JUMPING BACK IN

LAST WEEK'S ISSUE OF TIME had a very readable article on the problems of water use and availability ("Dying For A Drink"). The picture, from that article, is of Lake Mead. In 1995, when I was living in Arizona, this reservoir was full and now is nearing empty.
I have included the Web reference this in my most recent email to you. I also recommend three books:

Two are by Fred Pierce, a science writer, who has made quite a study of the matter,

"When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - the defining crisis of the Twenty-First Century", and " With Speed and Violence: Why scientists fear tipping points in climate change" (a more general examination of climate change).

The third is by Diane Raines Ward, "Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst". I particularly like this book as it gives a wonderful account of the great Snowy River Scheme in Australia, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority but superior to it in many ways. As mentioned in a previous posting, there is quite a literature on this topic; these are the most recent I have been able to get from our local library system.

Of course, I will be amazed if you all read all of the above. At least check out the Time article. With all that is going on...the world economies in recession, dwindling savings, the venality of politicians, and worse than useless waging of wars...I hesitate to urge you to read more bad news. Here in the US, it is clear that the next President will have his hands more than full. What can we do as individuals, we might well wonder?

It is really hard to know. As an example, would I buy the new plug in Volt when it becomes available? Oh well, most of you know I am more likely to stay with my 1991 Infiniti G20 which (it at 293,000 miles and I at 71 years) bids fair to outlast me and be my last motor car! Going with the argument...this car will be a "plug in" which means that you can recharge is at night and not spend a cent on fuel so long as you do not exceed the 40 miles battery capacity. Sixty percent of driving in the US has to do with getting to work and back and many will not exceed the 40 miles per day this car promises. Charging up a night will suit the power utilities as this will be 'off peak' power, at least for a while until millions of cars are recharging at night. Wind power will help as more and more wind farms are commissioned, and assuming that the power transmission grids will have been enlarged to take this additional quantity of power.

But consider that burning coal is environmentally dirtier than burning gasoline and, for the foreseeable future, there is no such thing as 'clean coal'. Also, until vast improvements are made in efficiency of cooling at electrical power generating plants, it will take more water to produce that power than is involved in producing the gasoline for the same energy. If we follow T. Boone Pickens Plan, we will exchange natural gas for coal, for cars and for electrical generation as an intermediate step while alternate energy production is developed.

It looks like that what you loose on the roundabouts you pick up on the swings, as the saying goes.
I consider that totally 'plug in' cars will be a huge environmental miscalculation and maybe the Pickens Plan has a lot going for it. Running cars on compressed natural gas is certainly practical as Australia has shown (where you can fill up on liquefied natural gas at most service stations and where you can buy a new car converted to run on this fuel). Notice the link between the fuel you choose and the amount of water needed to produce that fuel. In the case of ethanol from corn that is about four gallons of water for one gallon of ethanol (not including the water needed to produce the fertilizer and the fuels for growing the corn).

Maybe we are learning the value of conservation and moderation. US motorists are driving less and driving more slowly (or were, until gasoline prices fell to current levels...I bought gas at $1.75 the other day). Consequently we are using less fuel overall and our 'persons per million miles killed' has fallen to the lowest rate in years. High efficiency lighting and slower better thought out driving can go a long way, it seems, in conserving energy. As to what to do about profligate water use, who knows what will bring us to our senses?

Last of all, two bons mots from famous Americans:
"When the well's dry we know the worth of water." -- Ben Franklin
"Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." -- Mark Twain

A WEEK OF SNOW

THE SNOW CAME AND WENT AND THEN CAME AGAIN
This time, we got seven inches or so (that's about 18 cm). The heavy falls came over two days and we had about three inches late in the evening of the first day. I thought to myself, 'You should get out there and shovel that off the driveway while it is light and fluffy.' Of course, I did nothing of the sort and had to tackle four more inches sitting on top of the now heavy snow from the previous day. Never mind...nothing like a little snow shoveling at six in the morning! Ha...as I write this I am listening to the news from Portland where you are getting much the same.

For those of you who liked the Fall picture from the back deck, here is how it looks now. With the temperature down between 20 and 30 deg F, I have been thinking of skiing and have been at waxing skis off and on. As the snow persisted and stayed dry, I finally went down to the shed and got out my wider, back country skis and took a tour around the property.

Behold, cross country ski trails at Painted Post. Altogether, I managed to get about 200 yards of trails to ski about and those of you who might at one time have had a ski outing with me back in my days as a week end ski instructor might recall all that tramping about on skit to make skiable slopes might recognize this bit of work below.

I got about two days of skiing out of this. I took off to Pinnacle Peak Golf Course (Nine holes of skiing and tobogganing just now) this Sunday afternoon.
This is the highest point around here with great views all around but, alas, the snow was just damp enough to clump underfoot (well, underski, if you get my meaning). Lacking glide wax, I fairly soon gave it away.

With my trusty cell phone camera, I took a shot or two so you can get an idea of the conditions there.
There were about a dozen or so having fun on the slope below the clubhouse. No golf today!

Uma caught me at it in the back yard so Here I am...

OVER MY HEAD IN WATER...

I HAVE BEEN READING QUITE A BIT about what we are doing with all the water in the world. At a practical level, there has been a bit of snow clearing from the driveway and some shoving of snow from off my car. For now, the snow has gone away but the temperatures keep around freezing point. Yesterday (Monday) was an exception with the temperature rocketing to the mid-40s; I ventured out into the garden and even took Uma's scooter out for a spin around the block.

I suppose that one thing that retirees can do is to read lots of books that just happen to interest and then pass on some of that to others via a blog, which seems to be just what I am doing. I have been amazed at how much literature there is about our use of water. There seems to be so much to discover about this that I feel more than a little overwhelmed by it all.

About 200 years back, an English clergyman, Thomas Malthus, got worried about the relationship between population and food supplies. Dear Rev. Tom figured that, since food supplies increase linearly and populations increase exponentially, eventually there would be more people in the world than could be fed putting the human race into a precarious situation. I am sure he had no idea how may people would be on the face of the earth 200 years on. The Rev. Tom's ideas have been quite influential in several areas of science, economics, and population dynamics. He was a skeptic about the promised benefits of the looming industrial revolution and, while the grim conclusions arising from his analysis have been delayed in fulfillment, what with the industrialization of food production, the Green Revolution, and the like, it has taken until our own time for his ideas to have their full impact.

One of the 'and the like's has been the phenomenal increase in the use of irrigation in agriculture since his writing. Humans have been irrigating crops for thousands of years because water is like magic when it comes to increasing food production. It takes around 1,000 tons of water to produce a ton of wheat (and lots, lots more to produce a ton of corn) and, if you are relying on rainfall you get just one good crop per year. With irrigation we can produce wheat and other food even in the dessert, multiply yields many times over, and have two or even three crops each year from the same piece of land. So, if you can put 3,000 tons of water onto the ground you stand to get three tons of wheat where you would have only gotten one. Not bad, eh! Actually, completely astonishing!

The good old Brits got modern irrigation going in India about the time that Malthus was writing his stuff about how the world would one day run out of food enough to feed its growing population. Not content with just improving what the Indian farmers had been doing for thousands of year, the Brits build new canals, barrages and dams. When American engineers got wind of this, they got busy with irrigation during the settlement of the West. They learned to make even bigger dams than the Brits had managed to do and soon, using American methods, those Brits were doing the same all over their Empire and also in places like Egypt.

Today, 40% of food is produced through irrigation. Despite this being the Water Planet, only a very small portion is fresh enough to drink or to use for agricultural and industrial purposes. Most fresh water is under ground so, once centrifugal pumps became available, it was not long before farmers were pumping water out of the huge aquifers as well as diverting it from river systems and lakes. There are problems with adding all this water to the land that were not easily foreseen when the irrigation is started. A big problem is rising soil salination; eventually this can stop farming on the land affected so that the amount of land suitable for agriculture actually begins to diminish. This problem may not be insoluble (sorry about the pun) but it will take a lot of money to research it and change farming practices. Another is that we are using water faster faster than it is being replenished by natural cycles.

Still another problem is that the supply of water for human use and for agriculture is also diminishing. This is due to industrial pollution of water on the surface and underground. As an example, where I live there are considerable gas bearing shale formations underground. To get significant amounts of gas out of these formations it is necessary to drill horizontal wells (down into the shale and then sideways) and then to pump in water and sand to fracture the shale and allow the gas to escape and be collected. This takes a million or so gallons of water per drilled, productive well. When the water returns to the surface it bears the sand and lots of other 'gunk' likely as not rendering this water unusable ass well as polluting steams and aquifers. I am sure each of you readers know of similar instances of industrial pollution.

Expanding cities result not only act to reduce farmland by covering agricultural land by buildings, parking lots, and roads that also interferes with hydrological cycle as well as the run off, with pollutants, going straight into rivers and lakes. In the US, road surfaces cover an area equal to the size of Kansas, not counting parking lots that occupy more space than do buildings in most cities. Another effect of cities is to divert water from agriculture as the balance of population shifts from rural to urban living.

Enough of this! Reading in this area is entirely depressing and I warn you not to proceed. It is very hard to know what any individual can do about it, unless you happen to be a Maude Barlow (read her books).

Well, the thing is that there is a fixed amount of water on this planet (disregarding the minute amounts added via small meteorites and comets entering the atmosphere). Surface water is increasingly polluted through population increase, agriculture, and industry. Under pressure to grow more crops, farmers the world over are pumping water out of aquifers faster than the replenishment rate even while available productive land is diminishing. Oh...and then there is global warming possibly resulting in warming and drying of land currently used for food production.

This all too much!!! Maybe Malthus finally has a point.

AN ELECTRIC STOVE!!!

I HOPE YOU WERE AMUSED by the image of a small boy, long ago, wondering how an electric stove could possibly work. Within a year or so, we had an electric stove although my mother continued to use a wood stove most of the time, especially in the cooler months. So the daily drill of cutting kindling still fell to me even as my father, now home from The War, took over splitting wood.

A correction on the last posting. It seems that producing gas fuel from the partial combustion of wood products is alive and well here and there, even here in the US. What results from this process (in which wood or similar stock is slowly combusted at high temperatures and in an impoverished oxygen environment) is not methane but CO gas and, if steam is introduced, hydrogen. Depending on the density of the wood, each load in the generator can take a car up to 200 miles. However the conversion is limited to carburetor engines or diesels. Try Googling 'gas producer cars' and see where this takes you.

By the time I was a teenager, oil was cheap and plentiful and cars were becoming more common. In Adelaide, my home city, almost everyone used public transport to get about, or else, cycles. Every main street or road had tramway (street car) tracks or electric trolley buses but the City Fathers determined that these were getting in the way of cars. Traffic was slowed because the trams had right of way, as did passengers alighting from them. Also, at street crossing where there were trams you had to use a special turn that increasingly held up traffic. So all the trams were replaced by diesel buses. The only Australian city that held back from this was Melbourne, a delightful city that still has those trams and one can just hop on them for a block or two to get about. However, drivers still have to execute that weird turn. As you may know, in the US, the motor manufacturing companies bought up the street car networks and then closed them down! I wonder why.

At the time, this seemed to make a lot of sense although there were, inevitably, the old stagers who resisted this modern advance. 'This is not progress at all', they protested. After all, rail transport was converting to diesel, so why not make a clean sweep of it? And oil was cheap...

Despite growing up in the dry mid-North where water was always in short supply if you had to rely on rainwater, life in the city led me to think that two materials were seemingly inexhaustible: Oil and Water.

Now we have looming the two scepters: Peak Oil and Peak Water. In our energy based society, we are beginning to realize that it is not only true, as the saying goes, 'oil and water don't mix' but they actually work against each other. It take water to produce the gas we buy at the pump, the coal or natural gas to produce the electricity we use in our homes, and the natural gas for heating, and it increasingly takes energy to supply water for agriculture and urban use. Pumping water into California, for instance, is the biggest power consumer for that state. Desalination plants are mind-boggling users of electrical power.

Best to read the special issue in Scientific American Earth 3 series, 'Energy versus Water' to get a good grasp of this looming crisis; the URL is in my latest email to you. Fresh water turns out to be relatively scarce and is getting scarcer. In 1996, Vice President of the World Bank Ismail Seregaldin predicted, 'the wars of this century would be over water. It is the oil of the 21st Century'.

If this even halfway true, then the biggest issue to confront and solve is how to get more energy from wind, sun, and tide and less and less from sources that use up that familiar but precious resource essential to life and of which we are mainly made...water.

Thanks to my daughter, Elizabeth (who lives in Adelaide, capitol of the driest state in the driest continent in the world) for drawing to my attention the Scientific American article mentioned above.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

A FEW WEEKS BACK, I saw a frog. I was working in the back yard, tidying up some cuttings, on a crisp Autumn day. Suddenly, there was the frog, just at my feet! It seemed that it had been a long while since I had sighted my last frog. Reaching down, I picked up Mr. Frog (I think he was a little slowed by the cold) and together we regarded each other. After a few moments I replaced him on the ground and he hopped away slowly. Probably a little like me, this ancient frog, with a touch of arthritis in his knees.

A sign of the times, this scarcity of frogs, it seems. What with global warming, too few streams and ponds, and too many houses the world has become inhospitable for frogs. But a sign of what times, I wonder? That the times, they are a'changing? Now, when I was a lad (here we go again!) there were frogs all about. If one wanted a dozen or so frogs, they were easy to find. Often they kept you awake at night with all their croaking.

This week one of my brothers turned 83 (my other brother is 84); I bet they miss the frogs too. My birthday brother and I lived our first years on a small farm about twelve miles from a small town that was, in turn, some 85 miles north of the capital city; colloquially, we lived in the mid-North of South Australia.

How were our times? This was just before the outbreak of the second World War and toward the end of the Great Depression. You might think we lived a primitive sort of life. True, we had a motor car, and a truck, and our father had not long begun farming with a tractor having used horses in the early years of his farming life. On the other had, we had no electric power and had only a wood burning stove for cooking. No refrigerator of course, just an evaporative water cooler for keeping things cool. In the evening, our parents lit kerosene lamps. We were not cut off from the world however as we had a party line telephone and a radio that worked off a car battery (when you turned it on you had to wait for the vacuum valves to warm up so the sound came up gradually).

In America, and I suppose in the big cities of Australia, things were much more advanced. With the outbreak of war, an administration called Manpower sucked away all the casual labor left as men enlisted. My father found he could no longer run the farm and he too rejoined the Army. My mother moved into the town with my two sisters and me. My brother had moved to the city and my other brother had joined the Navy. Even in this small town, we were rapidly embroiled in the war effort. We knitted for the troops, collected all sorts of stuff to be melted down for the war industry, and wasted nothing. We grew our own vegetables as much as possible. Being in the town, we now had electric power but still had to rely of rain water collected from off the roof into two large water tanks. Alas, there was still the wood stove and the water cooler but now we also had an ice box with ice delivered! Each day the milk man called by, as did the bakery man. Every so often a grocery cart would come by or perhaps the haberdashery man. All horse drawn with the horses knowing just where to stop. The horse manure was prized for the garden!

Petrol rationing meant that only a few could continue to run motor cars; ours was put up on blocks in the garage. Some folk ran their cars on coal gas held in rubberized bags atop the bonnet (car roof) and others had gas generators mounted at the rear of the vehicle! How quaint! These used coke, wood, or coal to produce methane gas to power the car. The cars looked just like this.

With almost no cars on the roads, we rode our bikes about with complete abandon and virtually no road sense.
Looking back on it, I realize that ours was a wood and coal dependent society. If we had to travel any distance, it had to be by steam train.

Somehow we all got by. If something happened that was particularly frustrating, a common oath was, "Well, wouldn't it rip your ration cards!" Just after the war ended, the local electrical store featured an electric stove. We rushed down to see it in the store window display. How, I wondered, might a stove work on electricity?

ELECTION REFLECTION

ELECTION DAY 2008 was the first time I actually attended a polling station since becoming a US citizen. Not wanting to wait in line, the people in our house arrived well before opening time. I got to be the first person to vote and by the time I had voted, there was quite a line of folk waiting for their turn. I had previously voted but, as a Washington State resident, I had voted by mail (by poking chads out of an IBM computer card and sending it back by post). However, this was my first Presidential Election.

As noted in my earlier posting, I admit I was a little apprehensive about using the machine (instead of poking out chads or, as in Australia, using pencil and paper to record my ballot) but everyone was friendly and helpful. The machine was one of the older type and simple enough to use. Now, in the aftermath of that historic day, I have found myself musing on some of the differences between the two countries of which I am a citizen in the handing over of power.

Things are a little more complicated in this part of the world. The President is independent from the Congress and may not always have support from his own party even when it has the majority in the house of representatives. In my other land, the leader of the party that wins the election becomes the Prime Minister and is active in the lower house, hopefully busy on putting into place policies argued during the election period. It gets a little more complicated if the Prime Minister (PM) leads a minority government and has to contend with getting a bunch of independent members to support government policy. Even so, the PM can expect to have the support of his party. With the US style separation of powers, this t'aint necessarily so.

Then there is the long transition period between the election in early November and the Inauguration of the President late in the following January. So you have a 'Lame Duck' President on the one hand, and the chap you have just elected on the sidelines waiting to assume power. Elsewhere one week it is the current PM and, once the election is finished, it is the next PM...move out and move in!

When things are relatively stable, this ought not produce much anxiety...but, with things in crisis on the financial, and perhaps also, political front it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck just a tad. A urgent question seems to be, Having gone to so much trouble to get a President, how can we ensure he gets sufficient support from his party?

President-Elect Obama seems like a very smart fellow and very much inclined to surround himself with chaps just as smart or more so. He has the quality of listening to others, or so it would appear, and his Vice President-Elect certainly knows how the ropes work in Washington, DC. However, there are powerful senior congress members and senators who might easily thwart his intentions...not to mention that hidden body of government in the US, the kingdom of lobbyists. Let's hope too that the Fourth Estate, the press, will take the role of independent criticism of government and formulation of issues seriously. That would be a change from their performance over the last eight years. Rather too many of them, for comfort, are under the control of that ex-Australian press mogul.

I guess this means that we all have to be on our mettle and to be sure to give the new President the sustained support he will need to guide the US through extremely difficult times.

BACK TO COMPOSTING...

THE TREES HAVE TAKEN SERIOUSLY that this is the Fall. In turn, they have dropped their leaves and this means it is serious composting time for me.

After a few days, this task is well in hand; the composting processt starts with things looking like this; it doesn't do to wait for all the leaves to fall as this makes too much work for the mower. First, I set up the mower to mulch. Unless I am collecting cuttings, this is the normal setup. The mower chews up whatever it goes over and returns the cuttings to the ground. One has to mince up the leaves to speed up the action of bacteria already on the material. Leaves left uncut take forever to reduce to compost. After a run of the mower, the leaves look like this.

Composting leaves works best by including grass clippings as each has different balance of nutrients and one is looking for a proper balance of all nutrients in the final compost. In Summer I compost the lawn clippings from time to time but generally leave them in the lawn which grows up around them and returns them to the soil. As Autumn draws near, I collect lawn clippings in one of the bins at the end of the yard. Within hours the bacteria are at work and you can feel the heat of the reaction if you place your hand into the pile. The heap settles quickly and must be turned over to aerate it and prevent anaerobic bacteria taking over.

The next step is to set up the mower to collect the cuttings. When mincing up the leaves, I have the mower set high. With the basket attached, I set the mower lower so that it will also cut and pick up grass cuttings along with the macerated leaves.

Here is the good old Toro mower ready cut and vacuum. In the background, in the middle bin, you can see compost mainly from last year but also from the 2008 spring collection. On the left is some compost that has been working for several weeks (since coming back from Paris). In the right hand bin are cuttings done just the other day.

Here is a close up of the recent cuttings. If you look carefully you will see blades of grass mixed in with the chopped up leaves. All this is a bit dry (the bacteria love moisture) so I spray in several gallons of water for each six inch layer of cuttings.

This really gets things going and the heap becomes very warm by the next day. After a day or so the heat of the reaction dries out the mixture and I turn over the pile, adding water by layer as before.

After this, it is just a matter of turning over the heap occasionally to keep it aerated occasionally adding some water to preserve a moist environment for my bacteria friends. This only takes an hour or so and is good exercise. A garden fork is just fine for this task. I have just discovered that one can compost leaves inside black plastic rubbish bags. Rolling the bag about would make mixing and aerating the compost somewhat easier. If I have a surplus of leaves, more than my bins can hold, I will give this a shot. What does it all look like when the process is complete? Lovely compost like in the final picture. New York state is short on worms so I will look to introducing worm culture to the middle pile.

Now, doesn't it look just lovely! It smells wonderfully fresh and earthy and plants just love to grow in it. The pieces you can see break up easily in the hand into friable, rich dark potting material. During the Winter, the pile remains warm despite a constant covering of snow and, last Spring, I was not surprised to discover evidence of a couple of mouse nests. Bacteria were the first life on earth and constitute the largest biomass by far. The soil is full of them. In fact, they make earth into soil. We too are mostly bacteria and they generally treat us very well. It is nice to have them working for me in the garden and the compost they produce is better than potting mixture and petroleum based fertilizers.

ON ELECTION EVE

A BIG DAY FOR AMERICA...

A longtime friend wrote me: 'Robert, are you voting Nov 4th? Are you voting for the right person?'

Yes, I am and, Yes I think I am. If you live in the US, there is a strong feeling abroad that this Election Day will be one for the history books. It is my first opportunity to vote for a presidential election since my naturalization. Just figuring out how to use a voting machine will be quite a challenge (in Australia, we use pencil and paper, which could be quicker and certainly less expensive and, in the state where I last voted, Washington, it was all postal voting).

It could well be a day for the records in terms of the numbers of registered voters voting.

So we will vote and wait to see the outcome.

We have been enjoying wonderful autumn weather: sunny days and frosty mornings. How good it was to 'fall back in the Fall' last Sunday to rejoin standard time. Begun during wartime, long ago, Daylight Saving persists despite economic analyses suggesting that is does not save energy and costs more that remaining on standard time. At least the sun now gets up at a more convenient time.

The fine weather has extended the suitability of bike riding. Corning has some really beautiful countryside and, from where I live, I am quickly into rural scenery and quiet roads that often run alongside the rivers jn the valleys. Climbing out of the valleys can be quite a grunt, I do admit.

At the end of my last ride, I was lying on my back on the rear deck looking up at the blue, cloudless sky and the autumn leaves and suddenly thought, 'Photos". Jumping up I got myself inside and returned with my camera. So, here is what I had been looking at:


Once you get going with a camera, it can be amazing how that changes how you look at familiar scenes. Suddenly, instead of leaves to be mulched, lawn to be mowed, fallen branches to be picked up...there were scenes to be photographed!

The local squirrels seem to love this weather also. Of course, they are busy finding and burying seeds for their winter larders. Nonetheless, they find time to frolic about together in the sun. They love the breezes which seem to get them quite excited. Have you ever looked at a squirrel's tail lit from behind by the evening rays of sunlight. Their fur is amazingly fine and their tails are electric with small tremors. Almost as in the Spring, they run about, chasing each other up and around the trunks of the trees...squirrel aerobatics!

This pic eventuated as my favorite for the day. Luckily for me, the three trees in the yard take in turns to shed their leaves. This tree is the last and it may be several more days before all its leaves havel fallen. The streets are lined with heaps of leaves at the front of all the houses...except for our place where, at the rear, compost grows higher with each mowing.

Have you ever wondered where the squirrels go during Winter? Chipmunks pop in and out of their holes while woodchucks retire to the burrows to hibernate and to have their litters. One thing squirrels do is to construct nests made of leaves in the forks of three branches. This tree has such a nest, about two thirds of the way to the top. Also, while woodchucks sleep the squirrels may decide to squat in the woodchuck holes. The woodchuck are generous chaps and do not seem to mind the occasional guest.

We have had two days when fine snow fell, quietly materializing all around then melting as soon as the flakes found the ground. This sent me into the shed to recover my skis with the aim of getting my winter gear in order. Also, the promise of snow had me swapping out my snow tires. I am keeping my fingers crossed as such behavior has been know to send snow away. After election day, I plan to drive north to check out cross country ski areas between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks Park.

Happy Election Day if you live in the US and, if in Canada or Australia, enjoy the spectacle.

GLOOM AND DOOM III

I HAVE JUST READ AN INTERESTING BOOK: written by one of those climatologist types, Wallace Broeker, 'Fixing Climate; what past climate changes reveal'.

It is really amazing what these scientific chaps can do with a mile of so of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, submerged tree stumps, and lakeside stratifications to gain knowledge about past climate, reaching back tens of thousands of years. I recommend this book for your 'must read' list.

One compelling piece of information: each day the earth's inhabitants emit 80 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. You will perhaps agree that this is a lot of CO2! A great deal of this is recycled via natural processes but much remains leading to an increase in the 'green house' gas content of the atmosphere. Broeker puts the case that it is urgently important to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, given that there is little we can do, in the short term, about slowing the emission rate. Despite this, he is overall pessimistic about the chances of humans doing anything constructive in the next thirty years. We will become accustomed to a hotter climate along with some nasty stormy weather where it will cost the insurance companies and the governments lots of money.

This will probably make life difficult for Californians who are now in their third year of drought. The real problem for Californians is that their state has come to being during a rare period of wet climate that has continued since the great gold rush, judged by recent studies of climate change over the last several thousand years in the region. I hope this is not true but if it is so, they may be about to slide into a period of extremely dry climate lasting a hundred years or so, typical of past periods of greatly pr0nlonged dry climate. It won't help the rest of us much since theirs is the eight largest economy in the world and a very large slice of the US economy; not to mention that they grow a lot of what the rest of us enjoy eating. Watch how climate develops there and if you notice continued drought and happen to live there, plan to move somewhere else where it rains more reliably, such as Oregon or Washington states. This will not help those of you who live in Australia which looks as it will have to endure prolonged droughts as climate shifts.

I confess to being surprised at how the current recession has developed. I thought it would arise as oil became scarce and more costly. Given that oil contributes to so much of what we use and even eat, it just seemed inevitable that, as supplies dried up, so the global economy would stall. Instead it has turned out that, due to the efforts of some clever financial wizards in manipulating and disguising debt, what has dried up is credit. As available money has suddenly diminished to just about naught, the global economies have stalled and toppled. Consequently, we are not using so much oil and the price is dropping. If it falls far enough we will probably recommence our profligate ways, get back into our SUVs, and resume our former fatal course to ruin. Hopefully, this recession will provide an opportunity to learn better ways. Darn...just when those oil rich nations were becoming embarrassed, due to the falling price of oil, and were in trouble with their attempts to strong arm us with oil-diplomacy.

The slowed global economy will not stop us burning lots of coal to keep our poorly designed and built homes (from the climate perspective) warm/cool, depending on the season, our TVs on standby, our computers humming, and the like. So the CO2 will just keep on piling up in the air above us.

So, if you hear of someway of getting CO2 out of the air at about 90 millions tons of it per day, please send the 2009 President or Prime Minister (depending on where you live) a note so that she or he too will have a clue about what to do. Well, send a note anyway...maybe, when enough or us do so, it will be a wake-up call loud enough, a tsunami like roar demanding urgent attention.

AS GLOOM AND DOOM (G&D) CONTINUE...

G&D LOOK LIKE BEING ALL AROUND US for some while to come...so how about a little more of Paris? This post is about food...

A funny thing happened the last evening we were in Paris. After spending a pleasant late afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens, we walked back to our hotel to shower and dress up a little for the next big event: dinner at the corner bistro. Uma was determined to have the steak with pepper sauce I had sampled a day or so earlier. I settled on the breast of chicken. An interesting feature of the menu is that it had little footnotes about areas from which the meats originate; four areas not too far from Paris. Now...this is not an expensive restaurant, just your ordinary local cafe-bar bistro. Well, you say, 'What is funny about that?' OK, I am getting to that... but I bet it would be hard to find such footnotes on the menus of the cafes where you and I ordinarily eat.

The funny thing was the taste of the chicken. It tasted quite a bit like the 'chook' I used to eat back in days before supermarkets. Explanation needed here...the term 'chook' is Australian vernacular for fowl. As a boy, my family ran chooks in the back yard as quite a few folk still do if the local regulations permit. The chooks forage all about and do a great job of keeping local insect populations low. They also gobble up kitchen scraps and grain you spread about in the evenings. In the morning, you go and collect the eggs. When they ceased laying or happened to have become to be a supernumerary rooster, they were killed off and became a feature of Sunday lunch. For a special occasion, if you didn't run chooks or wanted to preserve your layers, you could buy one at the local butcher shop who might also have a rabbit or two for sale as well as the usual range of meats.

The curious thing is: the chicken you buy in the supermarket tastes nothing like those free ranging chooks. I was eating some last night, come to think of it, and it is hard to say just what it tastes like; certainly not like good old fashioned 'chook'.

I confess it was a bit of a shock to rediscover what chicken used to taste like...kind of 'wild'. Now I think of it, the french fries tasted a little strange too; they had a distinct 'potato' flavor! The French of course, above all else, are 'foodies'. They really value the taste of good food.

How about this? In 2006, when I stayed with a French family in Aix-en-Provence, we would start getting dinner ready about 6:30 in the evening and continue through the preparation and eating until almost nine o'clock, talking all the while and working our way through at least four modest courses. We never got to watch TV! Thinking this a little strange, I asked the other students at the language school about their experience. Oddly enough, they reported the same pattern.

I have referred several times to the views of Michael Pollan. He has a great piece in NY Times (October 9: The Food Issue...Farmer in Chief) in the form of a letter to the next President. Maybe, what with the cost of transporting goods, the rising cost of food, and a new emphasis on buying locally, we may one day be once more eating chicken that tastes like 'chook'. Maybe the old fashioned butcher shop will return, along with a local bakery where you can eat bread that tastes like, well...BREAD!

Happy eating!

A LITTLE LIGHT RELIEF?

AMIDST ALL THIS GLOOM AND DOOM, how about some frivolity…

The other week, Uma and I went off to Paris (France) for four days. Of course, we wish it could have been longer but what with the demands of running a business and the exchange rate, four days looked enough for us to get to do all the things we wanted to do.

Paris is a wonderful place to visit, both old and new and full of wonderful history. It was Uma’s first visit it (she wanted to visit The Louvre and to see the Mona Lisa above all else) and the third time for me (twice in 1985) not counting a brief transit on my way to Aix-en-Provence in 2006. We had perfect autumn weather, the sun shining every day and hardly a cloud in the sky. Our hotel, the Holiday Inn pres St. Germain, was in the Left Bank area and just a minute or so from the Metro, served a sumptuous breakfast each day giving us a good start for all the walking ahead (part of a great deal I discovered on the Virtual Tourist website).

Don’t believe those stories you hear about the French being rude or disinterested; it maybe that this perception is more a function one’s own personality. In any event, we found, with perhaps one exception, everyone friendly and helpful. And we got it all done: the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, Notre Dame Cathedral, Musee Carnavalet, and the Eiffel Tower (at night all lit up). We walked a lot, drank coffee and ate patisseries in sidewalk cafes, rode around and around on the Metro, ate at cheap bistros, sunned ourselves in the Luxembourg Gardens, and happily observed the relaxed life of Parisiennes.

One highlight was taking a guided walk around the Mouffetard area, based on the life of Ernest Hemingway in the years he was first in Paris (1921-26).

At left is the location of his apartment, his second after coming to Paris.This is the Latin Quarter (so named because of the concentration of scholars and schools where, in the early days, all spoke Latin). In this area you find rue Mouffetard, a narrow sloping street filled with vendors of all kinds of good, including food and wine.

The sights, sounds, and smells are wonderful. It is filled with tourists many of whom may have been unaware of the connection with Hemingway. On the right, you see some of them, typically eating outside a bistro in this street. No matter, Paris is fascinating from any standpoint.

Our guide was fantastic, animated and knowledgeable.This tour got me all worked up about Hemingway’s life and writing.

So, now I am back, I am reading as much of his work as I can lay my eyes upon. As I read 'A Moveable Feast', I could see the young EH walking the streets from his apartment (the first was just down the road from our hotel and the second was near the most interesting Gothic church, St Etienne du Mont) so he would have walked quite often by the building that was briefly our base , on his way to the Luxembourg Gardens or to Gertrude Stein's apartment nearby.

IN THE HEART OF THE FIRE

HOW MANY TIMES have you said, "Now if I could just write (say) something as well as that"?

How about Bob Herbert's 'When Madmen Reign' (NY Times Op Ed, September 29), his opening shot?

'I’m not holding my breath, but I would like to see the self-proclaimed conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealots step up and take responsibility for wrecking the American economy and bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

Even now, with the house on fire, the most extreme among them won’t pick up the fire hoses and try to put it out.'

So here we all are, at the center of a conflagration akin to a forest fire set off by a group of picnickers who wanted a 'barbie' in the woods at the height of the fire season. We are surely past the moment of finger pointing about who was responsible or who held up rolling out the hose. The politicians are in the crossfire between the immensely powerful lobbyists who aim to protect 'Wall Street' (say, have you any idea of how powerful lobbyists are?) and the sudden anger of millions of citizens who have flooded Washington in a deluge of emails, many expressing rage at the possibility of rewarding the incendiaries.

'We get the politicians we deserve', as I previously quoted. 'Can we be all that deserving?', one might quip. Thomas Friedman, in his latest book (Hot, Flat, and Crowded) traces the origins of the cumulative messes, of which the latest credit crisis is just one, in which we find ourselves. Is there a way out? The power of one activity has been strikingly evidenced this week...the power of email. This power had previously been evident in influencing policy even in China. But how should such power be used? Maybe to reassure the 'pollies' that it really is OK to roll out the hoses and start quenching the fire? There can be no perfect solution to this kind of mess. Maybe to pressure the current candidates to start saying something clear and productive about some of the other alligators swimming around us? Like the energy crisis, decay of infrastructure, the excessive political polarization of government, and the inefficiency of excessive urbanization are examples surely?

If the 'Bailout' package is the best we can do, then let's do it. It may not be, of course. Some 200 economists have expressed their collective doubt about this. 'Wall Street' will eventually bounce back and maybe doing so as I write. The freezing up of credit appears to be the central issue. How are other countries responding to this, perhaps by increasing the money supply as the main intervention. Is there a case to hasten slowly on a massive 'bailout'. Putting so much economic power into the hands of one man who won't be around for much longer, with no political redress, seems too lacking in caution. Not even in wartime have we gone to such extremes.

Remember the joke about the three greatest lies (The check is in the mail; I will respect you in the morning; and Trust me, I'm a doctor)? What are we to make of 'Trust me, as an ex-mogul, I can rescue us from this mess'?

Maybe we should hang on a little longer or find a means to graduate and review the course of this proposed intervention, certainly for government to retain adequate control. But not too long...the dog days of government are just ahead, where the trade winds cease to blow. I would like, before November 4, to see how the candidates really propose to step into action. Our emails to them should insist they become plain about what they plan to do about "change".

HERE COMES FALL

THE TREES AROUND THE HOUSE are beginning to drop their leaves, prompting me to turn over the compost and create space for new material. Hard indeed it is to believe that all the material from last year now occupies just one (of three) piles and looks like very rich soil indeed.
Also, here in the USA, we have less than 60 days to endure before the Presidential election. As a relative newcomer to this land, it is still amazing how much considerations from certain religious attitudes intrude into the political process. Also puzzling , not related to anything I have written so far, is the level of 'socialism' (whatever that may be) that is present in this intensely 'capitalist' country. Way, way back, President Nixon, concerned about the high price of food, instituted a change in farming support that enabled farmers to profit from corn no matter what price they might get for it. Now we have so much corn that it appears, in myriad forms and derivations, in almost all the foods we eat, not to mention being turned into ethanol so we can fuel our cars as fossil fuels diminish; we even feed it to other animals before we eat them. As well, there are tax benefits granted to many industries; it seems that the oil industry is a considerable beneficiary from government largess. And just this week, the federal government has had to move to bail out 'The Frannies' whose debt level is higher than the economies of many nations. So great it seems that their impending collapse was capable of stopping credit worldwide! Now we taxpayers will have to take over this debt burden.
To add insult to injury, it even seems possible that the Frannie masters who have run to ruin these two conglomerates may even be permitted,while shareholders loose all, to walk away with multimillion dollar golden handshakes. Socialism for the rich and powerful is OK but not, it seems, for the poor and needy.
Well then, back to religion and politics; those two unmentionables in polite conversations in the local (pub). Just now, one party is doing all it can to retain or increase support from the 'religious right' and hopes that the selection of their VP candidate will assist in achieving that goal.
I wonder about the terms 'right' and 'left'. In language, 'right' usually means 'correct' and 'left' suggests something to worry about. For example, in Latin, 'dexter' is the word for 'right'; from which we get 'dexterous'. On the other hand (forgive the pun), 'sinister' is the word for 'left' reminding us that this side is not altogether 'correct'; bad things, often unexpected, can come from the left side. In French, the word for that side is 'gauche', carried over into English, this is not an epithet one likes to have applied to one self!
Perhaps I am being gauche! There may be a case that a strong component of 'rightism' answers to the need for certainty, for simple strong action. We humans differ considerably in our tolerance for complexity and uncertainty. One does not find much fundamentalism out there in the left zone. Risking a fall into excessive simplicity, I surmise there may be a connection to 'capitalism'. Before Charles Darwin made us part of Nature (vs. 'apart' from Nature); we had a convenient, simple view of ourselves in the world, the world and everything in it was made for us, as we were made for God. For many this meant that we could do anything we liked with Earth's bounty, its myriad creatures and material resources, so long as it led to our aggrandizement and greater glory. As wealth became concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer there came about a dehumanization of the common person. Just as kings and princes could formerly send with impunity ordinary folk into war, the emerging owners of industrial might could send laborers to the mills and the mines.
Those were hard and cruel days, we will say...the days of child labor and of slavery, of harsh conditions in fearfully grimy cities; all gone now, of course, or so we think.
Even so, I suspect the tension between the powerful and the poor, buffered somewhat by a substantial and educated middle class, lies just beneath the political process. In the meantime, what will our resolution of this tension portend for the rest of nature? Now that we, having arrived at our present place in the world,are so collectively powerful and able to alter life on Earth.
Never mind 'global warming', just get down the price of gas! Forget the polar bear, the Arctic fox, and the Alaskan wolf; there are probably too many of them. Reclaim more prairie for cropping. For that matter, clear away the Amazonian rain forest so that we can grow more sugar cane to produce ethanol for our cars. Never mind that it supplies a lot of the oxygen we burn in our blast furnaces and cars and nicely tucks away a good deal of the carbon dioxide we produce. And hey, forget all those species that disappear with the trees, they are of no use to us anyway.
Gauchely yours 'til next time...
Roberto

IS THIS A TEST?

LIFE IS FULL OF TESTS ... imagine one of our hunter-gather ancestors setting off with his mates to hunt for game. Perhaps it is over a week since they have made a kill. Should they fail today someone of their tribe may die from hunger. Or again... imagine our pioneer ancestors, in the 1850s, arriving at Split Rock in western Wyoming, on the way to the Pacific lands, and contemplating crossing the Rockies. If they dally, they will be overtaken by the harsh Winter. If they press on, snow storms may catch them in the mountain passes.
Perhaps you have faced a test in which, if you did not take precisely the correct action, you would not have lived to tell the tale. For my part, flying has presented several such moments when only good training stood in my stead and... here I am, still telling a tale or two.
Speaking of tests, the Bible begins with a great story of the 'ultimate test'. Biblical stories often contain profound metaphors and can still teach us much. In the second story of creation we see Man placed in a wonderful garden, full of delicious fruits. He is told, 'You may eat whatever you wish of these good things, except for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The day that you do so is the day you will certainly die.'
The point of this is that there may be some actions in the ''garden' (our world) that can put us in great peril. For most of our history, humans have been much at the mercy of events. We hardly thought that some things we do might profoundly affect the way the living world works. We are accustomed to think that nothing we do will matter in the long run.
Glenn's comment on a previous post is pertinent (referring to awareness of climate change) '...how one can translate that into enhanced national "awareness" is a challenge for all of to think about'.
Is this 'THE TEST'? The BIG one...the one we all have to pass?

CRUNCH TIME: Part Two

WARMER...THEN COOLER seems to have been the pattern of climate change. How could this be? We have seen that climate change can be non-linear. The earth cannot not just keep on gradually getting warmer because, once heat radiated exceeds heat received, the temperature will drop at some point to ensure equilibrium. How this might come about is an intriguing question.
In the meantime, much of the worry about the 'green house' effect appears to be related to the rise in sea levels as the Greenland ice sheet and, to a lesser degree, the Antarctic ice sheet melt. The ice sheet over Greenland is up to two miles thick; should it melt completely folk living near the coast would have enormous problems, not to mention huge loss of agricultural lands.
Burning fossil fuels, especially over the last 60 years, has dumped lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while de-afforestation has removed significant carbon sinks. According to The Guardian (May 12), "Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years." In addition, some scientists worry that methane currently locked up in sub-arctic tundras will be released as these areas unfreeze, adding more greenhouse gas.
Serious as gradual sea level rise will be, a more serious, precipitous outcome is in the offing. Fresh water melt from Greenland enters the north Atlantic just about where the cooled, saltier water of the Gulf Stream begins to sink to the ocean depths to turn southward. Large volumes of fresh water melt drawn into these gyres and mixed with the more saline current, have the capacity to prevent the downward sinking by lessening local sea water density. Depending on volume, this could slow or stall the great ocean conveyor. This would produce a succession of colder European winters and summers leading to widespread crop failures. It would also cause the ice sheets to begin to regenerate, adding another factor to the cooling trend.
A cooler Arctic region, coupled to the now relatively much warmer equator would accelerate the climate engine. The jet streams in the Northern Hemisphere would speed up and move more northerly, bringing wild weather and drought conditions where we now expect to grow crops. During the Little Ice Age, Europe experienced famine due to crop failures but this may have been somewhat reduced by the plagues.
Remember that, prior to the Twentieth Century, most people ate food produced locally, a large proportion of folk being employed in agriculture. Nowadays, in developed countries, just a few farmers produce food for the rest of us (ratio: one farmer per 70 or more non-farmers) and food is transported many hundreds of miles before we purchase it. Widespread crop failure, in conjunction with high transport costs, could prove catastrophic for millions.
Our most pressing concern may therefore be a sudden increase in the melt rate of the Greenland ice sheet dumping enough fresh water into the sea around Greenland and Labrador to stop the Great Ocean Conveyor.
Could continued extravagance in burning fossil fuels bring that about? You can bet your life on it! But then, we are betting somebody's life on it, are we not?

CRUNCH TIME: Part One

THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE of the Earth has been rising, everyone agrees. Climate science has discovered that this has been going on for the last 25,000 years or so but with a hiccup here and there (for example, the Little Ice Age from 1300 AD to 1800 AD). The big question is, how significant is human activity like our burning fossil fuels in large quantities since the Industrial Revolution began?
Climate science also informs us that the past 15,000 years has been a period of exceptional climate stability, just warm and wet enough to favor the development of agriculture. Prior to this, our human ancestors had to cope with the vicissitudes of two great ice ages. There were not a lot of us back then and it is even possible that the human population was sometimes reduced to thousands. Our effect on climate was virtually nil.
During the ice ages lots of snow and ice covered the poles and extended down to the mid -latitudes. The earth received less heat and tended to stay cold. The regular change in the earth's orbit and in the orientation of the poles resulted in warming and the end of each ice age.
The atmospheric winds and ocean currents adjust the amount of ice around the poles by transferring heat from the hotter equator, the air and sea each doing about half the work. One current in particular, the huge current that contains the Gulf Stream, has attracted attention as it appears to influence the climatic 'flip flops' signs of which are found in the ice and sediment records. Climatologists have nicknamed it 'The Great Conveyor'. It is a massive flow judged to be as much as 100 times that of the Amazon River. Starting at the part we call The Gulf Stream, warm water flows northwards towards Greenland and Labrador becoming saltier and cooler. At the top of the loop, it sinks to the lower depths and turns southwards, eventually entering the southern oceans before moving east past the Antarctic and then up into the north Pacific. The final part of the loop returns westwards along the Equator, around Africa and back up into the Atlantic, warming and becoming more saline. A drop of water, taking this amazing journey, would be in transit for about a thousand years!
Should the Great Conveyor slow or even stall, less heat reaches the northern latitudes. The ice sheet will grow. Instead being warmer and wetter than Canada, making agriculture impossible, Europe would become cold and dry leading to crop failures. This could be the 'Crunch Current".

MAINTAINING FOCUS

CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN ADJUSTMENT is proving to be so interesting that I need to keep a clear focus. Let's stay focused on climate change and the interaction between climate and human activity.
Weather and climate change are not the same thing. Weather is day-to-day stuff while climate change is the stuff of decades through to millenia. The exception to this is violent weather that seems to occur over the several years involving a climate flip-flop from warmer-wetter to cooler-dryer, as the story from the ice core research seems to indicate (I hope you turn to those two books I have mentioned for the background to this pronouncement).
Relative to the period of the ice-ages (beginning some 2.5 million years back), human study of climate is startlingly brief. What caused the ice-age period is not clear; however, prior to this , the earth was considerably warmer. Scientific study of climate is less than 200 years in the making and has only made serious advances in the last 40 years. The average temperature of the earth has been warming these last 30,000 years. Back then, ice sheets covered 30% of the earth's surface whereas currrent coverage is only 10%.
Climate is the engine that transports heat from the equator towards the poles. We all know it is hotter at the equator and gets less so as we go toward the poles. Unless heat could be moved, it would be hotter at the equator and much colder at the poles than is the case. This work is shared between two abundant fluids; water forming the oceans and the gases that compose the atmosphere above the seas. The basic forces that move the air are convection and the Coriolis effect. Heating at the equator causes air to rise, move toward the poles, descend as it cools, rise again and so on, steadily moving heat as it does so. Land complicates this flow by getting in the way of the lower winds. With more land north of the equator, the effects of the lands on wind flow are somewhat different between the northern and southern hemispheres. Land also divides the sea into regional oceans. Changes in temperature and salinity cause currents to flow in these regional oceans. Land also causes the regional oceans to have different sea levels and to have differing salinity, in addition to different temperatures. Because these regional oceans are connected to each other, currents flow between them to even things up. In the nature of things, evening up cannot occur due to the sun persisting in heating the earth, so the whole climate heat engine just keeps on running.
We humans live on the land and, apart from wind (and ocean currents if you happen to be seriously involved with getting around between bits of land), are hardly aware of the climate apart from the micro-shifts we call the weather.
The average temperature of the earth's surface at any period depends on many inputs. When lots of ice and thick clouds abound, the earth tends to be cooler. The climate engine does not run as fast because more heat is reflected and less heat reaches the surface of the earth. When carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane concentrations increase in the atmosphere, heat is prevented from escaping by radiation causing the temperature to rise (the 'greenhouse' effect). During the ice ages the earth was cooler. In between ice ages, things warmed up. That the ice ages will occur can be predicted to some degree by variations in the path of the earth around the sun (causing it to be significantly nearer or further from the sun), oscillations in the angle of the earth's axis to the plane of its orbit, and by the temperature of the sun's surface. This was mathematically predicted before we had evidence of the ice ages.
Climate change causation is even more complicated than I make out and, even after the basic data were discovered, the development of useful models had to await the appearance of supercomputers to run the models that simulate climate change.
Although politicians make use of some results from science from time to time (Einstein's letter to FDR about the atom bomb and the likelihood of Hitler producing one early in WWII is one example), they seem nowadays to be more influenced by lobbying from powerful sectional interests. The rest of us have lost interest in science or, at worse, are skeptical about its supposed 'findings'. Until recently, scientific reports about climate change (if you disregard the occasional horror movie of episodes on Discovery Channel) got about as much regard as Noah may have received when he commenced building the Ark.
Well, this little foray into the science of climate and climate change is over for the moment. The next posting will seek to relate something of what has emerged about the great heat exchange engine (climate) and the effect of human activity.

CORRECTION

PRIMATES WALKING:
In my previous posting, I indicated that our evolutionary ancestors had been walking and using tools over the period of the last ice age (125,000 years). It seems walking has been going on, so far as can be inferred from the development of a heel that can support full body weight, at the beginning of the ice ages, some 2.5 million years ago! There is evidence of tool using from that time also. However, primate brains were much smaller then. At the beginning of the most recent ice age, hominid brains had increased 300% in size and the newer brain part, the cerebral cortex, had become much larger and elaborated.

CLIMATE and THE WEATHER

ONE OF YOU RECENTLY emailed a reply to a posting and included this comment: 'Watching the Weather Channel is now like watching a Hollywood disaster film...'
It is hard to tell, from the weather, just what is going on in the world. Part of the trouble with the weather is that it is so changeable and our recall of weather patterns (which vary in cycles longer than our lifespan) is imperfect. Unless, that is, unless you are a climate-oriented scientist who has been active in the profession over the last 20 years. Before that, we knew little about long term weather patterns.
This comment drove me back to two books I have read that bear on the climate and how the weather we experience fits into things. These are 'The Two Mile Time Machine' by Richard B Alley, published in 2000, and 'A Brain For All Seasons by William H Calvin, published in 2003. Richard Alley spends a his time helping dig up ice cores from the ice shelf in Greenland and studying what this can tell us about climate going back almost 250,000 years. William Calvin is a neurophysiolist, originally a physicist, who is interested in how climate change and the evolution of the brain and human intelligence might be connected.
250,000 years seems a long time and covers the span of two recent great ice ages, a good bit of the time that primates like ourselves have been walking more and more upright. It is also a time when hominid brains have been getting bigger. Modern humans have been around for 150,000 years, roughly the period of the most recent ice age. During this time we have developed tool use, tool making, language, agriculture, and finally industry. This intrigues William Calvin who wonders about how climate change has influenced increasing cleverness. I recommend these two very stimulating books to your reading.
The earth's climate has been warming these last 15,000 years, with a few recursions into cold periods about 13,000, 9,000, and 1,300 years ago when the climate flipped from warm and wet to cold and dry. These adverse periods made life extremely hard for our ancestors and lasted variously roughly five and fifteen centuries. Agriculture has only been around for about 8,000 years; before that we were all hunter-gatherers. Written history began about the same time and was well developed by the last cold period when we know that Europe became very cold and crops failed or were uncertain for a long time. Painters from this time depicted such scenes as folk skating on the canals in The Netherlands.
These ice cores (and sedimentary deposits in the lakes and the sea, as well as iceberg rock-rubbish dumped on the sea bottom) tell us that these changes from warm-wet to cold-dry happened very quickly (less than a decade). Rainfall shifted to higher latitudes leaving the deserts around the equator to expand. Weather in the mid-latitudes became more violent as winds became stronger. Maybe the weather is telling us something important!
Here is the paradox...global warming can lead relatively suddenly to catastrophic cold-dry periods when agriculture becomes harder and literally millions starve.
Lots more has to be discovered about how this 'flip flopping' comes about. It is sure to happen again in our future. Climate scientists seem now to understand that global climate change can be non-linear. At some point, gradual changes lead to sudden inversions. How does this relate to our modern focus on green house gases and global warming?
The significant 'green house' gases are water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide. We add quite a bit of the last gas to the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels. Keeping lots of cattle and hogs (especially if they are grain fed), not to overlook human activities like regular lawn mowing, puts plenty of methane into the air. Even we humans contribute methane (a couple of pints per day per person) and there are a lot of us contributing (oh, pooh)!
Here is the significant point. As increasing pressure pressure on the switch suddenly turns on the light or increasing pressure on the trigger leads to the firing of the gun so gradual warming of the atmosphere can lead to a sudden flip into cold dry conditions. This could well lead to widespread failure of agriculture and extensive famine conditions.
So, keep and eye on the weather and learn from the past...it has all happened before and not just once or twice.

IS THIS MY LAST WORD?

TWO OPINIONS IN NY TIMES this week could be of interest.

1. Editorial, Energy Fictions (August 10), concluding paragraph: "Here is the underlying reality: A nation that uses one-quarter of the world’s oil while possessing less than 3 percent of its reserves cannot drill its way to happiness at the pump, much less self-sufficiency. The only plausible strategy is to cut consumption while embarking on a serious program of alternative fuels and energy sources. This is a point the honest candidate should be making at every turn." The point of this editorial..."A toxic combination of $4 gasoline, voter anxiety and presidential ambition is making it impossible for this country to have the grown-up conversation it needs about energy."
2. Thomas L. Friedman, Flush With Energy: (Aug 10): He comments on his recent visit to Denmark where, since 1973 taxes have been applied to gasoline to raise the price to the equivalent of USD10 per gallon and applied these, along with carbon taxes, to the development of alternative energy. The result of this has been the transformation of a society that was almost completely dependent on foreign oil to one that is now energy sufficient. Friedman says, "What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent."

Personally, I would hate to pay $10 a gallon. It would surely change my driving habits. I believe that this sort of price will eventually be paid as world consumption of oil significantly outstrips production and reserves. Accustomed as we Americans are to amazingly abundant resources, living in the expectation that these are limitless and that somehow science and technology will produce a deus ex machina, a magical solution, that will return gasoline to (I wish) $3.00 a gallon. Is it really possible that we could get as smart as the Danes or that enough politicians will appear who are sage enough to grasp the nettle of our energy crisis? Could we really grow up and do so in time?

GOD BLESS THE MARKET, or

WHAT KIND OF PRESIDENT DO WE NEED?
Charles de Gaulle once remarked, "I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians".
Both candidates for the US Presidency are having quite a bit to say about the cost of motor fuel and what should be done about it. Almost everyone in the US is of the view that gasoline costs too much. Naturally, we all like to buy a commodity as cheaply as possible. When I purchased gas back in 1987, while traveling in Ohio, I was amazed that I pumped gas into my friend's Honda for around 70 cents a gallon; that was about what it was costing per liter in Australia! Of course, in the UK, it was costing around twice that per liter. In 1999, I thought it pretty good when I managed to buy gas for as little as 99 cents per gallon and got a little upset when it went up to $1.15.
Public Radio in the US runs a sage and thoroughly humorous Saturday morning show, Car Talk, hosted by Tom and Ray Magliozzi ("Click and Clack"). I recommend that you listen to it from time to time. When I first began to listen to this show, back in 1987, one of them remarked that gasoline was so cheap it might as well be given away!
According to many economists, when demand for a product goes up, price will increase and lead to increased supply, resulting in a lower price. As we are beginning to notice, when supply cannot ramped up, all that happens is that price goes up. At a certain point, this affects demand. In the US, demand for gasoline has fallen almost 3% compared with a year ago. In terms of making an invaluable and essential commodity last longer, in the face of limited capacity, this is a desirable outcome.
When it comes to world supply of oil over a long enough period for alternate sources of energy to be developed, this is just what we need. For good measure, let's throw in the dangers of global warming.
As I remarked in the last posting, the present cost of fuel is producing some progress toward a saner construction of society. It is even having some effect on globalization (itself a freak result of overly cheap transportation costs) for which see the article in New York Times last Sunday, Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization. When you consider that bunker fuel (for shipping) is the cheapest fraction of oil before bitumen, this is really news. Another bit of news is that even bitumen is becoming costly and sufficiently scarce to affect the maintenance of roads.
Actually, I am all for drilling to discover more oil and am glad that the ethanol-from-corn myth as the answer to foreign oil dependence has been debunked. I certainly hope that biofuels that do not compete with food supplies will become available as quickly as possible. None of this will lead to fuels that are cheaper than ought to be, in terms of preserving the supply of oil for the really amazing uses we have found for it.
Human society depends on energy and, luckily for us, there are abundant supplies of energy all about us that are being developed. These will not threaten our home, the planet Earth. Cheap oil can only get in the way of a truly energy rich society. We need and should demand for politicians who refuse to pander to the cry for cheap gasoline. However, according to an old saw, we get the politicians we deserve. So let's give some thought to the world we want for our grandchildren and their children, the kind of world we are bequeathing to them. Let's look for and listen for a politician who takes politics seriously.

WOODCHUCKS, MILEAGE, AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING

APROPOS of nothing much...I caught sight of my friendly woodchuck today, keeping to his allotted corner of the back garden. We have a visitor; a charming red cardinal. I think he may be somewhat north of their usual realm.
GAS MILEAGE: For those who think metrically, my 29 mpg translates to 7.9 litres per 100 kilometers.
SOCIAL ENGINEERING: I met my friend Walt in the library last week. Walt lives in what used to be the general store in a small town about 15 miles east of Corning. He comes down to shop, work out at the Y, perhaps catch a meal at the local senior citizens' center, and check out books and newspapers at our excellent library in Corning. We are of an age and like to discuss the changes overtaking our society. We agreed that we may be entering one of the more dramatic times of change and societal adjustment and that this will be an interesting decade, to say the least.
Here are some straws in the wind...
The proportion of Caucasians (whites) compared with African Americans is beginning to increase in many US cities; apparently, they are moving in from the suburbs.
Because US motorists are driving less miles as gas prices remain around $4 or more per gallon, the Federal Government is collecting less tax designated for the maintenance of roads and bridges. A quarter of a million bridges in the US have been determined to need crucial repairs and there may not be enough money to get the work done.
A recent Washington Post article (This Time It Is Different, Sunday 27 July) drew attention to unheralded events. One was the notice given by Valero Oil to its US refineries that it will reduce supplies of crude by 15%, necessary as the production of oil diminishes in Mexico. The other was the announcement by Tara Motors (India) that it plans to begin production of its mini-car (the Nano) later this year, hoping eventually to produce a million cars for Indians drivers each year. If this transpires it will boost exponentially India's consumption of motor fuel at a time when oil supplies worldwide are like to be beginning to diminish. Since demand is driving the rising cost of oil, this ought to be a 'wake up call' in respect to gas prices over the next decade.
Rising fuel costs will bring about a re-engineering of American society. Already folk are leaving the 'exburbs' and returning to the inner cities in order to reduce commute times and costs. Shopping mall parking lots seem less occupied; it may be that Amazon's recent increase in profits has to do with it being cheaper to purchase online than to drive to the mall.
Few of us, unless we have really read up on the history of the flight of Americans (and Australians) from the cities to the suburbs, understand that our culture (the large motor car, the large house in the distant suburb, the large centralized schools and their school bus fleets, cheap goods available from the large supermarkets with huge item-delivery miles from original site of production to point of sale, and the gargantuan food industry are all based on and made possible by cheap motor fuels and the huge influence of the motor manufacturing companies.
It looks as if we will be 'blessed' with interesting times as the price of energy continues to rise and we make what may be for many very painful changes. Hold on for the ride!

JULY ROUND UP

HMMMM....ALMOST THREE WEEKS since my last post.
UPDATES:
The Woodchucks: I went to work on the garden shed, another lair for the woodchucks, using the same technique as for the window box. I left one small bolt hole pending the arrival of the one way excluder I had ordered (who wants to trap an animal under the garden shed?). I managed to get all this done before the onset of the amazingly humid, thunder stormy weather we have had for the last week or so. This leaves them one set of burrows in the corner of the rear garden. I have not seen any of my friends since so I conclude that I have deprived them of convenient bolt holes and they are now appearing in my neighbors' gardens.
The Garden: Apart from the regular mowing, I have now two reasonably sized tomato plants safe behind netting. A new compost heap warmly grows. My compost from last year has turned out well and has been used for some planting. Going to Australia in May was a tactical mistake in terms of gardening as I am well behind in what I might have achieved had I been working during the onset of Spring.
The Motor Scooter: We had a bit of a slip up getting my driving test done so we are a bit behind on that project. I ride it around the back yard and sometimes convince Uma to do the same. She is improving each time she ventures her hand at it. My test on on the last day of this month; after that, I will be able to supervise Uma on the road.
Fuel Economy: As a result of disciplined concentration each time I drive, I have managed to lift the overall consumption of my ageing Infiniti G20 to just over 29 mpg since my last check.
Local Scene: For the last three years or so Painted Post/Corning has been the focus of a complicated road works project, the construction of a new highway interchange. I shudder to think what this may have cost (but thank you, Hilary Clinton, for this bit of pork barreling) but now it is nearing an end. Uma and I have made bets on the date of the completion of the last components which will eliminate all the detours and inconvenience of the extensive road works just past the bottom of our street. It is just about all done and it will save quite a bit of fuel just to be able to go directly to downtown Corning. The purpose of the interchange is to facilitate access to Painted Post and Corning from off the main highways to Rochester and Jamestown to the north and Pittsburgh and Washington to the south. Of course, the roadworks have occasioned the opposite to the detriment of local businesses. Everyone will cheer, Hooray, when it is finally done.
Congratulations: to my friend Pete Libby who completed the 200 mile or so ride from Seattle to Portland in one day on July12...his second time to do it on one day. Pete, and two friends, and I did the ride last year. I left them , after 135 miles, to complete the ride in one day and can attest to the considerable feeling of accomplishment that results from the adventure. All this pales in comparison with the riders in the Tour de France, currently nearing completion. Those guys are supermen on bikes!