SGU Episode 888

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SGU Episode 888
July 16th 2022
JWST's First Deep Field Image
SGU 887                      SGU 889
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
AJR: Andrea Jones-Rooy, political, social, and data scientist; professor and Dir. of Undergraduate Studies at NYU Center for Data Science
Quote of the Week
Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
John von Neumann, Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Navigating Social Media, Misinformation, Pandemics

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 13^th 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening folks!

S: And we have a special guest rogue this week Andrea Jones-Rooy. Andrea welcome back to the SGU.

AJR: Thank you so much. Hi everyone. Great to be here.

S: Great to have you on the show.

B: Andrea!

E: Hey Andrea.

J: Hey Andrea let me ask you do you notice, I know it's anecdotal but do you notice that the city is actually kind of hotter now?

AJR: I think it's approaching infinity but it depends on if you want to use Fahrenheit or Celcius.

E: Oh it's a good point.

AJR: But it's very hot. I've been blasting the AC all day to keep it from like being intolerable. It just doesn't cool down. And I'm also actively the cause of global warming I think.

S: So guess which number episode this is?

J: 300!

E: 888?

S: 888.

J: Good guess Evan.

AJR: That's very auspicious.

[talking over each other]

B: Super auspicious and they would love this number.

AJR: Yeah. Well done.

J: It must mean something.

B: We're gonna get a lot of downloads in China.

E: Oh it means something.

J: Well talking about good things I just wanna remind everybody we have NECSS coming up.

AJR: Great segway Jay.

J: Yes I know. The fact that you're here and you're on the executive committee is it's I have to talk about it. So I'm excited because we have a really cool topic this year. The topic this year is navigating the misinformation apocalypse. So we will be talking in many different ways about how to deal with all the misinformation that's out there and people's experience with misinformation. And the keynote is going to be between Bill Nye and David Copperfield and I had the pleasure of talking to them yesterday for an hour about the keynote because they they wanted to go through all the different things that they could discuss. and we had a really fun and interesting conversation. And they have great stories to tell. It's gonna be a very fun discussion so I hope that you join us. Go necss.org and you can get your tickets there. Don't forget that if you buy the tickets you could watch the conference for up to 3 months after is airs. So It's available to you for a very long time.

B: Jay we've been on the air since 2005. Haven't we already solved that problem? Why are we still working on this?

S: Misinformation thing?

B: Yeah I mean.

J: Bob it's worse now. Arguably it's worse now than it ever was.

B:Oh it absolutely is. We have failed.

AJR: We don't know the counterfactual how much worse it could be if it wasn't for the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

B: True.

AJR: I mean at least you're damping it.

J: Andrea I would love to see statistics that would never exist but I would love to know what the world would have been like today if the internet didn't come into existence.

E: That's interesting.

AJR: You know I was actually just reading a study today where someone tried to figure out whether getting off the internet was actually gonna help people. It was in the context of politics. And they did this study in the lead up to the mid-term election when they were like, all right these people get off Facebook for 3 months before the election and then report back in. Not like a particularly well-controlled study. Anyway the punchline is they were happier. They were less polarized. They used Facebook less after the election when the study was over. And it was just Facebook. It's not the whole internet. But I was I gotta get off Facebook.

B: Wow.

E: That's interesting.

J: Yeah I have dramatically decreased my use of social media outside of the SGU. I barely post things. I'm barely perusing. I just don't wanna have anything to do with it. It just irritates me.

S: It's exhausting but at the same time like this is kinda my job though as a skeptic. As a science communicator. I mean how can you avoid it? The whole point is─

AJR: Steve I feel the same way.

S: ─we're trying to convince people of a more rational approach to the really controversial topics. Like just today on Science Based Medicine I wrote entitled Biological Sex is not Binary or the Science of Biological Sex and the subtitle is biological sex is not strictly binary. And people lost their freaking mind. I'm just going over the basic science. There's nothing scientifically controversial about anything that I say. But people, just the amount, the degree to which they are willing to torture their logic in order to make some semi-point. I'm not even sure what they're saying half the time. It's just amazing.

AJR: Well Steve I'm sure the science that you're writing about has been around a lot longer than the argument for the last few years that we've all been freaked out about.

S: Oh totally.

AJR: We've known about intersex people forever and ever. It's not like you're making up new science to defend some woke stance.

S: No. Not at all. Because that's what the people think. It's like it's also not controversial among actual biologists. Biologists who study this are like, of course it's not binary are you crazy. Here's a good example and I think that the duck-billed platypus needs to become the poster child of the trans community. I'd love to see duck-billed platypus saying that platypuses are mammals too. Because some mammals lay eggs. It's like the exact same thing.

AJR: We gotta put that on a flag.

S: There's no sharp line between evolutionary categories. Biology is messy. You cannot. And it just happens to be that human sexuality, first of all it's not all about reproduction. And two it's not strictly binary. There's a lot of mishmash in the middle. That's just a fact.

AJR: Well I remember the first time I learned we don't really know, maybe it's changed since I heard this many years ago, but we don't really know where our species begins or ends.

S: That's correct.

AJR: It's really hard to say.

S: It really depends. It depends on the species. Also depends if you're only including extant members or extinct members. Like some species all their relatives could have died off. And they could be all there by themselves at the end of some twig. And it's like pretty clear that yes that's one species but evolutionarily there is no sharp line. When did they stop being the same species as their most closely related other population. They're just populations. And populations are interbreeding. We had this conversation last week with an expert on dog evolution. He's like yeah they're spreading their genes all over the place. Like the idea of species. You can't apply. You can't draw any kind of lines here. There's too much interbreeding going on. You can come up with some kind of functional semi-definition. It's like pseudo-objective but it's like between planet and dwarf planet. We're just making up criteria that sound good just so we could have categories that make us feel good about ourselves.

AJR: And then millennials freak out about loosing Pluto.

S: Yeah.

E: There are dwarf planets?

S: But the reality just doesn't conform to that. So anyway I was just hoping to educate people a little bit about the biology of sex. It's not all about gametes and chromosomes. There's a lot more going on there. But they still freak out.

E: Well you did educate them. But that doesn't stop them from freaking out. So they have to, hey you learn in different ways.

AJR: Maybe this is the most naive I've ever said but maybe if we all just educate enough at some point we'll all come around. I don't know. Speaking of Jay of the conference I feel that this is a very urgent topic. Because I fell less confident about that than I did [inaudible]. For example when I was growing up which is like logical.

J: Another thing that we have to deal with though is that I feel like my life is infinitely more complex than it was when I was in my twenties. The internet introduces an incredible amount of complexity. And to a person that's wired like me it really produces an extraordinary amount of stress. So decoupling myself from social media and from other things that I've come to do on the internet actually is a destresser for me.

AJR: Well and there's also, I don't know Jay if this falls under the same category but just like there's the social media part of the internet and the voices and communication. But there's also so much more information that we've ever had to confront.

E: Oh my gosh. Drinking from a fire hose.

AJR: I used to have books and the evening news when my parents had it on. And that what sort fo like well I know what's happening. And now there's no way to know.

S: It's overwhelming. There's to many things to worry about. There's just too much bad stuff and nonsense going on. You do have to focus a little bit. All right this is my little corner of the nonsense that I'm gonna deal with and I just can't pay attention. I don't have the bandwidth for everything else. You know what I mean? To some extent you gotta prioritize. But you can't do that entirely. No matter what you think we have to be aware enough to participate in our democracy. You can't take that for granted anymore that it's just gonna chug along. You have to pay attention or it could go bye-bye. There's just too many things we have to pay attention to.

AJR: And they all feel and probably are very existential. It's hard for me to be like. Because I agree with you Steve. The democracy is a huge one. Climate change. Pandemics. Future pandemics. Dealing with this nefarious potentials. For this current one it's not something that I can be like I'm just gonna check out for a little bit. Because I need a brake.

S: I know. It's though. Because I'm the physician in the family and in the social group and I get a lot of these questions. So like not too long go my wife was doing this she's like okay so this person that we know had an exposure to somebody who was just diagnosed with covid. I just put my head in my hands I was like oh my got I'm so tired of these questions. Of having to troubleshoot everyone's pandemic exposure and everything. It's just exhausting. Of course I happily do it. But I'm just saying it's just constant. It's constant.

AJR: So I should save my questions Steve for after the recording?

S: No but it's true because everyone has to worry now. What do I do? Do I, like there's this updated CDC criteria about how we mitigate our risk and manage things. It's like just get vaccinated.

B: And boosted.

S: And boosted.

AJR: And maybe boosted again.

S: And then just when we get a handle on this stuff the monkey pox will come along and throw a monkey wrench into everything.

AJR: At least the name is a little more fun.

S: It's a little more fun.

AJR: I feel a little bit like we're in a movie.

S: I agree. It's a little bit more fun. The monkey pox. And we already have a working vaccine for it. Which is good. We just have to produce a lot of it.

AJR: And then we get to hear from all the anti-vaxxers why we shouldn't take it. So we have that conversation to look forward to.

E: Oh yes, that's forever now. That is ensconced.

AJR: Well uplifting talk everyone that's great.

E: Hey this is what we do.

S: But we also like to just talk about cool science, and that's mostly what we're going to do in the News Item segment of the show this week, starting with Jay.

News Items

Green Steel (11:10)

• The race to produce green steel

S: You're going to tell us about the race to create "green steel."

J: Yeah Steve so we're at a point with steel production where the industry is trying to come up with new technology that will get them off of fossil fuels. And it's interesting the information that I have to share will fill you in on basically just how bad steel production is and how far it needs to come in order for it not to be very bad for the environment. So global steel production right now it's over about 2 million metric tons produced annually. And that is an incredible amount of steel globally that's being produced. Steel is of course essential for our modern world and our modern economy. It's ubiquitous. It's versatile. It has amazing versatility. It is a corner stone or a pillar of modern society. So you can't really live without it. And we have to work around what's happening today to get to a point where we can move forward and not destroy the planet. Concrete kind of comes up in my head at the same time. We need concrete. And concrete production is bad too. So there's lot's of technologies today that needs to change and steel is one of the biggest. So there is a heavy cost here with steel because steel production create up to 11% of the global greenhouse gas emissions per year. That's huge.

S: Yeah that's a lot. We focus a lot on energy production which of course is the biggest chunk. Transportation and energy. Burning fossil fuels for that. But there's other industries that contribute significantly. Yes so like basically 10% of greenhouse gasses come from steel production. So that's a huge opportunity.

J: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean when we finally do get there it'll be a big game changer. So steel production over the years of course it's steadily increased and it's gonna continue to increase because every year demand goes up. it's estimated that steel production will increase by 33% by 2050. So that's a pretty significant increase. Half of the global steel production today by the way is made in China. The United Nations has said that industrial carbon emissions must be lowered in order to do what? Slow down global warming. So no duh. But there's a lot of industries that have to spend and awful lot of money to do this. And industrial carbon emissions must be lowered by 93% they say by 2050. That's a lot of time, money and consideration that needs to desperately be spent in order to slow down global warming. It's not gonna stop it but we need to slow it down as best we can. Steel makers are desperately now looking to find new ways into find low carbon technologies like using electricity and hydrogen instead of carbon-producing resources. So it's becoming a very important thing to the industry. And we're seeing large companies and small companies trying to innovate technology to move away from the way that they're produce steel today. Now this is no small feat because steel industry like I said is huge. It's a huge industry. In 2017 global steel production was 2.5 trillion US dollar industry. That's tremendous. There are over 6 million people employed by steel manufacturers. That's tremendous. So changing a critical component of this industry is very very likely to be a major disruption to a lot of people. And of course huge amounts of money have to be spent in order to make all these changes. The most common way steel is produced starts with crushing iron ore until it's pellets size. And we now what they do is while they're doing that they're also preparing coal. They're heating it and they're converting it something called coke. So the iron ore and the coke are then combined with limestone and they're put into a blast furnace. And a blast furnace is an intense, intensely hot temperatures. It burns the coke and the mixture becomes liquid iron. And then that molten liquid iron is then put into an oxygen furnace where it's hit with pure oxygen and this removes carbon from liquid iron and the result is crude steel. Now just in what I said there is so much energy being used to create the heat they need. And the fact that the way that they're making the coke, which is made out of coal, that of course has an incredible amount of carbon in it. You won't be surprised to hear that this process goes back to 1850s. And guess what? It produces a large amount of carbon dioxide. All along the production lines. Unfortunately 70% of modern steel is still made this way guys. So we're using technology that was made a very very long time ago today. So check this out. For each ton of steel produced, two tons of carbon dioxide are emitted.

B: Wow.

J: That's insane. That is a lot carbon dioxide. Now steel is also reclaimed as scrap and melted back down. And this accounts for the remaining 30%. This reclamation process uses electric arc furnaces and as you can guess this furnaces produce a significantly lower amount of CO₂. And we could increase steel recycling as high as 45% of the global demand. By 2050. But this would take a significant amount of government policy changes. And I think everybody knows not to expect that.

AJR: Yeah.

J: Because lots of global governments, big governments around the world today seem not to be able to get out of their own way. I certainly know that's the case here in the Unites States. Many companies have developed new methods of steel production that's significantly or completely lower carbon emissions. But none of them have been scaled up to industrial size yet. And that's, we've talked about this many times on the show. If you cant's scale up the technology it's worthless. So having these ideas and having some technology that steal needs to all that engineering and all that innovation that needs to be into it in order to scale it up. That's what's gonna take 30 to 50 years to do. And there's always a giant hurdle but at least the work is starting to be done to get there. Another major concern is that new methods are developed that they'll be reliant on electricity. Now why is that a problem? Because they're gonna be reliant on a lot more electricity in order to do this. This means that solar and has to be significantly increased. If the electricity used is being generated by burning fossil fuels there isn't much gain here. You don't wanna spark up a coal fire plant to fuel our green steel industry. It has to be renewable from the beginning. The renewable energy infrastructure has to be there to support new electrical demand. So experts say that we would need approximately three times the solar and wind energy generation we have today just for the steel industry. So that alone is a whole other thing that has to happen while they are augmenting this technology and making new innovations. They're also kind of waiting for the world to change. Another thing I read was that a lot factories have been built in places that make it convenient to get coal and bring coal to them. So they're not in places that are near where solar panels are gonna be and that energy is gonna be available. They've been built around the fossil fuel industry. Which sucks. Because that means that a lot of factories would have to move and all sorts of change. This will likely increase the cost of steel production. Because if these companies start spending a ton of money to make all this innovations that money has to come from somewhere. And they'll just raise the price of steel which consumers will have to deal with as that transitions is happening. And again governments could offset some of these costs to consumers very easily if they could just make decisions. And China also guys unfortunately is a major concern here. Because one - no one really knows what's going on in China. The country is said that they plan to be carbon neutral by 2060. That's a pretty long way off. But not an unreasonable date. But still 2060 is pretty far away from today. And meanwhile China has announced that they are building 18 new blast furnaces which are essentially the old technology. Okay you're building more coal fire-plants and you're building more these traditional blast furnaces factories. So they don't have technology to transition their steel yet either. And they're 70% of steel production. So lots of factors here guys. Number one I did not know that steel production was so bad for the environment. I had no idea. But right out of the gate. I mean we need steel so desperately. This isn't like stop doing it. We can't. We just can't. Society can't move forward without steel.

S: No. We need to find mechanisms of making it with less carbon. Doing it electrically is the way to go but of course that means we need to ramp up our electricity. Our green electricity production. If you're burning coal to make the electricity it doesn't help.

J: Yeah it's ridiculous.

S: So that's the other thing. We talk about decarbonizing our energy infrastructure but at the same time we are increasing the amount of energy that we are producing. And that becomes even more dramatic if you include oh yeah and we're also going to decarbonize transportation by having electric cars. And the steel industry by making all electric steel production so we're not burning fossil fuels there. Again we have to doing running the numbers we have to include that.

J: Yeah and Steve the backbone of the electric grid need to be completely revamp. And we need to start doing it now. Right now. We have to be ready for all these companies to be upgrading and changing the world over to completely to electric. And the fact that, I don't know exactly what's going on globally. But I do know in the United States almost nothing is happening.

S: Yeah.

AJR: Yeah. I haven't seen anything.

B: If only we knew how important this was 20 and 30 years ago. If only we knew.

S: Yeah.

B: What we had to do.

AJR: If someone had uttered a word.

S: If only scientist predicted this was going to happen. Oh boy.

AJR: I mean and on the China side of things where China's building sort of like old model because that's where you're like well at least some countries can start anew and China says well I'm not going to. I'm frustrated with that but I'm also sympathetic because I think China, India, other developing countries will say you all got to pollute like crazy during your development. So we're gonna do that too. But that's just gonna lock them into this technology for even longer. It's depressing on every level.

S: Technology is advancing. That's only thing good that's happening. But in terms of government or society or industry or whatever there's really not much happening.

AJR: And it is hard to imagine a version where we don't as Jay was saying either as consumers somehow pay more because the steel companies or the government steps in like it just seems like from a short term and sympathetic cost perspective it's hard to. The people who were getting solar panels in the United States are the people who can afford to get them installed. Even with government incentives.

E: Yeah it's expensive.

AJR: This is reminding me of a paper I read in 2010 when I think it was whenever when Obama was in power and gas prices were really high then. And it was some paper, economics paper that was like given the gas prices keep getting really obnoxious why aren't we seeing the market respond with alternatives to offset this high raising costs. And basically the punchline in this particular article was well it's so, there's so much fluctuation that there's no incentive to do anything long-term. So it's like yeah gas prices are high. We all wish we had electric vehicles right now but then gas prices went back down. Until now. And so it's just kind of punctuated pattern to that doesn't from a business perspective doesn't incentivize anyone to pay the cost up front. Maybe that will change. Maybe it will keep gas prices will keep being as high and we'll all have to change what we're doing. I don't know. But that still doesn't address the steel thing. And I just looking around just how much steel is around me and it's [inaudible]. I think 10% of climate issues are from steel and I think a lot of that steel is right next to me.

S: We talk about that a little bit in our upcoming book the Skeptics Guide to the Future. Where one part of the book is look around you. You're probably mostly surrounded by materials that we've been using for thousands of years.

B: Yeah, right.

S: Sure.

AJR: Yeah.

S: So there's every reason to think that we'll be using─

E: Cause it works.

S: ─steel far into the future. It's a good material.

B: It is.

S: It's not going anywhere.

AJR: If anything steel has been sort of green-washed from a marketing perspective to me or I think because it's like that's the sustainable, reusable steel this and steel that as opposed to plastic. And these things aren't free. Just like electricity. Still has to powered by something. It's not like it's a magic bullet. But it's tempting to think of it.

T. rex Arms (24:54)

• T. rex Arms

Getting Out the Vote (44:58)

• Getting out the vote in the projects: lessons from a community organizing experiment

James Webb Images (59:36)

• Webb Telescope Reveals a New Vision of an Ancient Universe
• Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam Image)

B: ...for this specific news item, and I came up with a couple: "Now witness the power of this fully operational Space Telescope; and this one's for Jay: "My god, ___!" Finish it, Jay.

J: "...it's full of stars!"

Who's That Noisy? (1:16:03)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Old, German aristocrat gravity-fed water fountain.
Noisy starts at 1:50.

J: ...Tom Scott's video on gravity-fed, decorative water fountains

New Noisy (1:19:42)

[increasing number of small animals chirping/twittering/squeaking]

J: If you think you know what this week's Noisy is or you heard something really cool, please do--just send it to me. You never know, I might love it. Send it to WTN@theskepticsguide.org

Patreon Reminder (1:20:31)

J:

Science or Fiction (1:32:40)

Item #1: A new study finds that smart thermostats, designed to save energy through efficiency, can increase strain on the electricity grid and worsen peak demand. Item #2: A new analysis finds that the probability of one or more human casualties from rocket body reentry is about 10% over the next decade. Item #3: Researchers find that intranasal oxytocin is effective in improving emotional sensitivity and relationship satisfaction in couples undergoing therapy.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Intranasal oxytocin
Science	Smart thermostats can strain
Science	More reentries, more death

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Jay	More reentries, more death
Evan	Intranasal oxytocin
Bob	Intranasal oxytocin
Andrea	Smart thermostats can strain

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:50:47)

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
– John von Neumann (1903-1957), Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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