly that amount of oil. The problem is figuring out how much it affects things and where. Natural stupidity stops the thinking process with a conclusion that this is horrible and we’re all going to die. We need more analysis to better understand how much threat anthropic global warming is – or, if it might combine with the farmable lands in Canada and Russia to provide huge food surpluses. I don’t have the answer – but I don’t believe Greta Thunberg understands the question.

    The strength of an Artificial Intelligence application is that it can review the literature on a topic with amazing speed. The weakness is that – so far, anyway – the application isn’t nearly so good at telling good data from bad. It’s not enough to be the fastest – you also need to be the most accurate – and Artificial Intelligence needs to be protected from natural stupidity.

    c

  • Using Science

    Using Science

    I noticed a Dilbert cartoon that seemed to epitomize a lot of the comments I’ve seen on Facebook.

    The challenge is that there are a lot of folks who believe in science, or at least think they do.  The thing is, science is a method of understanding parts of the world, or universe, around us.  We call it scientific method – and skepticism even toward your own results is an important part.  I too am skeptical of the chipmunk understanding what he heard.

    Part of my job description included the expectation of “using science-based information.”  There’s a difference between “science-based” and “evidence-based.”  Court verdicts are based on evidence – and decisions often made based on a jury of reasonable men and women.  Science doesn’t require consensus, agreement, or a majority vote.  It requires formulation and testing of a hypothesis – and if the hypothesis doesn’t meet the test, it is discarded or modified.  If it does meet the test, the hypothesis is tentatively accepted . . . until a better explanation comes along.

    Sometimes it’s difficult for scientists to use scientific method in their daily lives – we all have this thing called confirmation bias.  In a meeting on hiring, someone mentioned the high cost of getting a computer background check through the police.  My comment was “Well, we might just require a South Dakota concealed carry permit – that gets the check completed, and only costs $10.”  The reply, from the department head (full professor and  Ph.D) was direct: “I can’t believe that.”  It was the week after my daughter’s 18th birthday – and I had just bought the permit as part of the birthday gifts.  My fact was solid – but there was no space for it in her reality.

  • Believing in Science

    After last week’s Do you believe in science? I’ve been pondering.

    My first reaction was that if you have to believe in science, you’re doing it wrong. Science, on principle, is not a thing to take on faith. It is a field of study that considers doubt to be a virtue.

    But here, I define science. Science, as a word, can mean a number of things, among them, the entire body of information humans have learned about the universe. It is also a method, a systematic way to study the universe, what we often refer to as scientific method.

    But these definitions are jargon, language used by a specific group of people and not by everyone. I was quite shocked to find that Merriam Webster’s first definition of science was “the state of knowing”.

    The idea of believing in science, still remains to a very strange thought to me. But in a sense, there are aspects of science that I do believe. I cannot read every new article that comes out in scientific peer-reviewed journals. I do not always have the ability to read them. A basic knowledge of statistics and the topic is not always quite enough. And, even if I had the ability, it could not be done in a human lifetime.

    We live in an age of information, and it is impossible to find the time to keep up on everything. While I can take an individual scientific study, read it, and draw my own conclusions, I cannot do so for all studies. In an age of so much information, there are many things that we must simply take on faith, simply to believe.

    ‘Do you believe the science?’ is still not the right question. ‘Do you understand the science?’ is better. But the question we really should be asking is ‘Which aspects have you taken the time to understand, and which do you choose to take on faith?’