Greenland melting and Latent Heat

Possible effects of Latent Heat with regard to the melting of Greenland are interesting.  As usual, this is speculation but based on old established physics.  So what is Latent Heat.

When you add heat to an object it gets warmer.  We will use the old imperial measurement since in this instance it is easier to understand.

A calorie (with a small 'c') was defined as the amount of heat needed to raise one gram of water by one degree centigrade.  This is not Latent Heat. The term used is Sensible Heat - possibly because we can sense when something gets warmer.  And, of course,  it will take 100 calories to raise one gram of water, from zero degrees to the boiling point.

There are two types of latent heat.  Lets start with the phase change from ice at zero degrees to water at zero degrees.  For this transformation, it takes 80 calories to melt one gram.  That is to say, the amount of heat to melt a gram of ice at zero degrees to water at zero degrees is the same as is needed to raise a gram of water from 0⁰to 80 degrees Centigrade.  This is the latent heat of the phase change between ice and water.

Importantly, when water becomes ice, exactly this amount of heat is given out.  You might be tempted to say - "but won't this heat up the water".  No.  But it will keep the temperature at zero degrees centigrade until the water is all frozen.  When ice is melting (say in a styrofoam cup) it will remain at zero degrees until all the ice is melted at which time the added heat from the environment will cause the water to warm.

The second  latent heat is the phase change from water to water gas (water vapor).  To convert a gram of water to water vapor takes 540 calories.  This is 6.75 times as great as the phase change between ice and water.  This will be important below.

Let's see what the importance may be of latent heat with respect to the great big ice cube which is Greenland  or the even larger ice cube, Antarctica.

At some time in the not too distant future, all the ice will be gone on the Arctic ocean.  Initially it will only occur in mid September when the ice minimum occurs but the period of no-ice will widen in subsequent years.  Without ice, the heat absorbed by the open water will go into warming the water*.  Here is our first effect of Latent heat, in this case the Ice-Water Latent heat.  The ice will keep the water cold until it is all gone. When the ice is gone, the water begins to warm up.
*  Actually this is a bit of an exaggeration.  If you draw a cross section of the Arctic ocean to scale, it is a very shallow body of water in comparison to it's width.  Already, for a considerable portion of the melt season, large areas are ice free.  These are warming already since the ice that could keep them cool is far away across the ocean, but you get the idea.

As more and more of the water is ice free, we have ever warmer water on the surface of the Arctic ocean, heating the air from below and evaporating water vapor into the air.  Since the solar radiation penetrates into the water, the warming occurs over one or two tens of meters of the surface, depending on the clarity of the water.  It takes a lot of heat to warm water so the temperature only gradually increases but a very large amount of heat is stored in this surface water.  It heats and humidifies the air blowing across the ocean*.  What happens when this air blows across Greenland.

*Incidentally, contrary to what 'the man in the street' might think, water vapor is only 60% as heavy as the same volume of dry air  (obviously at the same temperature and pressure), so moist air is lighter than dry air.  Note that water vapor does not disappear into the spaces between air molecules the way salt or sugar does when dissolved into water.  Any gas adds its volume to the gas it is introduced into.  Wet air over the Arctic ocean will tend to rise to be replaced by dry air from the surrounding continents (which will in turn take up moisture from the ocean and tend to rise)

 

First we must define The Lapse Rate.  The Lapse Rate is the change in temperature if you take a body of air and increase it's altitude without the addition or removal of heat.  For reasons, I won't go into, as air expands, it cools.  Conversely as it is compressed, it warms.  You can feel the practical effect of this if you pump up your tire with one of those cylindrical hand operated air pumps that you hold near the flexible tube that connects with the tire and pump with the other hand.  The hand holding the tube gets hot.  

Lapse rate is 9.8 degrees per km of altitude.  That is to say, if I took a perfectly insulated balloon full of air and raised it up a kilometer, it would be 9.8⁰C cooler at the top than when I started up.

 


It gets a tad more complicated when there is water vapor in the air (as there always is) but we will leave that for now.

Now, for the sake of the argument let's assume that we have fully saturated air at 10⁰C blowing onshore in Greenland.  The air hits the ice.  Look at the following table.  That 10 to the minus 3 kg/m cubed in the third column is their way of saying grams so a cubic meter of saturated air at 10⁰c contains 9.39 grams of water in the form of water vapor.

Temperature		Max. Water Content
(oC)	(oF)	(10-3 kg/m3)	(10-3 lb/ft3)
-25	-13	0.64	0.040
-20	-4	1.05	0.066
-15	5	1.58	0.099
-10	14	2.31	0.14
-5	23	3.37	0.21
0	32	4.89	0.31
5	41	6.82	0.43
10	50	9.39	0.59
15	59	12.8	0.8
20	68	17.3	1.07
30	86	30.4	1.9
40	104	51.1	3.2
50	122	83.0	5.2
60	140	130	8.1

This saturated air contacts the ice at 0⁰C and the ice cools the air and causes water to condense out of the air.  Remember that as water vapor changes into water, it gives out 540 calories per gram of water.  Each gram of water condensed from the air gives out enough heat to melt six and three quarter grams of ice*.

*Incidentally if you want to read a dramatic account of a warm wind blowing across ice, read the book Plains of Passage by Jean Auel.  True it is a novel but Jean did her homework and reports what generations of glaciologist have observed.  It is somewhere around chapter 42 or 44.  I can't find my copy of the book.   

Let's back up a step. Where did this heat actually come from.  The wind blowing across the open water is picking up the water vapor from above the ocean.  Each gram of water that evaporates from the ocean takes this 540 calories from the ocean.  So the air is cooling the ocean and the heat is being contained in the air as latent heat.  If you have a wind that is blowing for some time from the water to the ice, a considerable amount of heat can be transferred. This is a convective process and convective processes are very powerful.

You remember, I said that the top ten or twenty meters of water are heated by the sun.  As the surface water is cooled by the wind, it sinks and warm water comes to the surface.  If the water has been open for a good portion of the summer, there is a lot of heat available.

Note that sun shining on snow isn't very good at melting it.  Most of the radiation is reflected back to space without warming the snow.  Clear ice or ice with a pool of water on its surface is a little different.  The radiation penetrates but has to heat a considerable layer of ice up to zero degrees C before melting starts.  

A warm wind or a wind with lots of water vapor is something else again.  The heat is applied on the very surface of the ice and is constantly replenished from the sea.  If there is considerable water vapor in the wind, latent heat of condensing water vapor is added to the sensible heat of the wind. 
 

If this was dry wind blowing across  Greenland, it would only contribute sensible heat to the ice.  The air would cool both by contact with the ice and the expansion of air as it rose up the slope.  However with a high water vapor content, some of the latent heat of the condensing water vapor stays in the air.  

You remember, in our example we started with 10 degrees C, fully saturated air.  At a little over a km in altitude, it would have cooled to zero degrees and would stop melting the ice.  However some of the latent heat which is released as water vapor condenses into droplets (fog), the air will remain above zero degrees to a higher altitude, all the while melting the ice.

Of course the situation get's rapidly worse as the air becomes warmer than the 10⁰ C we took as our example and the water vapor content of the air increases.  Have a look back at the table. 

While we are at it, there is another scenario that may be relevant to the story of a melting Greenland.  

Suppose there isn't much wind but Greenland is bathed in war moist air right to the top.  This air is light (relatively) due both to it's temperature and it's water vapor content.  That's right.  Humid air is lighter than dry air.  The reason is interesting and explained below.  It is in contact with the ice.  The ice cools this air and condenses out some of the water vapor making it heavier.  If the droplets of water stay in the air as fog, this exacerbates the effect.  This air now begins to flow down the slope as a density current.

You remember the lapse rate.  It works in the other direction too.  For every km that this air flows down the slope (vertical kilometer), it warms by 9.8 degrees C.  by compression.  Of course, it doesn't actually warm.  It transfers this heat to the ice, melting it.  These are the the famous Piteraqs that are seen around the shores of Greenland.   

A body of air flowing from the very top of Greenland to the sea would warm almost 30 degrees if it didn't gain or loose heat.  This heat plus the latent heat of water vapor condensing on the ice is available to melt the ice.  We should see some rather extreme melting events in the future.

Relative density of gases  
Gases have some interesting properties.  The volume of a gas is inversely related to pressure (if you keep temperature constant).  That is to say, if you double the pressure, you half the volume.  The volume of a gas is directly related to temperature.  Not Centigrade but Kelvin temperature otherwise known as absolute temperature.  This is temperature measured from absolute zero.  If you increase the temperature of a liter of a gas, for instance, from zero degrees centigrade (2730K) to 100 degrees centigrade (3730K) then the volume will increase by 373/273 =  1.37liters.

Leaving all this aside, let's get on to the really interesting aspect of gases.  It turns out that a given volume of any gas at the same temperature and pressure contains the same number of particles.  I say particles rather than atoms since many gases exist as molecules of two atoms such as N2, O2 and H2.  This has an interesting implication.  If you know what gas you have, you can work out it's relative density to, for instance, air.

Now air is a combination of mainly Nitrogen and Oxygen.  An atom of Nitrogen has an atomic weight of 14 so each N2 atom is 28.  Oxygen, similarly has an molecular weight of 32.  So air is approximately 30 (I should have done a weighted average but we are just illustrating the principle).  Water vapor consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom so has a relative weight of 18.  Water vapor is only 18/30 = 3/5ths or 60% as dense as air.  Now we need one more property of gases.

When you put sugar into water it dissolves and  to some extent the sugar fits between the water molecules.  The volume of the sugar and the water is somewhat less than the volume of the water and the sugar added together.  Gases are not like this.  Each molecule occupies the same volume as any other molecule.  So if you add a tenth of a liter of water vapor to a liter of air (with no condensation, of course) you end up with 1.1 liter of gas.

You can see, therefore, that humid air which is a mix of water vapor (relative density 18) and air (relative density 30) is lighter than dry air.

All bets are off, of course, if the water vapor condenses into fog.  Now you have a suspension of water droplets in air and it is heavier than dry air.

So we have a couple of mechanisms that could cause a rather striking acceleration in the melting of the surface of Greenland.

 

The End of the Ice Age

Sorry to rain on your parade but it ain't over.  We are still in the middle of an Ice Age.  It has been going on for about 2.8million years and is not over.  It is actually, if named  correctly, an epoch.  Namely the Pleistocene Epoch.  This Epoch is colloquially called the Ice Age.

During the Pleistocene Epoch (Ice Age)  there have been many icy periods (Glacials or glacial periods) and relatively ice free periods (Interglacials or Interglacial periods).  We are at present in the Holocene Interglacial and the previous one around 125,000 years ago was the Eemian Interglacial. Between the Eemian and the Holocene Interglacials was a glacial period in which glaciers extended from the Arctic to a bit past the American Canadian border. You could say that the Holocene Interglacial started 20,000 years ago since that was the peak of the previous Glaciation but melting really got underway a little less than 12,000 years ago so that is usually taken as the beginning of the Holocene Interglacial.

We should already be beginning our slide into the next Glacial period (not Ice Age - remember, we are still in an ice age) but the plow, rice paddies and the destruction of forests slowed our slide into the next galcial just long enough for the Industrial revolution to kick in and send us into a warming phase.  Read Plows, Plagues and Petroleum by Ruddiman for chapter and verse on the plow, plagues and rice paddies.  Despite early (from about 8000 years ago) human influence delaying our slide into the next glaciation, we apparently were finally just starting into the next glacial period when the industrial revolution reversed the trend.

The final straw in our slide into the next Glacial was the demise of the population of North America due to European diseases and the black death in the 'Old world'  Both resulted in forests regrowing and the sucking down of Carbon dioxide just enough to start the accumulation of snow way up on the high lands of Baffin Island.  Apparently there is still a halo of dead lichens around this area where the expanding permanent ice and snow killed the lichen.  Green house gases then increased enough to reverse the accumulation of snow.

Some scientists are predicting that we are going into a sort of Maunder Minimum in which sun activity decreases.  No way, though, that this will reverse our warming.  We have put way too much Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Our output of green house gases, by the by, long before the industrial revolution, is the explanation of why this interglacial has been so much more stable, weather wise, than previous interglacials.

With our output of Green House Gases and especially Carbon dioxide, we have put off the next glacial and with a little luck we may put it off until the next Interglacial.

However, we now have too much of a good thing and it is time to put carbon back into the soil, into trees and to stop adding more to our atmosphere.  We have the technology.  Any reasonably bright year 12 student could tell the politicians exactly what they should be doing but the politician won't listen.  They want to be elected next time and need the money from the vested interests to succeed.  Until we make it illegal for anyone to contribute anything to any politician for any reason whatsoever, we will be pushing the brown stuff uphill with a spoon.  Never was the old adage, Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune more true.

One of the barriers to the use of renewable energy is it's unpredictability.  In the long term, you know more or less how much wind and sunshine you will get at any location but it comes in unpredictable booms and busts.  There are may fixes including notably,  demand balancing of our grids (electricity priced to reflect the extent of availability over  demand and devices that use electricity selectively when it is most available and hence least expensive).  However, a really good battery for stationary applications would go a long way to help.  Fortunately there are technologies in the wings, which could fill in the gaps left by other methods and systems.  There are Vanadium and Iron flow Batteries,  Liquid metal batteries and  the Zinc bromide flow and gel batteries.

It looks like we are over the hump.  Tesla sold a mega battery to a wind farm in Australia.  What is particularly significant is that it is on track to produce revenue equal to a third of it's capital cost by the end of the first year of operation.  Economics trumps all other motivations.  This could be even better if the alternate battery technologies take off and become less expensive than Li batteries.

You might ask yourself, why I get so up tight over terminology - namely the misuse of the term Ice Age.    You will see in the popular literature and even in scientific papers, the use of the term Ice age to mean the glacial period between the present Holocene interglacial and the previous Eemian interglacial.  Why is this important.  We as humans are prone to lie to ourselves.  For instance, we note that the megafauna of North America disappeared when the Ice Age ended.  And we admit that man might have had something to do with it but it was probably climate change.  Nonsense.

First, as I said, we are still in an Ice age.   (The Pleistocene Epoch to be totally correct) so it hasn't ended.  But that is the least of the deception.  The Mega Fauna survived repeated cycles of glacials and interglacial and depending on how you define them, there have been between 30 and 50 such cycles within the present ice age (Pleistocene epoch).

No, the NA mega fauna disappeared at the end of the most recent Glacial period.  They survived quite happily the end of many previous Glacials and the subsequent interglacial and only the recent one caused their demise.  The only difference was the arrival of the first people who ate their way through these animals from one end of the Americas to the other.  If you don't think that primitive hunters could wipe out the mega fauna of the Americas, just look at the extinctions in Australia (50,000 years ago) and New Zealand (700 years ago) or in  any other  area when man first arrived.   Now we are finishing the job with habitat destruction.  Soon we will be alone in the world and then pooooof.   We are Gone Burgers. Evolution can begin again from whatever remnants remain.

ps.  Note that there are indications that around 12,000 years ago, there was a major meteorite hit on North America which left a layer of sediment recording it's existance.  This could have had an effect on the fauna of North America but there would only need to be a few 'refugia' left for the animals to make a come back.  Future work may shed more light on this possibility.

The Anthropocene actually started at different times in different locations with the arrival of man.  So much for first people being the guardians of nature.  In actual fact, they eliminated any animal that they could hunt faster than it could reproduce. Now modern man is finishing the job.

The story of wheat

I have just purchases a grain mill to make my own flour and hence the interest in this fascinating story.

                 The Story of Wheat

In the 'old days' you would take your wheat to a miller, he would grind it and you would take it home and bake delicious nutritious bread. But there was a problem.  Wheat berries would last till the next harvest and well beyond, but once you ground the wheat seeds into flour you had to use it or refrigerate it.  The oil in the germ was spread through the flour, the wheat was no longer alive and over time, it went rancid..... so, in the summer, you ground only enough wheat at one time - for a month at the most.
 

Wheat  was full of essential minerals, vitamins and oils that mainly came from the germ* (80%) plus some nutrients and valuable bulk from the bran. In a minute you will see why I said "was".

 

 

*The germ is the little embryonic plant inside the grain.  It is only about 20% of the weight of the wheat seed (berry) but contains 80% of the nutrients.  It is most easily seen in a dicot like a bean rather than in a monocot like wheat.  Soak a bean in water overnight and then dissect it.  You will see the little embryonic plant between the two sides of the bean.

Since wheat was harvested in the fall with winter coming on, ground flour would last for a bit longer before going rancid as long as you kept it cold Since they didn't have refrigerators, they often had a cupboard in the pantry that was open to the outside with a screen over the 'window'.

The short shelf life of flour didn't please the business men who saw a great chance to make a profit.  They wanted to be able to buy large quantities of wheat from the farmers, mill it into flour and ship it far and wide.  Fortunately for them, but not for us, along came the roller mill.  This flattened the germ and allowed it to be sieved out of the flour and presto changeo, you had a commercial commodity that would last without refrigeration for a very long time.
 

This was the beginning of the end for wheat as the 'staff of life',

For some unfathomable reason, white flour was considered a great luxury so the millers also sieved out the bran which, in a roller mill, hadn't been ground to a powder.  Was this love of white flour possibly promoted by them??.  Out went almost all of the little nutritional value  left in flour and to add insult to injury, they worked out a way to bleach the flour.  All that was left was the bleached endosperm.  The bran and the germ was fed to animals who were better fed than us.

In the third world, many folks once ground their own flour and some still do so wheat was still a vital part of their diet but we in the west have found a way to even muck that up.

In the 1960's along came Norman Borlaug.  He was a plant breeder and got the Nobel prize for his work in the 70's.  He realized that you could increase the yield of the wheat plant considerably by conventional breeding but that the stalk of the wheat plant would have to be shorter so that wind would not flatten the more heavily laden wheat plant.  He bred not only wheat but rice and other grains to produce vastly greater yields.  In some cases he tripled the yield of these vital food sources.  So what's wrong with that?

Yields per wheat plant (and the other grains) were greatly increased but the nutrient content didn't keep pace.  In fact it stayed about the same per wheat plant as before.  Plant breeders call this 'nutrient dilution' and it occurs in many of our food plants.  Because of this, wheat and other grain contained as little as a third of the essential nutrients per kilogram as previous varieties.  Starvation was fended off (at least for a while) but people suffered from nutrient deficiency.  

 

To further add insult to injury, this was a period in which agriculture, based on manuring fields, leaving them fallow, adding organic material and so forth gave way to what we now call conventional agriculture (it is no such thing).  This so called conventional agriculture is based on adding chemical minerals to feed the plants.  This destroyed the soil and led to further decreases in the concentration of nutrients in our plants*.  

*Read What Your Food Ate by D. Montgomery for chapter and verse. 

As a side effect, it is estimated that with the cessation of famine in a number of third world countries, there are now 700m more people in the world than would have been the case without this agricultural revolution.

As Richard Dawkins said in  his book The Greatest Show on Earth,  "If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored."

There is a get out of jail card to our increasing population.  If you want to see what it is, click here.  It is not relevant to this discussion.

 

But in the words of Dr Seuss, That is not all, no, that is not all.

Come forward to today.  Wheat berries last a very long time.  The wheat is alive (as you can see by sprouting some) and under good conditions will last for decades.  The farmer can use this to increase his profit.  If he has a silo, he can augur his wheat into the silo and sell,  either when the price is right, or when the grain merchant or miller has space in his silo to take his wheat.  But there is a problem. 

Along with the wheat he will be putting insects and insect eggs which are attached to the grain, into his silo.  So what does he do.  He dribbles a little organophosphate into the grain as it is augured into the silo.  Generally, the Active compound is Pirimiphos-methyl, often going under the brand name Actellic.  (There are many other products with the same active ingredient).

As one farmer told me, the grain merchant, not trusting the farmer, puts in a little more and the miller ditto.  This might have been tongue in cheek or perhaps not.

If you read the rap sheet on Pirimiphos-methyl, it talks about full body protection when using the product and one rap sheet suggested that if you have any choice, use something else.  That is how toxic this product is and it is put regularly into our wheat; a product that is not only the main ingredient of our bread but is in a vast array of other prepared products.  Do you ever get the impression that you know an awful lot of people with cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Info on organophosphates says that besides being carcinogenic, they cause dizziness, nausea, loss of memory, neuralgia (whatever that is) and a raft of other symptoms.

What is sad is that the use of Actellic is completely unnecessary.  Enlightened farmers, and there are precious few of them, pump Carbon Dioxide into their silos from the bottom.  It does the same thing.  Carbon dioxide is one and a half times as dense as air so by introducing it into the bottom of the silo, it pushes out the air.  Any aerobic organism dies.

It gets worse.  Many farmers 'roundup' their grain fields shortly before harvest.  This has two purposes.  First it brings the wheat plants to ripeness all at the same time.  The grain is not killed, only the plant. The second reason is to stop his harvester from plugging up with weeds.  Of course, if it is roundup-ready wheat, it is also 'rounduppppped' while it grows.  (Does New Zealand import roundup ready wheat for milling??).  And, of course the field is usually roundupped before planting.

We now have two carcinogens in our wheat and hence in our food chain.  Note that roundup has not been proven to be carcinogenic to humans.  No ethics committee would agree to the necessary experiment!!! However it has been shown to be carcinogenic in animals.  As the lawyers say, I rest my case.

 

In case you have taken my suggestion and got What Your Food Ate by David Montgomery, you will see what roundup does to soil organisms.

 

July 2022

Just the other day I 'stumbled' on the biocide regime of a wheat farmer growing milling wheat (for flour, not for animal feed)  Here it is in chronological order of what was used during the growing cycle.

 

* Field sprayed with Firebird herbicide @ 500ml/ha

* Trimec @ 3L/ha in spring plus Quantum140ml/ha and Starane @200ml/ha

* Karate insecticide @ 40ml/ha

* Regulate @ 1.75L/ha

* Stellar @ 750ml/ha

* Phoenix @ 1.5l/ha

* Transform @ 40ml/ha

* Proline fungicide @ 600ml/ha with Vimoy Iblon 1.5L/ha

* Amistar and Prosaro head wash fungicide @ 1L/ha

 

So wheat has  been bred to reduce nutrients, machined to further take out what was left, bleached (in the case of white flour) and  poisoned, all in the name of profits for the industrialists.  I wonder how many other products that we eat day in and day out have a similar story.  How many of these additives work synergistically to cause cancers.  For that matter are people really gluten intolerant or are some of them simply showing a reaction to the poisons they are ingesting.

Grinding your own flour, Making your own bread

I'm away from home just now but when I return at the end of the month (7/18) there should be a flour grinder waiting for me.  I suspect I will be making updates to this blog for years as I discover the joys of producing and using my own flour.  What have I discovered so far.

Apparently threshed and winnowed wheat berries (grain) will last for decades if kept, even at room temperature, as long as they are kept dry.  I remember something I read many years ago.  Somewhere, I can't remember where, there are some people that make grain storage bins from ferro-cement, buried in the ground with the removed soil making a berm around the entrance.  The bins are conical in shape getting wider toward the bottom. They look like the early re-entery vehicles from the space program.

Grain is alive.  It uses Oxygen and produces Carbon dioxide.  Apparently when the grain is stored this way, any insects, mice and anything that needs oxygen to survive dies.  The grain is preserved this way for very long periods.

Some "modern" folks apparently use a plastic liner for the grain.  Critical is to have the grain below 7% moisture for long preservation.  Lower still is better.

In contrast, when grain is ground, it's shelf life is very short unless refrigerated and even then should be used in a week or so.  This is why the flour you buy at the store, even the brown flour, doesn't hold a patch on real whole meal flour for nutrition.  When you used to take your wheat for grinding to the mill, bread really was the staff of life.  However, in order to turn flour into a marketable commodity that would last, the germ had to be removed.

 This is the little wheat plant that is tucked into the grain and while it is about 20% of the weight of the wheat berry, it contains some 80% of the nutrients.  Using roller mills it was possible to sieve out the germ and make a flour that would last for a very long time and could be shipped long distances.  However, as with so much of our food, we lost a huge amount by having this convenience.

By the way, if you want to see the germ (the little plant in a seed), it is most easily seen in  a bean seed.  A bean is a dicot which means that the endosperm is stored in two halves and they can be split to expose the germ.  Soak a bean seed in water over night.  In  the morning, carefully remove the outer coat and split the two halves apart.  You will see the little plant in between.  You can even leave the bean in water that only partially covers it and let it sprout.  The little plant grows and can be more easily seen as can the cotyledons.  It is harder to do this with wheat but the principle is the same.

Back home.
I have my grinder but before I get into it's use, I must tell you some more I have discovered about our wheat supply.  It is not pretty.

I have checked with a number of farmers and a grain merchant and the story remained the same with all of them.  Apparently when grain is augured into the silos, a little Pirimiphosmethyl is added against insect pests.  This can be added by the farmer, especially if he is going to store his wheat in his own silos for any length of time, and by the grain merchant and by the miller or all three.  If you look up the rap sheet on this chemical, you find a recommendation that if you have any other choice of pesticide, use it.  This stuff is nasty. Besides being highly poisonous (you guessed it) it is a carcinogen. It gets worse.

If the weeds have got away from the farmer toward harvest time and even earlier if the farmer is using 'roundup ready' wheat.  he will roundup his field.  Apparently the weeds will plug up his combine so he lets the roundup do its work and then harvests. Also killing the plant makes the grain ripen all at the same time.

So, not only do we have a known carcinogen pesticide in our wheat but a known carcinogenic herbicide.  Roundup has not been proven to be a carcinogen to humans.  After all, you can't feed Roundup to a hundred humans and not to a control group.  No ethics committee would agree to such an experiment.  But it has been proven to be carcinogenic to animals. I rest my case.

What is particularly annoying is that the use of the pesticide is so unnecessary.  Enlightened farmers (and there are precious few of these) use Carbon dioxide.  They have a connection at the bottom of their silo where they can attach a hose from a Carbon dioxide cylinder and fill the silo with this completely harmless gas.  Problem solved.  Any insect or their eggs that have come in with the grain dies.

Update March 2020
We now have two sources of organic wheat grown and stored without the use of either Roundup or Actilic (Pirimiphos methyl).  We have waffle morning every Sunday with friends and Pitza Thursday, using the new Pizza oven I finished 6 months ago. In addition, we bake bread two or three times a week.  The grinder which is a German model (Hawos) has worked flawlessly and it takes about two to three minutes to grind 500 grams of wheat.

You can't grind oily seeds such as pumpkin seeds but there is a trick.  If you combine, say, 10% of these oily seeds with the wheat they grind perfectly without plugging up the grinding stones.

You can also grind cloves the same way, if, for instance, you are making a sweet spiced loaf. We also use our grinder to grind pepper cornes.  Man is freshly ground pepper a different beast than pre-ground pepper.

We also grow our own grinding corn (sweet corn is not nice).  It doesn't make a good flour), but here there is a trick too.  The grains are too large to pass the wee dowel at the bottom of the funnel so if you simply put a finger down there and wiggle it while the corn is grinding, it works fine.

Another little trick, sometimes when you shut down the flour mill, when you start it up again, it stalls.  You hear the motor humming but not turning.  Close the mill really quick like.  Then move the fineness selector to course, start the machine and pull the lever back to the fineness you want.

In a really serious jam up, you have to tip out the grain from the hopper, remove the top, and clean out the stones manually.  I've only had to do this once.

We usually use the bread maker to make the dough and then either finish it in the bread machine or in the oven, depending on what we are wanting to produce.

Our white skin

We "whites" seem inordinately proud of our white skins.  We have always considered it to be a sign that we are superior to the darker variety of homo sapian.  So I thought it would be fun to consider where our white skin came from.

We all know that people living in sunny climates which includes much of Africa, where we originated, have dark skins.  Undoubtedly, this included all the species of the genus Homo that preceded us.  Look at our nearest relatives, the Chimpanzies and great apes.  All with black skins despite the fact that they live, for the most part, in jungles.  Early hominids must have spent many hours in the sun and often, due to warm temperatures,  went with limited body covering.  They had to spend considerable time in the open finding their daily crust of bread and they developed dark skins to protect their skin from too much sunshine.
 

Note that the babies have white faces while the adult is black.  Why do you think this might be.

Sunshine of course, provides us with vitamin D which is essential for the calcification of strong bones.  A hominid with weak fragile bones hasn't got much of a show in an environment in which his speed agility and strength will often make the difference between eating or being eaten.


But, vitamin D is important for so much more and we keep finding additional functions  of this important vitamin.  Some functions which have so far being discovered include:

*Strengthened immune system
*Enhanced muscle function.
*Improved lung health
*Anti-inflamatory properties
*Reduced blood pressure
*Reduced hardening of the arteries
*Protection from kidney disease
*Suppression of a pathogenic appetite
*Protection agianst Alzheimer

So there is a strong selective pressure for anything that ensures you obtain enough vitamin D

Sunshine is not the only source of vitamin D either.  Other sources include:
*Fresh fatty fish
*Oysters and some other 'shell fish'
*Some livers
*Cheese
*Egg yokes
*Raw milk
*Some mushrooms
*Some fish eggs.

Think of the dilemma of the first hominids that left sunny Africa.  Those that migrated along the coast toward India had little selective pressure to evolve a light colored skin.  Not only did they migrate through sunny climates but if they were able to fish, they would have got their vitamin D that way.

However for those that left the beach and migrated northward it was a different story.  There was a double whammy against them.  First, if they migrated into northern climates, it was more cloudy giving them less exposure to sun.  In addition in these colder climates, they would have had to dress in skins or clothes made of wool which was shed annually by various woolly animals.  They probably had only their face and hands exposed to the sun so there was a strong selective pressure to loose their protective melanin so that they could obtain their vitamin D.

For the males, there was another factor.  We had beards, possibly for the same reason that a male peacock has beautiful feathers so even less of our skin was exposed to the sun.

The interior of continents are very warm in the summer so they probably also evolved the ability to sun tan, if they didn't have this already.

According  to our present archaeological knowledge, Homo erectus  arrived in Eurasia at least 1.6million years ago.  For those that challenged the northern interior of the continent, there would have been a strong selective pressure for the evolution of a white skin.  Erectus sites from 1.6m years ago contain  flint tools including  retouched flakes so he was no dummy and it is not unreasonable to assume he fashioned some sort of covering.

Homo erectus likely evolved into  Homo heidelbergensis and then into
Homo neanderthalensis.  .  It is unlikely that this was a new migration from Africa since neanderthal genes are found in European people of today but not in modern Africans.  Incidentally another species which may have developed from Homo erectus is Homo sapiens denisova  further East in Asia.  Presumably, Denisovians who lived in northern climates characterized by cold cloudy conditions, they also had pale skins.

But there is something curious.  Bones of Homo sapien have been found in Africa from 315,000 years ago but only appeared in the fossil record in Europe 45,000 years ago.  How come.  Of the various theories presented, my favorite is armament.  It is likely that Neanderthals and our species came into contact much earlier than 45,000 years ago in the bridge from Africa to Europe, namely in the middle East. Think what a conflict that would have been.  The gracile Homo sapien comes up against the powerful, robust Homo neanderthalensis who makes his living stabbing large and small animals at close quarters with his spear.  No prizes for working out who would win that contra-ton.

I suspect the critial development which allowed our species to make inroads into Eurasia was the development of throwing weapons.  This could have included the lance, atyl atyl*, sling and even the bow and arrow

*Trowing stick which allowed a spear of a size between a lance and an arrow to be thrown with much more force that with the hand alone.

Our whole history is one of killing at greater and greater distances*.  It has culminated now with cowardly soldiers sitting safely in America, killing people with gattling guns and hell fire missils from their drones in other peoples countries as if they were in some sort of video game.

*In more modern times, the Battle of Agincourt

Neanderthals were at two disadvantages.  Their culture was one of killing prey close up and with humans the way we are, there was probably a strong sexual selection for the man that did this most effectively.  You bring home the bacon and the girls want you for their mate. So their whole culture favored the man who was a real man and could kill a deer at close quarters. But they had a second disadvantage.

You would think that they would rapidly adapt throwing weapons once they saw how effective they were.  Unfortunately, through evolution, they had evolved a shoulder joint that while it was very powerful, it was not adapted for throwing.  Even if they wanted to adopt the new weapons, they would have been very clumsy at it. Neanderthals lacked a throwing arm.

An effective throwing weapon would have completely changed the balance of power. And again, the way we are, when a tribe of Sapiens defeated a tribe of Neanderthals, they probably killed all the males and took the females for themselves.  Here a little diversion into genetics.


With the difficulty of travel when all you could call upon were your legs, and considering how territorial humans are, the two tribes were what we might consider pure breeds.  In other words, they would have had a high degree of homozygosity* at many more sites on their chromosomes than modern humans who breed with other humans who are distant both in geographical terms and in their genetics.

*Each cell of our bodies has two copies of each chromosome.  The genes on each chromosome at the same locus can be the same (homozygose) or different (hetrozygose).  When closer related individuals mate, this increases homozygosity and of course when a recessive lethal gene or even a disadvantagous gene comes together in an individual, he is either dead or disabled.  Inbreeding over time, to some extent, weeds out deleterious recessive genes from the population.  When two inbred individuals from different genetic lines breed, their offspring are likely to be particularly robust. 

 We keep chickens for the production of eggs.  We start with a variety called brown shafers who are great layers.  They are a hybrid of at least 4 so called pure breed varieties and express hybrid vigor. However we allow them to breed freely and you should see the varieties of chickens produced.  They not only revert to the original varieties but produce all sorts of assorted mixes.

Imagine the offspring of this first mating of male Sapien with female Neanderthals.  The two populations had been isolated and inbreeding for thousands of years.  The result would have been the equivalent of our Brown Shafers.  They would have all looked very similar and likely would have been very strong with a somewhat better throwing arm than Neanderthals but not a good as Sapien and with an intermediate skin colour.

In order not to make the whole story too complicated, I will assume that a throwing shoulder is determined by one gene and likewise skin color.  Any genetisist will tell you that many genes are involved in the determination of these characteristics and most others.  Mendel lucked on to some characteristics of peas that indeed were determined by one gene and so laid the basis of genetics.  I will also assume that both genes have equal influence.  That is neither is dominant over the other.  We will use W for a white skin and w for a dark skin.  Also T for a throwing shoulder and t for a non throwing shoulder.  This is a huge simplification but will make the situation easier to understand.

In what the genetisists call the F1 generation we have a cross between two quite homozygous populations (pure bred) The offspring will have half their genes from the mom  and half from the dad and those from all the dads will be quite similar to each other and likewise all those from the moms, similar to other moms.  Then the fun starts.

When the children start to reproduce, their offspring will have all sorts of mixes of these genes.  We will have:
WWTT - a white skin and a throwing shoulder
WwTT - a dusky skin and a throwing shoulder
wwTT - a dark skin and a throwing shoulder
and so forth.  Use a Mendelian square to work out all the variations.  On one axis you put WT, Wt, wT and wt and the same on the other axis.  These are the genes in the gametes (eggs and sperm).  Now selection begins.  Since humans are nasty and of great danger to each other, a throwing shoulder will be selected for as will a lighter skin, especially as these hybrid humans move away from the coast into more northern areas.

We have all heard by now that we have a small percent of Neanderthal genes.  This begs the question of what is a species.  The old definition was that two individuals are of the same species if they can produce a viable offspring that itself can breed and produce viable offspring.  Of course the situation on the ground is more complicated than this.  Apparently the various species of hominin in Africa bred back and forth in all sorts of combinations and clearly we bred with Neanderthals.  Otherwise we wouldn't have their genes.  Over the thousands of years since we started to breed with Neanderthals, individuals would be selected with characteristics from both strains of human that had the best survival.  Here we have only considered two.

I suppose we we were lucky to breed with a species that had already adapted to northern climates.  It would have speeded up considerably our rate of adaptation as we kept those characteristics that benefited us rather than having to start with favorable mutations - a much slower process.

We can thank the Neanderthals for our white skin.

Post scriptum
Facts are such a bitch when it comes to a great theory.  It was great fun poking fun at the white supremicists but it turns out that it probably is not true.  Have a look at the youtube videos from this chap.   Apparently it is true that at least some neanderthals were white and interestingly they had red hair.  The whatsit in the woodpile is that the genes that make present day whites, white are different from the ones that made Neanderthals white.  We seem to have evolved out own genes to turn our skin white and hence give us our daily dose of Vitamin D.

Now, of course, this doesn't mean necessarily that all Neanderthals were white.  If there was a population that lived in sunny parts of the world or on the sea shore where they got enough vitamin D from the sea, they could well have been black or brown, just as present populations of humans display all color variations.  Anyway, so much for a fun theory.

Brown flour

Brown flour just ain't what is is cracked up to be.  Let me quote a paragraph or two from The Third Plate by Dan Barber (incidentally, highly recommended)

"The roller mill appeared in the late 1800's just in time to expand the divide between the wheat field and the table.  It was a technological breakthrough that revolutionized the wheat industry just as the cotton gin had done for the cotton industry a century earlier.  Until its widespread use, people used stone mills.  Stone mills like the one we use at Blue Hill work like molars, crushing the kernels between two large stones.  They are effective, but slow and tedious, and they do little to separate the kernel into its component parts, a key development in the drive to industrialize flour.
 


A few years ago, Klaas's wife, Mary-Howell showed me a picture of a wheat kernel in cross section.  It looked like an ultrasound image of a six-or seven week old human gestational sac, which isnt a bad comparison; a wheat kernel is a seed, after all.  The grain's embryo or 'germ' is surrounded by the starchy endosperm, - the stuff of refined white flour - which stores food for the germ.  Surrounding the endosperm is the seed coat or bran, which protects the germ until moisture and heat levels indicate it's time to germinate. 
 

Whereas stone mills had crushed the tiny germ, releasing oils that would turn the flour rancid within days, roller mills separated the germ and the bran from the endosperm.  This new ability to isolate the endosperm allowed for the production of self-stable white flour, able to be stored and transported long distances.  Overnight, flour became a commodity. 
 


It's hard to fathom that merely removing a temperamental little germ could revolutionize a staple grain, but that's just what happened.  The settling of the Great Plains and the advent of roller-mill technology meant that white flour was suddenly cheaper and more readily available.  Small wheat farms, including those in the former grain belt of New York, couldn't compete. Gristmills dotting the landscape became the stuff of folklore.  The homogenization of the US wheat industry had begun

The whiter flour became, the greater the demand.  To be fair, that's been the history of wheat for thousands of years.  But for all its efficiency, steel couldn't match the old-school grindstone in two key respects.  In fully removing the germ - that vital, living element of wheat - and the bran, the roller mill not only killed wheat but also sacrificed nearly all of its nutrition.  While the bran and the germ represent less than 20% of a wheat kernel's total weight, together they comprise 80% of it's fiber and other nutrients.  And studies show that the nutritional benefits of whole grains can be gained only when all the edible parts of the grain - bran, germ and endosperm - are consumed together*.  But that's exactly what was lost in the new milling process.

*this probably relates to the fact that you need to consume all the amino acids in protein at the same time.  The digestive system takes up amino acids as balanced proteins.  If there is an excess of one amino acid, the excess is rejected. Presumably there are different amino acids in the various components of the wheat seed and only by consuming the whole seed do you get the full nutrition.

There was another cost as well, just as devastating. Stone-milled flour retained a golden hue from the crushed germ's oil and was fragrant with bits of nutty bran.  The roller mills might have finally achieved a truly white flour, but the dead chalky powder no longer tasted of wheat - or really of anything at all.  We didn't just kill wheat,  We killed the flavor.

The Chinese Dilema

You may have wondered why there are so many Chinese in the world today.  The answer is surprisingly simple.  Many many years ago some Chinese genius worked out that in order to have sustainable soils, you have to return every bit of organic material you can to the soil.  This includes animal waste, human waste and all the inedible parts of your crops.  You can also supplement this with material from the sea since you are sending huge amounts of nutrients down your rivers from the land.  It has worked a treat and despite  mongol hoards, palace revolutions and wars, the Chinese have grown and prospered.'

It helped that they had rich deep loes soils gratis of the continental glaciers that ground rock into fine powder to be carried and deposited by the wind but so did America and they have gone through meters of this 'god given' bounty in a few centuries.

In the mean time other empires have prospered and declined as they mined their soils and the area they occupied had to wait for the slow process of building new soils from the bottom up before significant numbers of people could once more occupy the areas where empires once existed.

Back to the Chinese, they are now coming into the 'modern world' and it doesn't auger well for them.  On the nutrient front, they now have flush toilets and will be sending massive amounts of nutrients to sewage plants to be detoxified, denitrified and what is left, sent down to the sea.

It doesn't have to be this way.  For instance, in Seattle, they now have a sewage plant that is turning their 'feed stock' into valuable fertilizer, the sale of which covers half their running costs.  If this becomes the norm instead of the exception, perhaps us westerners can also have a sustainable future.

The Chinese are sinning against sustainability in another way now.  In their rush to industrialize. they are polluting their air to an extreme extent. It is so bad that they are negatively affecting their agriculture.  Never mind. there is light on the horizon.  At the same time they are working as hard as they can to replace coal energy with wind and solar energy and petrol vehicles with electrics.  With their command economy, they will most likely succeed and rather rapidly at that.

In the mean time the Chinese are buying up land all over the world to be able to feed their people.  If they adopt the western model of flushing nutrients down to the sea, they will have to buy up a lot more.

historical sea level

Time                         Level
 22000 years ago      Minus 120m
 15,000                                 -107
 10,000                                 -40
   9,000                                 -25
   8,000                                 -15
   7,000                                 -30cm

Electrical demand balancing

Electricity generating companies are facing a couple of problems which can be solved by demand balancing but first, what is demand balancing.

At present, most generating companies monitor the use of electricity and as demand goes up, bring on more generators and as demand goes down, reduce the power output of generators and even shed them.  All generators have a certain range of output so as power demand increases, smaller variations in demand can be met by increasing the amount of power produced by a given generator but beyond a certain level, more generators must be brought on line Power companies have a dilemma in that they must have sufficient generating capacity to meet peak loads.  This is expensive.  To build new generation capacity when it will only be used occasionally is a nightmare to their accountants.

There are peak generation periods such as in the morning when everyone is getting ready to go to work or school and more so in the evening when everyone is home, the TV is running, mom is making dinner in the oven, it is winter and all the lights are on.  What the generating companies don't need is, that at this peak load time you are also running the dish washer, cloths washer, cloths drier, water heater and so forth.  If these functions could be shifted to late at night when all the evening activity is over and the lights are out, then they could avoid having to build more 'peaker plants' that will only be needed in peak hours.

This is where demand balancing comes on.  The power company has to find a way to induce us to use power, whenever possible, in trough hours so that we don't need this power in peak hours.  The inducement is simple.  They must make power less expensive during times of low demand.

They could simply make power less expensive for all uses as demand goes down but what is really the holy grail for them is to be able to switch on and off some of your electrical devices as needed to balance their base generation.

We need some hardware and soft ware to make this happen.  Here is an idea of how it will work.

You have special little units that you plug into your wall socket and then plug your device into the unit.  It 'talks' to your smart meter you have installed.  You can set the unit to come on at different prices for electricity and, of course, the power company, when they have a little excess power, will send a message down their lines that now power is at 24c, 23c, 22c and so forth as they need more demand to balance the base power they are producing.

You are unlikely to put one of these devices on your TV or stand up lamp.  If you do, the TV and/or the lamp will go off if the price for power goes above what you have selected. For all these functions that are on demand,  ie that you can switch on and off as you want, you still pay the full power price of, let's say, 25c/kWh.  The only equipment you are likely to use these special plug in units for are your clothes and dish washer, any batteries you are charging (such as your car or wall unit), your hot water cylinder and so forth.  On the front of the device will be a dial that you turn to the price you are willing to pay for the function in question.  But all devices are not equal.

With your car battery or hot water cylinder, the power can go off and on as the power company adjusts the price to use their base generation.  Your washing machine is something else.  Once the cycle starts, you want it to finish.  Otherwise you may have food baked on to your dishes or a wet mess in your clothes washer.  So we have another wee switch on the device which you can put in either 'continue to the end' or 'intermittent'.    For your dish washer, you will set the 'continue' function so once it starts it will finish.

A battery or water heater is something else again.  You may have set your car battery charging unit to, say 10c since past experience shows that you are likely to get some power at this price during the night but here we have a different problem. You want to be able to get to work in the morning.  so we need one more function in our wall plug device..

We have a timer on the device which you set so that full power comes on, say, an hour before you go to work.  If the battery is fully charged, it will not take any more power but if the battery is only partially charged, it will fill up your battery at the full cost.  Not to worry.  Even at the full day time rate, it costs about a third as much in fuel to drive a km than with fossil fuel.

We could even go one step further.  Say you only need 50% charge in your car battery for what you do during the day or perhaps you can plug in at work and take advantage of low prices in the middle of the day.  You have checked the weather report and know that the wind turbines are going to be going gang busters from 10:00AM.  You might then program in, make sure my battery is 50% full by the time I head for work but keep charging if the price stays low.

Despite what you hear, power companies are more worried at present by the decrease in power demand.  People are putting in LED lights, factories are becoming more efficient and the power companies are seeing decreasing revenue.  The Electric car is a god-send to them.  But they don't want to have to build generating plants that only work to take care of peak demand.  By shifting demand to off periods, they solve this problem and make existing generators much more revenue efficient.  For instance, when there is lot's of water, they can send more of the water through the generator rather than over the spill way.

This is also a great way to help solve the problem of intermittent generation of renewable energy.  Say that during the day, the generation of wind energy is unusually good.  They can lower the price for these special functions such as heating the water in your cylinder even during the day.  You get cheaper power, they sell the excess instead of wasting it and over all, less fossil fuel is used.  Win win all around.

Wasted Effort

We are wasting our effort, dissipating our effectiveness, peeing against the wind and farting at thunder.  We are ensuring our failure.  I refer to our various  campaigns.  Save the flowers, save the bees, save the snails, save the trees.

 I could go on and on with:

  

*mitigating climate change, 

*re-wilding, 

*stopping all sorts of pollution, 

*getting control of trade agreements that shaft us, 

*stopping subsidies to fossil fuel companies, 

*adopting EVs, 

*saving our corals, 

*preserving our fisheries resources, 

*fixing the excessive and ever increasing costs of electricity

*slashing the egregious levels of corruption in politics, especially on the 'right'

*stopping getting into war after war that 'the west' looses.

*remaking the GOP into an effective, rational party that has the good of the American people as its primary purpose.

There is one ring that controls them all.

Nowhere is that old adage "Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune" more true than in politics.  We, the peasants,  think we are gaining some advantage by others paying for the election campaigns of our elected officials and then, we wonder why the elected officials do the bidding of the vested interests.  What a great investment for them.

They pay pennies and get back dollars, pay millions and get back billions.  For big business and the uber rich, this has to be one of the best investments they will ever make.  Businesses and rich individuals support politicians, often on both sides, just to hedge their bets and the politicians make sure that the legislation favors these big business and uber rich individuals and ensure that besides favorable legislation, they get tax breaks and subsidies.  Do you realize how many countries still give financial concessions to coal companies!!! not to mention oil companies.

Because of the system, many countries and especially America and Australia have socialism for big business and the rich and capitalism* for the poor.

*Incidentally there is nothing wrong in theory with Capitalism, Communism or any other 'ism'.  The problem is with uncontrolled capitalism;  what used to be called Laisse faire and now is called the New(neo) Liberalism.  As an individual, I am not allowed to kill by commission or omission, throw my garbage on the commons or the property of my neighbor, bear false witness, lie to the authorities and so forth and so on.  There are consequences for any of these transgressions.  Big business and the uber rich get away with all of these in both overt and covert ways.  We espouse everyone being equal before the law but it is just lip service.  It is similar to the way that various regimes have used religion to keep the peasants under control. 

Incidentally (once again) the only place I have seen true Communism is in the Kibutz system in Israel.  Kibutzim (plural of Kibutz) operated as a commune and hence was commune-ism.  The difference between this and the Russian or Chinese system or for that matter the Kibutz and various religious sects that operate as  communes was that the Kibutzim were fiercely   democratic.  No charismatic leader was tolerated,  leaders were changed often and democratically and all decisions  were discussed by the whole community. It was a beautiful system.  It has now collapsed for reasons that had little to do with the basic system. That's a story for a separate blog.

The politicians don't do the bidding of their financiers because they were supported in the last election.  They do their bidding because they know if they don't, they won't be supported in the next election.  They are also pretty well assured of a cushy job when they leave politics - often as a ""consultant"" or as a lobbyist.  Also, when you compare their wealth when they enter politics with their wealth when they leave politics, you can pretty well guarantee that there something else at going on here*.  Could it be insider trading tips.  They certainly don't get rich from their salaries.

*Here is the explanation.  https://www.commondreams.org/news/house-bipartisan-stock-trading-ban

The ultimate argument of politicians to explain their failure to fulfill their election promises is that, "if they aren't in office they can't do anything".  Nonsense.  Far better a one term MP that does what is necessary, sets an example and begins to steer the ship of state in the necessary direction than a 5 term MP that continually compromises to the point of total betrayal of the people who elected him.

This is costing us hugely in our day to day life and it is now clear that this system could bring down our civilization.

 

Clearly we can all, individually, do things to improve our world situation but our political representatives have to do the heavy lifting by setting the rules of the game so that positive actions are taken by us.  Politics at it's best doesn't actually do anything but rather sets the playing field so that we do things.  Look at how, for instance, Norway encouraged the public to take up electric cars.

Instead politicians are ensuring that we don't take effective action against climate change.  This feeds into the pockets of various vested interests and especially the fossil fuel industry.  Even if some of the milder scenarios from the scientists are correct with respect to the effects of climate change, we could  knock ourselves back into the dark ages or even the stone age.  The fringe scientists suggest we could trigger a run away green house effect that would turn us into a new Venus.  

 

 

And this is not some change that will occur in the far future.  Just look at Australia.  As of the beginning of 2020 it is disappearing in a cloud of smoke, and the ning nong of a PM* still denies climate change is real and promotes the massive sale of coal** 

* Scott, the stupid, also mocked the Hornsdale mega battery that has been installed by Elon Musk in a wind farm in Southern Australia.  He compared it to the mega banana and the mega peach that some towns display.  Well Scott, baby, this mega battery is making money hand over fist for the wind farm while reducing the cost of electricity to the people of the area and as an added benefit, stabilizing the frequency and voltage of the grid it is part of.  Oh and by the way, it acts as a peaker plant.

**Australia exports three times as much coal as she uses in Australia and in Australia, coal is the main source of electricity; this, in a country with, arguably the greatest renewable energy sources of wind and solar in the world***.   Fortunately the people and businesses of Australia are getting on with it and ignoring the government.  Oh...just the other day, the state of Victoria imposed an extra tax on electric vehicles.  What a bunch of losers.

 

***(June, 2021).  Here is a fun one for you.  It would appear that coal ash from some sources is rich in Rare Earth Metals which can be extracted.  Perhaps Australia sits on a great resource of these metals that are essential for building solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.

 


If some of the predicted tipping points are reached, climate will change faster than our very precariously balanced agriculture can cope with.  Even a single year of crop failure in the grain belts of the Northern Hemisphere and Australia will be disastrous.  This grain is shipped to countries all over the world.  Imagine a decade of such crop failure until we work out how to grow crops  under the new climate regime.

 

Note(April 2022).  We may see this in a reduced form.  With the war in the Ukraine, Ukrainian wheat production is unlikely to be significant this year and Russia has sanctions against her economic activity plus huge losses of soldiers, some of whom may have been part of the wheat producing system before they were drafted.  It will be interesting to see if there is a problem with world wheat production this year and what this results in. I just read an article that suggests that the Ukraine war will reduce world wheat production by 30%.

Or even more disastrous, it is a real possibility that our climate will flick-flack back and forth between the existing and the new climate regime before it settles down in the new regime.  This would be even more serious than a sudden change to a new climate. You would have no idea what crops would succeed from year to year.

At least by the end of the process, the world population would probably be down to the Lovelock Number*

*James Lovelock, the man who articulated the Gaia Hypothesis, suggested that within this century the population of the earth will have fallen to 1b (it is at present at 7b and predicted to go to 9b)

We have seen, in the 1930's and again, even more so, in 2008, how interconnected the world  is.  Back many centuries ago, if Europe crashed, America didn't even know Europe existed.  Now one country going down economically brings all down.  How much more disastrous would it be if our food supply suddenly crashed.  America, Canada, Russia, Ukraine and Australia provide most of the grain to a wide range of third world countries.

And consider this.  The higher you are the harder you fall. Many predictions say that the poor will suffer most under climate change and this could well be so.  But most cities in the so called civilized world have only enough food to feed their residents for three days.  Most large cities would take far longer than that to evacuate (and where would they go).  At some point in the future we may see internal migration in the so called first world to their rural areas with really nasty consequences.

Some commentators suggest that the Arab Spring was triggered (not caused)  by the rise in food prices caused by a poor grain harvest in Russia.  If so, that was just a wee warning shot across our bow.  A taste if things to come.

Consider, as well, the 2018 refugee problem, mainly in Europe.  It is just a tiny fore-taste of what will face us when climate change begins to get really serious.  Consider the social disruption this mini migration caused in many European countries.  Then multiply it by 10 and 10 again.

So what is the bottom line.  If we want politicians to do what is best for "we, the people", we must be the ones that pay for their election campaigns from the exchequer, and the first order of business after this is achieved is to pass legislation that anyone who pays money to any politicians for any reason what-so-ever gets mandatory jail time.  This, of course, also includes any non monetary bribes.  Note that it also includes paper jobs given to politicians when they leave office as a reward for their actions when they were in office. 

Campaign money must come from the exchequer.

And......It doesn't have to cost the ridiculous amounts that it costs now.  Politicians can be given a legislated amount of money and a legislated time on national radio and television.  They would get a legislated space on news papers.  Venues would be rented for them to hold town meetings where each candidate answers questions from each other, from the moderator and from the audience.  These meetings would be put in their entirety on Youtube and shown on Television channels.

We should also set up a standard web site for each of them
On their individual, standardized web site, they can express themselves as they please.   But there will also be a section, inaccessible to them, in which past promises are compared with their voting record and a second section comparing their voting record with any other politician one is interested in.    Of course, they can use the Internet to their hearts content.  It costs nothing.

If we want to call the tune, we have to pay the piper.  We should stop all our campaigns for various causes and concentrate a huge ground swell on this one alone.  Then, after we have succeeded,  we can return to our other extremely critical campaigns with a much better chance of success.  We are so smart individually but so dumb in the collective.  How hard is it to understand.

            Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune

 

Postscripts:

1/  Jan 12, 2021 - In this kerfuffle regarding activating the 25th amendment or impeaching Donald J Trump for inciting insurrection,  a number of large corporations have announced that they will suspend any financing of the elections of any senators that oppose impeachment when it is sent from the House of Representatives to the Senate.  This will be interesting to watch.  If a bunch of GOP senators switch their allegiance to the cause and vote to impeach Trump it will prove the premise of this blog in spades.  Namely that maintaining their financing is the main motivation of Senators (and of course congressmen) ahead of all other considerations.  We'll see how this plays out.

 

2/  July 17, 2021  A major complaint will be 'Where is this money coming from'.  I'll give you just one example.  You can find your own.  Once the link between vested interests and politicians has been severed, all sorts of legislation will be possible.  One example is removing the tax breaks, subsidies, amortization allowances and so forth from fossil fuel companies.  I bet that this move alone would generate enough money for federal elections.    And remember, elections don't have to cost the obscene amounts that they cost at present.  Of course, this will also go some way toward saving us from our sorry selves with respect to our carbon emissions.  

June 2022

Just one final thought.  We might wonder where the money would come from to support the election campaign of the politicians.  It would have to come from the exchequer, of course and it would be a huge saving of money.  Let me run this by you. 

 

In order to get the contributions from rich individuals and companies with vested interests, the politicians have to give them all sorts of concessions which cost money.  These include such things as tax breaks, tariff barriers, sweet contracts from the government and so forth.  All these cost money which goes out or doesn't even come in to the government coffers in the first place.  And remember, the vested interests want a return on their contributions/investment.  Therefor, the cost to the governments will be greater than the amount the vested interests contribute.

  

In other words, if we the tax payer, supported the election campaigns of the politicians, it would actually save money.