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".