Falling In The Water

In the South East we have had a long dry spell, the water companies are putting in meters as fast as they can and there is talk of water stress. These are in the very districts where Lord Prescott and his friends wanted to double the number of housing units.

Being a contrarian, this is the time to discuss flood risks, notably in London. There have been programmes in the past that have raised this question. Unluckily, they have been hyped up with raging torrents, tsunami type waves, life rafts on the High Street in Hampstead and huddled masses starving on Shooters Hill.

The reality is likely to be not more than a few inches (sorry, centimetres) gently overflowing the walls and going into all the underground and low level facilities. The overall level might not even be enough to flood The Strand. Even so the damage and disruption would be huge and very costly. It would take months, even years to sort out.

Whenever there is a heavy rainfall at present there are already overflows of the drains into The Thames sending Marylebone’s sewage down to Margate and beyond. There is a project to install a new Big Sewer to deal with it, but this will take some time to complete. Down river where walls and defences end there will be larger problems.

We know what it would take. A season of high tides, a stiff Nor’ Easter and a period of steady, sometimes heavy rain that goes on a lot longer than anticipated. We have seen some bad floods in recent years; it takes only an unlucky combination. The experts tell us that these events only happen statistically at rare intervals. Earth, sadly takes little notice of the long range forecasts.

We are not yet rushing to the Outdoor Activity shop to buy our Sou’ Westers or rehearsing our Tribute Fisherman’s Friends routine, but only guessing what could happen when. If anything, it is more difficult than forecasting the Atlantic Hurricanes. There is enough debate on this year’s Hurricane season to put any shaman off his entrails.

Just out of interest and looking at the tables and patterns, clearly there are several options of “windows” in the next decade and it is possible that none of them will see anything like this. But it is intriguing to play the guessing games. There are dates that are all too possible if one applies the law that if things can go wrong then they will go wrong.

My first date on the list is Spring 2012.

Whither The Weather?

Yesterday, Saturday 15 January, in the “Guardian” Environment section, Dr. Germaine Greer delivered a brutal analysis on the matter of the Queensland disaster, “ Australian Floods, Why Were We So Surprised?”. She is stranded up a mountain there at present attempting to save the rain forest. One of the factors in the flooding has been the deforestation in the territory.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/15/australian-floods-queensland-germaine-greer?INTCMP=SRCH

Along with this, she suggests is the usual mix of human greed, stupidity, short sightedness and failure to comprehend the nature of complex events or to plan or deal with them effectively.

Elsewhere, “Naked Capitalism” worries about other consequences of the present floods in economic terms, there could be nasty price effects and strain on the finances of some countries.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/01/la-nina-as-black-swan-%e2%80%93-energy-food-prices-and-chinese-economy-among-likely-casualites-2.html

The “Black Swan” is nothing to do with the new film about ballet or even the much better pirate film of 1942 about Henry Morgan, starring Tyrone Power, but refers to the concept developed by Nassim Taleb, Black Swan Events which means that the unexpected or unbelievable might just be out there waiting to happen, as in the discovery in Australia of black swans, before then held to be always white.

Meanwhile on Friday 14 January , Science Daily (the source of much of Daily Mail stuff, many of whose interns do not really understand it) put up an article from the Journal of Sciences, taking the longer view of climate and weather which gives context. Climate/weather patterns can and do change and have changed. Judging which way we are going is more complicated.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110113082627.htm

All this is a rich source for debate on many matters. What is happening at present may simply be predictable glitches and occurrences with an existing pattern, or it could be the first signs of larger scale change in progress.

But I can say with confidence that in the foreseeable future, I and others like me, will be worse off and suffer a great deal of inconvenience.

Climate Change - Back To Basics

A current row in the general debate on Climate Change has arisen over the research and data and whether the costly proposals over carbon emission make sense. However, in Science Daily today I saw what may be a much more reliable way of seeking information.

The little chap above, it seems has all the answers. In the meantime I will stick to volcano watching.

Quote:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 13, 2010) — Scientists at the University of Leicester are using an unusual resource to investigate ancient climates, prehistoric animal urine.

The animal in question is the rock hyrax, a common species in countries such as Namibia and Botswana. They look like large guinea pigs but are actually related to the elephant. Hyraxes use specific locations as communal toilets, some of which have been used by generations of animals for thousands of years.

The urine crystallises and builds up in stratified accumulations known as 'middens', providing a previously untapped resource for studying long-term climate change.

Funding from the Leverhulme Trust and, more recently, the European Research Council has allowed the Leicester group to join an international team led by Dr Brian Chase, from the Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier, to study these unique deposits.

With Dr Chase, Drs Andrew Carr and Arnoud Boom from the University of Leicester's Department of Geography are engaged in exploring novel records of past environmental change preserved within the middens.

Their work has recently been published in the journals Quaternary Research, Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology and Geology.

"In order to study past environmental changes scientists typically acquire samples from deposits laid down in bogs or lakes, within which organic matter, which can be dated is preserved," explains Dr Carr.

"But in dryland environments such as southern Africa this isn't possible. Fortunately it seems that hyrax urine preserves organic matter over timescales of tens of thousands of years, which provides remarkable insights into past environmental changes within the hyrax habitat."

Obtaining the material is not easy and Dr Chase is an experienced rock-climber, which allows him to reach middens that are often otherwise inaccessible. The middens form extremely tough deposits, which have to then be cut from the rocks with an angle grinder.

Using forensic techniques the Leicester group has been able to identify the individual organic molecules preserved in the middens; these include compounds produced by the hyraxes' metabolism and plant-derived molecules which passed through the animals' digestive system.

These 'biomarkers' provide clues as to the kind of plants the animals were eating and therefore the sort of environment they were living in. The biomarkers thus reveal insights into how the climate of the region has changed during the last 30,000 years, with a potential accuracy of a few decades to centuries.

"Palaeoenvironmental records in this area were fragmentary," says Dr Carr. "The middens are providing unique terrestrial records to compare against nearby deep ocean-core records, allowing us to think in much more detail about what drives African climate change.

"This is a very dynamic environment, and it appears that that the region's climate changed in a complex manner during and after the last global Ice Age (around 20,000 years ago).

The next step, which is part of Dr Chase's new research project, will be to compare the midden data against simulations of past climates generated by GCMs [computer-based general circulation models that are used to simulate both past and future climates] to evaluate their performance and explore why climates have changed the way they have."

Although the rock hyrax middens have been previously used to study pollen, this is the first time that their full potential to document the region's climate has been explored. Drs Chase, Carr, Boom and their colleagues have already a number of scientific papers on hyrax urine, with more in production.

The research has been announced in the month when the University celebrates its Big Green Week (October 25-31) signalling the University's commitment to carbon reduction and highlighting research that has an environmental impact.

Unquote.

The answer lies in the soil.

Climate, Weather, Hot, Cold, Wet and Dry.

The present is a tunnel between the past and the future. It might be more or less lit and we think we know our immediate direction and route. Otherwise what is going on outside is beyond our most frantic efforts. Moreover, the carriage is full of people who think they know and are shouting their opinions as loudly as they can. The great majority will turn out to be hopelessly wrong.

The future is something we do not know. Unluckily very many of those shouting the loudest think they do. They base their thinking on perhaps vague opinions, gossip of either higher or lower order, information from more or less reliable expert sources, ideas and ideologies they subscribe to, organisations they are members of or are employed by, even worse what they would like the future to be, worse still to exercise authority in science, learning, or what, and worst of all politicians in association with commercial entities looking to improve their poll ratings and earnings ratios and to increase their powers.

This is where we are at in the current debate on the future of the climate of our planet. The planet, however, may have its own ideas and will not communicate them but its working will give signals to those capable of interpreting them. There are few able to do so because the planet is a highly complex system many of whose secrets and ways of reacting are still either little understood or even unknown. It is only very recently that humans have probed the deepest waters and begun to learn what is there and what its potentialities are. We are still mystified by the implications of much of what goes on in geophysics.

This is why there is a great deal of effort devoted to examining the recent and the distant past. In the last half century many branches of science have had leaps of understanding due to new scientific and analytical techniques. There are too many to list. Working my way through the web and looking at even the most banal documentaries on TV tells me that the past I was taught and how the past is seen now has changed radically and is undergoing continuing reassessment. As so much of the climate debate turns on what is thought to be experience of the past, if the past itself is under scrutiny and perceptions alter, even that needs great care in interpretation and even greater in use for attempting forecasts.

We do know that in the Atlantic Isles there was a time when it was tropical and the flora and fauna very different. One of these times was when the deposits were laid down that became the coal we have plundered so much of to build our current vision of humanity in association with oils also relics of a past era of the planet. Along with the debate on climate we are now debating if and when “peak oil” is reached. Another debate is over the whole nature of the primary extractive industries. Is it simply a question of how much there is of it and where or is the critical issue the marginal cost of extraction? Did the Romans fail to take advantage of coal because it cost just too much in terms of their economic structure to extract and transport?

There have been changes even more recently. There are Bronze Iron Age remains below the waters of The Solent. The Atlantic Isles were once part of the mainland of Europe before the Dogger Bank was flooded and the Channel breached since the recent Ice Age. What shifts occurred before our recorded history? Why did the green Sahara become a desert? Did radical earth events in the Mediterranean have wider effects? Then there were the 6th Century events. There was the Medieval Warm Age, the Little Ice Age more recently and comings and goings in the general weather. At present there seems to have been a shift in the Jet Stream and the North Atlantic Oscillation has merged with the West Newfoundland Current as well as the effects of an El Nino. What comes next year is open to debate.

We have the horde heading in the direction of Global Warming and there does appear to be a lot of evidence in its favour. There are dissenters, candidates for the academic and political stake, claiming that Global Cooling is an equal or better prospect and they have a lot of cogent evidence as well. Much of it is the same if you believe that a period of warming is necessary to create conditions for a catastrophic cooling. If we have difficulty working out how to deal with hurricanes, a common and relatively predictable phenomenon, then we have problems. As with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, photo above, courtesy of one of the family who was there.

There are those in between who have an innate distrust of experts and propagandists trying to work out their own ideas. Then there are the majority who do not know and care only if it impacts on their own convenience or on the lifestyle and consumption patterns they have been instructed to obey according to their defined market segment. Meanwhile I am looking out of the window at a bright sun looking down at the snow left by a fall of a few minutes ago and about to check out the forecasts for Saturday to see if the trains will be running.

That is the only certainty in life, if the weather becomes quite hot, quite cold or quite wet, the trains will stop.

Copenhagen - Wonderful Queen Of The Sea

It was thirty years in November since I visited Copenhagen on an official thing. It was cold, wet, with snow showers and I needed the extra clothes. It made me believe the contemporary scientific theory of a period of Global Cooling. I had a good few days meeting and talking with interesting people. One best bit was a lunch at the Folketing, their Parliament, with a fine schnapps with cold beers when the politicians had to go off to urgent business and left it all for us to finish.

Expenses in those days were different. There was a fixed figure to cover the economy class air fare from London to Copenhagen and the modern equivalent would be around £3000. The other expenses were down to the individual. I managed to contain the travel, hotel, and sundry other costs within the figure by a surface travel package, Harwich to Ebsjerg and rail to Copenhagen. This took a lot longer, but was more scenic. It was less than fun coming back when the ship hit a Force 10 gale in the North Sea. I wobbled for days afterwards.

Many of the leaders of the world are in Copenhagen to talk about Global Warming and what can be done, if anything. Some will be trying to emulate Lord Nelson, who at the Battle of Copenhagen, is said to have put a telescope to his blind eye to claim that he was unable to see the signal telling him to withdraw, and went on to win. Others will be doing deals, at the behest of their favoured lobbyists. Others will sign up to measures and then go away and do either the reverse or nothing.

The meetings of world leaders are becoming a travelling circus where the turns are all too predictable and which give little value for money. Quite what the total carbon emissions are is impossible to calculate but they will not help much. One aspect is that all or nearly all will travel by air. If anything is contributing to climate warming it might be air travel, because there is so much more of it, and a reason for that is the huge reduction in the real cost of fares since 1979.

There are other things impossible to control if human activity is at the root of the problem. In that thirty years the world population has increased substantially, it is now more urbanised, and more societies and peoples are dependent on distant supplies largely trucked, air or sea freighted, all of which burn fuels. Quite what major reductions can be made here will not be discussed. Inevitably, the more people, the more scope for intercontinental movement; as happens when long term droughts occur.

People have votes and politicians want more of them. We have learned recently that the Blair government was importing migrants as future Labour voters at the same time as cutting back on UK agriculture, claiming there was never going to be a problem with food security, reducing the number of hospital beds and maternity services, and making major economies in the care for the aged.

One source I have seen suggests that to have some sort of effective climate control means that the world should have been opening a new nuclear power station each day for a little time now, and for some time into the future. Apart from the obvious problems there is the question of the supply of uranium, which may not be up to it.

This will not happen, nor anything like it. While the USA is marching through Afghanistan much of its power infrastructure is deteriorating, many of its people depend on food stamps, it is seriously in debt, and now drought is being forecast in the West. The start of withdrawal is timed for shortly before the caucuses begin to meet at the outset of the next US Presidential election campaigns.

There is a great deal of discussion and information suggesting that a warming might be taking place, whether or not humans have much to do with it. When I am still walking around outside perspiring in my shirt sleeves in December, it seems to be possible. It is difficult to believe that the current scale of human activity does not have some sort of effect, if only to make a large part of the Pacific Ocean a rubbish dump. But Earth has its own ways, and it is uncertainty that we have to be prepared for.

The picture above is one of the ship museum at Roskilde in 1979, new then to show the Viking trading ships recovered from the fiord there. They dated back to the early part of the Medieval Warm Period, and the timbers are now known to be from the vicinity of Dublin in Ireland. In the 1970’s they were assumed to be Scandinavian. The ships are the same but the science and its interpretation has changed.

So the politicians and leaders can talk as much as they want to, do whatever deals come their way, and issue all the statements they need to keep the media busy. The chances are what they do will be the wrong things, and what they don’t do would have been right. Just like in managing economies.

All I would ask if I were there again is that they find a reason for urgent discussion and leave the schnapps and beer for me and my companions.

Weather Report - Your Guess Is As Good As Mine

The debate over climate is being increasingly heated. Revelations over hanky panky with the figures relating to Global Warming by research grant seeking scientists seeking to survive in a world of contracting university spending with government money have livened up matters. The air has turned blue with critical comment.

The doubters and opponents of climate warming have taken heart and launched a Counter Reformation. Unluckily, many do not comprehend that if the world is not about to warm up catastrophically it will not stay as it is climatically. They have the happy belief of little children who think that things can always be the same, or politicians looking at the opinion polls and buying time.

Despite all this the natural contrarians, those who think we could be in for a bout of Global Cooling have been sidelined. They have been heartened by reports from one group of scientists that at the time of the Younger Dryas, the vicious goodbye of the last ice age about 12,900 years ago, the transformation from a warming world to a frozen one took but six months.

That is by next June the populations of the earth north of say 40 degrees or so and south of the same could have all departed for the equatorial regions. The world economy and monetary systems would have collapsed, as well as any effective government. Africa would be like Waterloo Station in the rush hour.

The problem is that there is so much information available about conditions in the present world and it is so complex that not only accessing it all is difficult, it challenges understanding and analysis. The one certainty is chaos. In this morass of debate, it is easy for the ordinary man, the wheeler dealers, and the trimming politicians to avoid and delay decisions. There seem to be no clear answers and no clear future.

But the past can be examined with a greater degree of insight, and that tells us the climate, and weather patterns change radically. In its life Earth has experienced many severe changes, and never stays the same. It even wobbles on its axis, and can change its magnetic field. One good big volcanic bang could do the trick without worrying about large things from outer space.

There is now enough information on this subject to convince all but the most ardent creationist. We can be certain is that the future climate in general and/or weather conditions in detail, short or long term are not going to remain as it is or how we would like it to be. Species have come and gone in the past. Some went suddenly, and others often after a painful period of decline. There have been humanoid species in the past that are no longer with us.

If it is the developed countries that are responsible for global climate change, then not only do they have to change and fast, but the undeveloped ones will have to stay as they are or contribute to any reductions, as there are a lot of them. Most of us in rich places may have had motor cars, but it is not enough on grounds of equity for us to give up ours if other nations with large populations promptly replace them.

For those over sixty, it is very tempting to say “What the hell” if that is where we think we are heading with any global warming of the future. However in the Norse myths hell was a frozen waste, and we could be heading there.

Ragnarok and Niflheim here we come.

Global Warming - The Prime Minister Takes Action

The Prime Ministers pronouncement that the world is about to end, unless we all follow his advice makes me wonder if he isn’t spending too much time watching the many Armageddon web sites. They are a lot of fun to read and make me realise that the travails of my old team in the present season are not the most important matter in the Great Scheme of Things, I think. The October 19 post in the site survivalblog dot com “Twenty Two Reasons Why This Recession Is Different And Will It Will Endure” although about the USA could easily apply to the UK.

What is certain for the next few weeks is that the Government intends to make us forget the economic fuss, because it is all about Global Warming. Given the amount of hot air that will be expelled on the subject it may happen and carbon capture will not be enough. The political heat will be turned up, exterminating a thousand species, but hoping to catch the Opposition and others out in the race to convince the public that our futures will be safe only in the Government’s hands. Already arranged in the weeks before the Copenhagen sessions are a series of appearances and speeches.

These will be kicked off by a major presentation by Ed Miliband at the London School of Economics on Thursday 19th November. His dad, Ralph of the Marx Brothers (check that one?) used to work there, altogether now, aaahhhh…. So he will know his way up to the Senior Common Room when it is time for drinkies. However, he ought to go up one floor to the Shaw Library, a big room full of dusty books on dead or lost theories, there are a great many of them.

In very recent decades we have learned an astonishing amount about the past that was never known, in part not even suspected, and a good deal of it is to do about what happens when climate changes, or weather patterns shift, or other alterations occur in the geophysical make up of our planet. The one thing that is certain is that it does not remain the same for long, and that major shifts can happen fast. It has warmed up in the past, and it has gone colder. Outer space has played a part, as has the sun, and within the shifting magnetism and the flows of the atmosphere, the troposphere, tectonic plates, and the seas.

The crucial difference between now and even the recent past, is that there are a lot more humans around, creatures of unpredictable, and sometimes uncontrollable behaviour. So any sudden adverse event must affect far more immediately and afterwards. In a world that is “globalised” and where the interdependence of so many entities gives the risk of systemic failures in series across continents and the world. At present in the UK we seem to be blithely unaware of the implications of the droughts and water shortages occurring already.

One immediate question is that in the UK it has been a long time since we had a hard winter. This year there have been early snows already in the northern USA. The UK has had a handful of spasms of bad weather in the recent past, but not many. Now the Prime Minister and the Government are in full flow on the subject of warming, it can mean only one thing; that this could be a very hard winter indeed with the potential for chaos and widespread misery. I remember the 1940’s.

So go to survivalblog for advice, get in the extra blankets, candles, tinned food, and the rest, and keep cheerful. The upside of power cuts is that they reduce the household power and heating bills, and you will be hoping for Global Warming as quickly as possible.