The Red Sea - Dead Sea project

 For decades a proposal was being considered by Israel to bring Mediterranean sea water through canals and pipes to the Dead Sea but the project has been scrapped due to political problems and the worry that the sea water might contaminate the ground water of the West Bank.  Now there is a proposal by Jordan to bring Red Sea water to the Dead Sea, mainly by canal.  This project would be all in the territory of Jordan, traveling through a desert area along the Eastern side of Wadi Araba.  What benefits could accrue from such a project.  First a little background.

 

 

The Dead sea is about 430m (1412ft)below sea level.  It is in a desert area and is fed from the Jordan river which flows down the rift valley from the Sea of Galilee (Kenerit) to the North and from many small streams that come down from the ridge of mountains which Jerusalem is located on to the west.  When the Jordan river flowed unhindered, the amount of water entering the Dead Sea more or less matched the water evaporating from it's surface but since much of this water is now extracted for agriculture, the Dead Sea is falling year by year.  Chemical plants at the south end of the Dead sea operate evaporation-ponds to extract the solids from the water and refine them into a number of valuable products*.  This is also contributing to the lowering of the Dead Sea.  The salinity of the Dead Sea is about 10 times the salinity of the open ocean.  This will become quite important as we go through the benefits of the Red-Dead project.  So what benefits could result from the project.

* MgCl, NaCl, KCl, CaCl2, NaOH

 

                 Benefits from a Red Sea - Dead Sea Canal

 

Production of fresh water

The go-to method of producing fresh water from sea water is reverse osmosis.  It is energetically more efficient than Multi-stage flash distillation methods that require heat and vacuum pumps but still takes a lot of energy.  Ocean water is pressurized to about 30 atmospheres and pressed against membranes that allow water molecules to pass but not salt molecules.  Essentially, on a micro scale, you are sieving the salt out of the ocean water.  Incidentally, you can also use brackish ground water and sieve the solutes out of it.  Whatever the source of water, you are left with fresh water and a concentrated salt solution (brine).  The  brine is sent back to the ocean or can be evaporated in ponds to obtain the salts dissolved in the brine.

Since the Dead Sea is 430m below sea level, water piped from the North end of the canal to the Dead Sea will have a pressure of 43 Atmospheres if you drop the ocean water in a pipe to the Dead Sea, that is  more than enough for reverse osmosis.  In fact, you could produce the fresh water higher up on the slope of the Dead sea and have 'head' to pipe the fresh water to a wide area. Clearly there will be energy costs in bringing the water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea but once the water is at the North end of the canal, there are no added energy costs to operate a reverse osmosis plant.  The brine which is the waste product, can be allowed to flow into the Dead Sea with none of the ecological problems of returning this waste product to the ocean.  As a matter of fact, it will have the benefit of slowing down or reversing the falling level of the Dead Sea.

Production of Electricity

Dropping this water through turbines will create massive amounts of electricity.  Some of the energy could be used to bring the water from the Red Sea and the rest will be available to the people of Jordan at very reasonable costs.  Actually, the whole area is so sunny that the cost of running a power line from the generators back south along the Arava Valley to the Red Sea could probably be avoided by installing solar panels on every house in Aqaba and some more on the desert to the East.  Also, at the Aqaba end there is a very dependable North prevailing wind  which could power a wind turbine.  In the rare times when the wind is not blowing from the North, it is coming from the South. The combination of solar panels and wind turbines might  be less expensive than a high voltage power line all the way from the Dead Sea to Aqaba.  A pond at the North end of the canal would serve as an 'energy storage' device to average out any variability in the power source.

Vegetable production

From 300m down the slope, to the shore of the Dead Sea, vegetables can be grown using the fresh water produced, with no pumping costs for the fresh water produced.  It will flow by gravity.  I say half way down because that is the highest point that fresh water can be produced using the 'head' of the water from the North end of the canal. (30 atmospheres of pressure = 300m).  Of course the fresh water could be pumped uphill to access more land or even pumped to the rest of Jordan for domestic use.

Sea food production

The research station in Elat run by the Oceanographic and Limnological Research Company has done years of research growing fish, crustaceans and oysters in the waters of the Red Sea - mostly in ponds but also in other growing systems.  Marine algae would be an easy addition to this package.  The whole package has been worked out and is available and the relations between Jordan and Israel are pretty good for a couple of Middle East countries*.  The Palestinian people are known for their enterprise and capability.  They would take to growing such products for the European market like, well, fish to water.

*Hard to believe but there is more stress between Arab countries than between Israel and Arab countries.

Production of more fresh water and/or more electricity.

I have never understood how this  works but if you have water of two different saltines you can use them in a device that produces electricity.  Or, using a three cell system, you can produce fresh water instead.  The waters from the Red and Dead seas with their different salinities should be ideal for such a system.

Producing yet more electricity

There is a system using 'solar ponds' to produce electricity.  This one is much easier to understand.

You set up ponds with a salinity gradient from low salinity at the top to high salinity at the bottom. With the Red-Dead project we have three sources of water of different salinity.  Ponds are a few meters deep.  You have to keep any algae from growing in the upper water and regular swimming pool technology is used here.  Think how clear the water is in a hotel swimming pool.  Sun light, which shines for approximately 364 days of the year in this region, goes straight through the upper layers without being absorbed and heats up the bottom of the pond which heats up the lower layers of water.  Because of the salinity gradient, convection does not occur and the heat stays in the lower levels.  The bottom layers get really really hot.

We actually experienced this in a natural pond just south of Elat.  On the west shore of the Red Sea just south of Elat, there is a pond and when the tide is high, sea water can flow through the gravel into the pond.  When the tide goes out, the algae mats seal the pond.  This has resulted in a salinity gradient.  You can swim in the upper layers and it is sometimes quite cool, but hang vertically in the water and lower your feet down and it is too hot to tolerate.

Anyway, you install metal pipes in the lower part of the pond and bring them up to the surface through a lagged (insulated) pipe to an electrical generator.  You use a refrigeration fluid in the pipes.  The fluid is boiled in the pipes at the bottom of the pond and powers the generator above the pond and the condensed working fluid flows back down to the pipes in the bottom of the pond.  Such a system was run many decades ago at one of the hotels on the western side of the Dead Sea. If memory serves me right, it was a 7ha pond.

 

And still more electricity

There is a possibility that over time as you allow more and more water of less salinity than the Dead Sea into the Dead Sea that the whole Dead sea might become a solar lake with the deeper water heating up and the heat held there by the salinity gradient.

Reducing the cost of the chemical extraction factories.

It is getting more and more expensive to pump the Dead Sea brine into evaporation ponds as the surface of the Dead Sea goes down.  This source of water should halt and even reverse this tendency.  If the surface of the Dead Sea gets high enough, water would flow by gravity into the evaporation ponds.  Of course you would still have your pipes going down into the Dead Sea water since there is where the valuable chemicals are.

 

Reversing the damage to the shore

 Pot holes are appearing all over the shore of the Dead Sea, often under the road along the West side of the sea.  This is caused because as the level of the sea falls, small fresh water streams underground are dissolving away the high concentrations of salt in the soil.  With the level of the sea back up, this would cease.

The Red-Dead project would not only be an economic boon to Jordan but would probably engender another layer of cooperation between Israel and Jordan which has to be a good thing.  

Regenerative Agriculture

 What is Regenerative Agriculture?  In a word, it is a combination of various agriculture techniques that restore the fertility of the soil.  That is it in a nutshell.

There are a whole raft of benefits that flow from adopting the techniques of Regenerative Agriculture.  In no particular order:

* Water which falls on the land is retained to a large extent in the soil where it is available for the crops.  There is less evaporation and less flow of water through the soil and into the ground water.  Irrigation demands are reduced during dry periods and less water flows off the farm during wet periods.

*The carbon content of soils increases, sequestering significant carbon from the air.

*Nitrogen in the form of nitrates and Ammonium compounds are very soluable.  When applied as simple, chemical fertilizers, they dissolve in soil water and are easily washed out of the soil and into nearby streams.  Nitrogen in soils in farms practicing regenerative agriculture are held in slow-release form which are made available over the growing season to the crop.

*Costly inputs to the farm, including feed, fossil fuel, herbicides and pesticides greatly decrease, resulting in an improved bottom line for the farmer.  After a few short years using regenerative farming methods, productivity equals or exceeds what we now call conventional (commercial fertilizer driven) farming.

*Regenerative agriculture often involves more than one crop unlike some chemical farming that is a often a monoculture or sometimes an alternation between a couple of different crops.  This increases resilience to  market fluctuation.

*Farming becomes much more resilient to changes in markets and weather.

*Possibly of greatest importance, farming becomes much more interesting as the farmer uses knowledge and smarts rather than expensive inputs to run his farm.  There is no way to become depressed or worse when your bottom line improves and you are in control rather than at the mercy of outside influences.

In order to understand regenerative agriculture, there are a whole bunch of natural phenomenon that must be understood.  Again in no particular order:

*There ain't no sunshine underground.  Pretty obvious, no?  All the energy to support the underground beasties comes ultimately from photosynthesis  by some plant the lived above ground.   

*Soil organisms are really really good at scavenging all the phosphates, nitrates, sulphates and other 'ates' in their vicinity.  All they need is a source of energy in the form of plant material, which was grown  on the surface.  But if you mix-in a whole bunch of straw, sawdust etc, your plants will starve.  The soil beasties will have taken up all the goodies.  So whada you wanda do.  I don't know. Whada you wanda do (The vultures in The Jungle Book).  You put the plant material on the surface.  There it is taken into the soil in a more gradual rate and has other benefits.

*Bare soil, when hit by great big summer rain drops, puddles the fine particles in the soil and the soil surface becomes impermeable to water.  The water runs off, taking soil with it.   Rain drops hitting organic material are stopped in their tracks and seep into the ground.  When the sun comes out and dries the surface.  It is a great insulator and shields the ground below from the heat of the sun.  The soil has absorbed more water and it retains it. 

*Rich organic soil is a great sponge.  It holds lots of water.  The deeper the rich organic layer, the more water it can hold. Pure mineral soil, if fine, doesn't absorb water.  In coarse,gravely soils the water simply flows through it into the water table below - often out of the range of the roots of the plants. If a coarse soil has been filled with organic material, there is a sponge between the coarse particles of the soil to retain water.

*Most plants exude up to 30% of the energy that they collect from the sun through their roots in the form of energy rich compounds.  They don't do this out of the goodness of their non-existent heart.  This behavior wouldn't have evolved if it wasn't worth-while for the plant. The soil organisms use these compounds and, in return, provide a range of benefits for the plant.  In the case of funguseseses, they exchange mineral nutrients which are either locked away chemically from the plant or are beyond the root zone of the plant in exchange for these energy rich compounds.  P is particularly important in this context.

*The mass of the part of a plant that is above ground is more or less equal to the part that is below ground.  When you harvest/crop/graze a plant, some of the roots die back to balance the reduced above-ground part.  Think of this as the insertion of organic material deep down where it is utilized by the soil beasties and ultimately becomes humus. Some plants have roots that reach meters into the soil so this process can be building a very deep layer of top soil.

*Organic material which is laid on top of the soil as mulch, has all the well known benefits such as reducing evaporation, stopping rain drops from disrupting the soil and causing crusting and thereby causing more run off across the soil.  Over time.  Mulch is incorporated into the soil by a number of organisms such as beetles, earth worms and fungus which live at the boarder between the mulch and the soil.

*Fungus in the soil is your greatest ally in growing crops.  Fungus accesses nutrients in two ways and transfers these nutrients to the roots of plants in exchange for the energy rich exudates from the plant roots.  First, fungus can liberate nutrients that are  fixed in the soil and that plant roots can not liberate.  Phosphorous is notable in this context.  Some soils fix P in compounds that are not available to plant roots.  Secondly, the mycellea of funguses extend far beyond the root zone of plants.  They can mobilize and transfer nutrients to the plant from far and wide.

So what are the principles of regenerative farming.

There are a few main principles and lot's of scope within these principles for some fascinating innovation.  

* All the stover is left on the surface of the soil.  Stover is all the parts of the plant that are not utilized by us.  If you have planted corn, stover includes all the stalks, leaves and if it is possible, the cobs.  If you chop it up while harvesting, so much the better.

* Stop plowing.  It disrupts the funguseseses which are the farmer's little helpers.  If you plow a field regularly, you will be hard pressed to find a worm in the soil.  If that isn't an indication of a sick field, I don't know what is.  If you have to seed the field, either use direct drilling or open a small trench of the desired depth and drop the seeds into it.  

*Never leave the soil bare.  Plant a cover crop.  Legumes are a great choice as they fix mega-bucks worth of N into the soil.  All farmers have heard of N-P-K (Nitrogen, Phosphorous Potassium).  It is not accidental that they are in this order.  N is the nutrient needed in the greatest quantities by plants.  And it doesn't have to be a sacrifice crop.  Plant soy beans, alfalfa or other cash crops that fix nitrogen from the air into the soil.  Nothing new here.  Thousands of years before the chemistry/biology  was known, farmers knew to do this.  We seem to have to relearn everything every generation.

*Rotate your crops in as random a schedule as possible, leaving as long as possible between the same crop.  Pests just can't stand this.

*If you are grazing, put the animals into a field at such a concentration that they graze down the sward in one day while trampling some of the plants into the ground and defecating and urinating on the field and then move them to a new place.  You probably have to use electric fences for this due to the cost of permanent fencing.  Let the plants recover before putting the grazers back on to the area but don't allow the plants to go senescent (old and woody).  Over-grazing and under-grazing are equally detrimental.

*Don't be bashful about putting chemical nutrients on your fields.  If a soil analysis shows that you are missing, for instance, Zn, Co, Se, Cu or whatever, apply it.  You can't grow healthy animals without the necessary macro and micro-nutrients.  Regenerative farming isn't some sort of religion.  It is farming with smarts as much as possible, replacing un-needed, costly inputs.  Oh! and when you get a soil analysis, get Total X rather than Available X done.  Once you have a vibrant rhizosphere# plus all the other wee beasties in the soil, they will mobilize what is in the soil.  You achieve this beatific situation by not plowing and by applying lots of organic material on the surface of your soil to power the soil ecology.

# funguseseses

Some interesting books

  By David R Montgomery

Dirt

The Second Half of Nature

Growing a Revolution

What Your Food Ate

 By Michael Pollan

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Omega 3 and 6 Fatty Acids

This is a book review of a small part of a book, What Your Food Ate, by David R Montgomery and Anne Bikle.  It is the most recent (2022) in a series of books including:

Dirt - what happens to a civilization that treats its soil like dirt

The Second Half of Nature - what goes on in a rich organic soil

Growing a Revolution - how to restore degraded soil, from the top, in one to three years - a process that nature  takes centuries to restore, working from the bottom up.

 

This essay is on fatty acids which is only a very small part of the book, which is jammed packed with information on the food-value of foods grown in rich organic soil, compared with foods grown in degraded soils, using chemical nutrients.  The difference is significant.  So what is a fatty acid. 

A fatty acid is a chain of carbon atoms with three hydrogen atoms attached to one end and a OOH at the other end.  All the other carbon atoms in the chain have 2 hydrogen atoms attached to it.  An omega three fatty acid has one H atom missing from the third carbon from the three-hydrogen end.  And as you might guess an Omega 6 fatty acid has one H atom missing from the 6th carbon atom from the three hydrogen end. Seems like a pretty minor difference, No?  This results in  a double bond at the location in question.  Actually, if I remember Organic chemistry correctly, the double bond  flashed back and forth between the carbon in question and the two adjacent carbons but don't take my word for it.  My Organic chemistry is pretty rusty.

Both types of fatty acid are necessary for human health.  The Omega6 fatty acid play a role in inducing inflammation.  Inflammation is part of the defense of the body against viral and bacterial invaders.  Omega 3 fatty acids play a role in shutting down the inflammation when it is no longer needed.  The ideal ratio of these fatty acids in the body is 1:1.  If there is an excess of Omega6s, inflammation may carry on and this can lead to auto-immune conditions and even cancers.  

Humans and many animals can not manufacture these fatty acids.  The ratio in your body reflects the ratio in the food you eat.  This is the same for livestock and if you eat meat that has a 1:1 ratio, you will tend toward a 1:1 ratio*.  

*Of course you don't only eat, say, beef.  The rest of your diet also contributes to your 3-6 ratio.

 

The milk, butter and cheese of a dairy cow will also reflect the 3-6 ratio in the feed of the cow.  

 

Cattle that eat pasture plants will have the ideal 1:1 ratio of fatty acids in their meat.  Cattle that eat concentrate, especially concentrate that is heavily based on corn, will have highly excessive Omega 6 fatty acids in their meat.  If a cow has been raised all her life on pasture and then 'finished' in a feed lot, it only takes a month or two for her fatty acid ratio to reflect her new feed.

 

You see where we are going with this.  I always thought that the "Pasture Fed" advertising was just a marketing gimmick.   Apparently not.  It really is far better to eat pasture fed meat  than feed lot meat.  I suppose the same would apply to animals which are hunted such as deer, pigs, birds in comparison to the same animals,  raised on concentrate. One wonders if feed lots explains the preponderance of auto-immune type conditions that seem to be increasing just as we have pretty well conquered diseases caused by micro-organisms. This seems to be particularly so in America where it seems that any prepared food you eat contains corn.

By the by, what foods besides pasture raised meat are rich in Omega3 fatty acids.  It included many nuts such as walnuts, oily fish at the bottom of the food chain, Other fish - especially wild caught ones,  flax seeds, chia seeds, cold pressed Olive oil, pumpkin seeds, soy beans, eggs if fed on Omega3 rich food, spinach, papya and Brussle Sprouts.

I would heartily recommend getting the four books mentioned at the start.  They explain so much.  By the way, there are no references in What Your Food Ate.  Including them would have increased the size of the book by 50 pages so the authors put the references on line.  The URL, if you want to have a look at them is www.dig2grow.com 

There is much more information on fatty acids in What Your Food Ate and on the nutrient quality of food grown on rich organic soil compared with food grown on degraded soil with the nutrients provided from chemical fertilizer.  In a sentence, the concentrations of minerals, vitamins and phytochemicals in plants grown in rich organic soil are considerably higher.               

My Nissan Leaf

I love my Leaf.  I have never been a petrol-head, even as a teenager.  I just wanted a car to get me from A to B (and of course with my girl friend by my side).  But my electric Leaf is something else again.  I'm a very conservative driver and drive gently but when I want to get out into traffic or pass someone with limited space to do it, man! does my Leaf get up and go.  It's a real jack rabbit.  I can understand why some electric car owners have to change their tires more often than when they drove and ICE car.  

And while we are at it, let's look at the cost of driving compared to an ICE car.  My Leaf has a range of 300km (actually more like 350 but let's keep the numbers simple) with a 60kWh battery.  Dividing 300 by 60, we see that I can drive 5km per kWh or for the sake of comparison, 10km per liter of petrol.  Now here a kWh cost me 25c so I pay 50c per 10km.  (actually I have solar panels but that is another story).  

A similar size ICE car gets about 10km per liter of fuel.  Here a liter of fuel costs $2.50.  Ergo, it costs me a fifth as much on electricity than it would on fossil fuel.  Add to that, that I hardly ever use my brakes and have no oil to change.  On the other side, I think I may need a new set of tires more often with my Leaf.

I think the Leaf could become the iconic  car of this century.  That is if they changed their business model.  For me, at least, their car is excellent and is all the car I will ever need or want but their business model doesn't put the customer first.

For instance, if you have one of the early 24kWh (kilowatt hour) batteries, the battery is probably getting a little tired by now and you won't have the range you once had.  If you can fine a wrecked Leaf with a 24, 30 or 40kWh* battery, it is a matter of about an hour's work to change out your battery for the one in the wrecked Leaf.  Suddenly the range of your Leaf has jumped way up.  And the chemistry back then was not what it is now.  Your new (used) battery is likely to last  longer than the original.  

*A 60kWh battery is apparently a real hassle to fit to the earlier models.  Possible but Quite difficult.

But the Nissan company doesn't make it easy to buy a new, higher capacity battery for your Leaf.  In fact, at least here in New Zealand it is virtually impossible.  This is not a company thinking of the best interests of her customers.

My second gripe is about the temperature control of the battery.  Apparently, too high or too low temperatures are bad for the battery and cause the battery to degrade more quickly.  Nissan should start to put temperature control around her batteries.

So what could Nissan do, even now, 22 years into this century, to make her car the iconic one instead of Tesla.  Actually, she would only make the Leaf iconic for one portion of the market but I suspect this is a huge percent of the market.  There will always be people who want the latest with all the bells and whistles.  Here is Nissan's advantage.  A whole bunch of us don't want this.  We want a reasonable looking car with very good range, ease of repair, nice handling but most of all a low price tag.  How does Nissan achieve this and still make a great profit.

1/  Keep the leaf the same from now on.  The only innovations should be ones that make the car cheaper or with better battery chemistry.  

2/ Decrease the cost of manufacture by, for instance, adopting Elon's mega-casting machines.  With the way you have your battery in the Leaf, you might be able to cast the whole chassis in one go, unlike Tesla that does it in two parts.  And while you are at it, make the underneath of the car flat.  At the back is a hollow that probably held the spare tire when they used the frame from one of their ICE cars for the Leaf.  If the bottom of the car was flattened out, there would be a huge increase in the trunk space.  An added advantage is that apparently a flat under side of a car improves its streamlining.

3/ Keep all the controls tactile.  No touch screens.  The radio in my Leaf is great.  It has a knob on the left for tuning and one on the right for volume and turning on.  Also there are volume control buttons on the steering wheel.  I never have to take my eyes off the road to operate my radio.  All controls should be similarly tactile.

4/ Produce a van for the 'tradie', the plummer, electrician, builder and so forth.  Provide a 220V AC outlet that the tradie could use and lots of attachment points inside the van for attaching shelves and things.  Make it with two sliding doors. Adopt every bit of kit possible from the Leaf.  Only innovate when necessary for the function of a van.

Autumn melt spikes on Greenland

I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction.  The Autumn melt spike on Greenland that we saw this year (End of September 2022) will become the normal situation as the years go by.   So what is the reasoning behind this prediction.

 

First let's look at the normal (usual up till now) situation with the Hadley Cells.  The equatorial Hadley cell is powered by the heating of land and sea around the equator.  Let's keep it simple and ignore various finer grained effects involving, for instance latent heat.  The air is heated from below by the warm surface of the earth, rises and flows North and South at altitude.

 

The Polar Hadley cell is powered by the air   radiating heat into space, becoming dense and sinking.  It is not heated from below because the snow and ice over the Arctic Ocean reflects most of the radiation falling on it back into space.  Besides, much of the year, in winter, there is virtually no radiation falling on the land, and ice covered sea.

 

Consider for a moment what would happen if these two cells met at 45 degrees North (Let's ignore the Southern Hemisphere for now).  Air at 45 degrees north is trying to both rise and fall with the Arctic Hadly cell air warming as it flows southward and 'wanting' to rise.  Air from the Equatorial Hadley cell, flowing northward at altitude cools by radiation and wants to descend,  Instead what happens is a third cell, the Ferrel cell is induced.  

 

This third cell,  the Ferrel Cell  acts like an idler wheel in an engine (the one that keeps your fan belt tight, for instance) ((if you are still driving an ICE dinosaur))

Incidentally, jet streams occur, at altitude, where Hadley cells meet

 

Now we throw a spanner in the works.

 

We add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and this results in the melting of more and more floating ice on the Arctic Ocean.  Radiation that falls on this open water over the summer penetrates the water and is absorbed, heating the water.  This results in more melting ice and more heat absorption.  The sensible heat of water is high (one Calorie* per kg of water) and the heating is over a considerable depth so a lot of heat is absorbed with a modest increase in temperature.  

*A large Calorie as opposed to a small calorie (which will heat one gram of water one degree C).

 

In the mean time, the land is heating up.  The land only heats up at the surface;  say a foot in depth or so and the sensible heat of land is less than water so the same amount of heat will raise the temperature of land more than water.  It can become quite hot on land, in the Arctic, in summer.  This induces an onshore wind.  The air over the ice-covered ocean is cold and flows toward the land which is warm.  (Air rising, over land, sucking air from the ocean)  With Coriolis, you have the polar Nor-Easterlies (Air flowing toward the South West).  So now we get to what is likely to happen in the fall.

  

The land has warmed much more than the ocean, but not absorbed much heat and it cools off quickly as solar radiation decreases.  Not so the sea and the  open water that increases year by year.  It cools more slowly.  In addition, when it cools enough to freeze, it gives off latent heat of crystallization which slows the cooling.  The effect I'm talking about, namely autumn melting spikes, will occur more and more as we see increased open water during the summer.

 

With the land around the Arctic cold and the ocean still relatively (to the land) warm, you should have off-shore winds.  In fact you may even induce a 4 Hadley cell system for a while*.  And when the Arctic really gains power due to much more open ocean, holding much more heat, eventually, you should actually suck the whole system northward and have a two Hadley cell system.  A good indication that we have reached this situation will be when the  Polar Jet Stream disappears.  Jet streams occur where Hadley cells meet.  So now, how about Green land melting.

* Since jet streams occur where Hadley cells meet, you might even observe an extra jet stream for a short time.

 

Air flowing off the land will be warming and becoming humid as it flows across an ever more open ocean and will tend to form counter-clockwise systems due to Coriolis.  This warm moist air will impinge on Greenland where not only will there be rain but a kg of moisture condensing out of the air onto the ice, releases enough heat to melt 5 or 6 kg of ice*.  (For water the latent heat of evaporation/condensing is 6 times as much as the latent heat of melting/crystallization).  Another couple of effects may come into play here.

* Heat of crystallization/melting is 80Cal per kg.  Heat of evaporation/condensation is 540Cal per kg.

 

If one of these low pressure area sidles up to the West coast of Greenland, on its northern side it will be sucking air down the slope and on the southern side pushing air up the slope.  Lets look at the North side.  When air flows down a slope, it heats up by 9.8 degrees C per km fall.  This warming air will melt ice if it reaches and exceeds 0 degrees C.

 

On the Southern side it is pushing humid air up the slope and, depending on exact conditions, may be causing rain which melts the ice.  And if the humidity in the air flow is condensing on the ice, it will be melting ice due to the latent heat effect described above. 

 

There is another possibility.  If the air is simply flowing toward Greenland, (atmospheric river?) it will come into contact with the ice and condense, causing melting as described above.  This will make the air dense and it may be full of droplets of water (fog) making it effectively even more dense and it will flow down slope to the sea.  We have the adiabatic melting effect described above, and may form sort of a miniature Walker cell between the ice and the sea.  Convective processes are much more effective at transferring heat than conductive or radiative effects and this could melt the ice at a shocking rate. Essentially, heat is being transferred to the ocean from the huge store accumulated all summer in the ocean .

(Read Plains of Passage, by Jean Auel - chapter 41 or so.  The book is a novel but Jean did her homework and described what happens when Foen winds occur over ice),  The resulting Peteraqs are intense.  Classic Peteraqs are typically well below 0 degrees but the atmosphere is warming.  Imagine one of these density winds that is above the freezing point, blasting across the ice.

Then, if all that wasn't enough, there are storms that come up the East coast of North America.  If the water they flow over is cold, they loose their umph but as the water becomes ever warmer, they can travel further North.  We have another mechanism for putting a storm up against Greenland with the same results as above.

 

Even a high pressure area sitting beside Greenland can do the same as long as the winds it creates are blowing across a warm ocean.

 

If these storms sidle up to the East coast, the same as above applies except the rain will be induced at the northern edge and the adiabatic melting at the southern edge of the storm.

 

So in conclusion, I think it is quite likely that we will see melting spikes in the fall just like the one this year.   They will occur in years in which the sea has accumulated a lot of heat and will happen as the land cools off, resulting in a strong pressure gradient from the land to the sea.  The strength of off-shore winds around the Arctic Ocean will signal the start of this process and how strong the melting is likely to be in any year. As the sea freezes over, and especially  if it acquires an insulating layer of snow, the process will stop. Initially we may  see a short-lived, extra jet stream but eventually as the Arctic ocean gains power, the northern-most jet stream will likely disappear in the fall.

The anthropocene

 First let's define a couple of terms.  We are at present in an ice age.  We are in a warm period within this ice age which is, so far, 2.75million years old.  Within this ice age there have been many warm periods.  At the beginning of this ice age, the cycle period was about 41,000 years.  Now, and for the last half, it has been about 100,000 years.  Our present warm period has been called the Holocene and started about 20,000 years ago.  The previous warm period is called the Eemian.  The start of the Holocene is defined by when the most recent Glacial (or glacial period if you like) was at it's maximum and then began to decline.    It may be more useful to define the start of the Holocene at about 12,000 years ago when melting really got under way.

Now we are arguing that we are in a new period, called the Anthropocene because man has taken control of the climate.  Using the word control may be a little optimistic.  We have changed the climate and are going to change it much more but it is actually completely out of our control.  We could control the climate and many important innovations, which would be sufficient to do so have been put into place but our politicians, who have to do the heavy lifting, have been fighting such moves, screaming and shouting and dragging their heels ever since it has become apparent that we are not going to like the results from climate change.

In the past, the change from one geological period* to the next has been defined by geology.  When the assemblage of animals in a continually deposited stack of sedimentary rocks changes we define a new period. A well known example is the K/T boundary - the change from the Cretaceous to the Tertiary.  Below this we have fossils of dinosaurs and other organisms, above this, no dinosaurs and a change in the assemblage of other organisms.

*I use the word 'period' to avoid having to define epochs, ages, eras, eons and so forth. Even using the term 'period' is problimatic as it is sometimes used in formal geology.

We are now arguing about when the Anthropocene started with the consensus seeming to be a little after the Second World War, when we started to have an effect on the climate.  

The change from using the assemblage of animals in the fossil record to a using change in climate to define a new period is probably due to the belief that the past changes in animal assemblages was due to climate change.  So is it justified to say we have changed the animal assemblages that could become fossilized just after the 2nd world war. (then we will examine the climate change argument).

Well, No.  Depending on which continent you look at, the animal assemblages changed in the blink of a geological eye some time ago. The process took, at most, one or two thousand years.   In North and South America it happened about 12,000 years ago.  In Australia, about 50,000 years ago and in New Zealand, about 700 years ago.  In every case it occurred following the discovery of these areas by the "First People" who wiped out every animal that their existing technology was capable of killing and eating.  The above are just commonly known examples.  The same thing happened everywhere man first arrived.  So how about us having an effect on the climate.

There is an excellent book called Plows Plagues and Petroleum by Ruddiman that argues otherwise.  Let's go back to the glacial periods.  When you look at ice cores from both Greenland and Antartica, ocean bottom cores and some other proximal indicators, it becomes clear that when a glacial period ends, temperatures rise and ice disappears to a minimum amount and then an pretty well immediate a slide begins back toward a glacial period.  In fact the slide starts to occur a little before minimum ice as you would expect*.  It takes time for snow to accumulate and glaciers to form and for the temperature and Carbon dioxide to decrease but the slide is immediately apparent.  This is very apparent in the graphs of the most recent 4 or so glacial-interglacial cycles.  All but the most recent one.

*Carbon dioxide levels  are a good indicator of when the slide starts but it is still warm enough to melt more ice so the slide toward the next glacial (glacial period) begins a little before minimum ice.

About 8000 years ago (6000BP), we started to reverse the slide of Carbon dioxide and about 5000 years ago (3000BP) we started to reverse the slide of methane, just as man reached a population and a technology capable of doing so.  So what were we doing.  We started agriculture, using the plow which releases carbon from the soils, used fire to clear areas and started to grow rice in ponds which as with any swamp, releases methane.  We didn't reverse the slide into the next glacial but considerably slowed down the slide.

In fact, despite our effect on climate, we just reached the tipping point in which continental glaciers began to from.  Ruddiman's book says two factors tipped us over into this situation.  First there was the Black Death in the 'Old World' which again and again wiped out around a third of the population.  Huge areas which were under cultivation, reverted to forests, sucking carbon out of the air and cooling the climate.

The other event was the arrival of European man in the Americas.  We brought with us a whole range of diseases that the indiginous population had had no contact with and hence no immunity to these diseases.  Recent archeology has made it clear that the indiginous population was far larger than we thought.  For instance, in the jungles of the Amazon, vegetation rapidly took over and made it very hard to see traces of earlier civilizations.  With the advent of methods to look down with Lydar from aircraft, we see the remains of human activity in areas completely vegetated today.

In places like Virginia, the first Europeans reported stepping off their boats into fields of pumpkin, corn and beans.  50 years later this was all forest.  The people had disappeared and the forest had taken over.  All this sucked carbon out of the atmosphere and tipped us over into the accumulation of snow from year to year.

This can be seen around the high lands of Baffin Island.  In North America, this is where the snow begins to accumulate.  There is a ring of dead lichens around this area.  Despite their hardiness, the one thing lichens can't survive is a lack of light.  They are a symbiosis between a fungus and a photosynthetic organism.

Following this we were entering into an industrial revolution and reversed the fall of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the snow melted back and we were off toward too much of a good thing which we are in today.  Releasing just enough carbon that is sequestered under ground to hold off the next glacial is probably a good thing.  After all, a new glacial would bulldoze New York and other cities into the sea.  But we have gone overboard and New York is likely to be drowned instead.

Conserving our Planet

 Why bother.  Well, some of us would like to pass on a planet which is better than the way we found it.  If we are Christians, we know that dad (The Father) passed on his business to us his children.  It says so in the first book in the bible.  Just judging from human dads who have passed on their businesses, that they created, they would be much happier if their children improved the business and kept it going for their children.  I think that God would like this too. 

To those of us who are not religious, the world is a pretty amazing, fantastic, beautiful place.  Such a shame not to preserve all this wonder for our children.  I've never understood why the religious amongst us want to drill, mine, clear fell and fish out all the fishes in the sea while us atheists are desperately trying to preserve the earth.

Much later

I may have thought of a reason.  You notice how so many religions, at least the many Christian varieties, emphasize the end of worlds and seem to lust after it happening in their time.  I think the thought of the world carrying on for generation after generation after generation makes them feel somehow insignificant.  Somehow they gain status or importance by being the last generation.  Well, the way we are treating the earth, this may 'come to pass'.

 

Whatever!!  It is all academic anyway as long as we have our present systems of government.  Have you ever wondered why politicians,  are not trying to help.  In fact they are actively blocking us from taking the measures needed.  We are continually fighting an uphill battle against them.  No-where is the old adage "Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune", more true than in politics.  As long as the rich and companies with vested interest  are allowed to support the election campaigns of politicians, to somehow make them rich while in office and to take care of them with sweet jobs when they leave politics, this uphill battle will continue.

 

So the following is just a check list of what we could be doing if we could stop vested interests financing politicians.  We, the people, will eventually succeed but how much more damage will be done in the mean time.  We might actually be able to save us from our sorry selves if we could get the politicians on side.

 

In no particular order

 

Basic Conservation 

Generation after generation has shown that we, as a species, are not capable of conserving our planet, either on land or at sea.  Every generation thinks they know what to do and each generation fails.  The level of Hubris is unbelievable.  There is one and only one way that works and that is to set aside large areas both on land and at sea that we don't interfere with.  Leave it alone.  Nature has done a far better job for far longer so get off the Hubris wagon and let nature do her thing.  We made a valiant stab at it with national parks but let's admit it.  They are inadequate. They aren't big enough and not wild enough.  Fortunately, some of them have preserved remnant populations that could spread out if given space.

Likewise at sea, our small marine reserves are great but think how much more effective large areas would be. In fact there are a few being established but the problem is the policing.  If successful not only will they seed adjacent fished areas with larval marine organisms but with adults as well who are looking for more leibenstraum.  And fishing in the permitted areas will be so good that we could abandon destructive fishing methods such as drift nets and bottom trawls.  

The only way to save our oceans is to set aside large parts of it and ensure that no human activity except for tourism happens there.

Forestry

In the protected areas, of course we leave well enough alone and let nature take her course.  If we insist on running sheep in these areas, as they do in the UK, we must also put in wolves or mountain lions.  But how about where we plant trees for lumber.  Timber plantations can make a great contribution to getting Carbon dioxide out of the air.

We must grow our lumber trees in fairly crowded conditions so that they self prune and shoot for the sky, making fine grained, straight lumber with large inter-node spaces (the distance between side branches) and few knots.  If we plant them with greater spacing, we must put lifts* on the trees.  We must then build this timber into engineered wood.  Engineered wood is essentially ply wood but in the form of beams and posts.  This sort of lumber is dimensionally very stable and tends to be built into quality, long lasting single and multi-story buildings.  Thus we sequester lots of carbon.  Dry wood is about 50% carbon so for every kg of wood used for construction, we sequester 12+16+16** = 4.4 X 1.2 = 2.2kg of Carbon dioxide. Better still, engineered wood, while more expensive than sawn lumber, is easier and quicker to work with.  It saves on labor costs.  It can also be delivered, already cut to the needed lengths.  It might be that the use of engineered wood for simple one story houses would be less expensive, despite it's greater cost, than sawn lumber.

* The process of cutting off the branches flush with the trunk over the bottom half, or so of the tree.  This is typically done 3 times for fast growing lumber trees such as Pinus radiata.  It results in an increased proportion of knot free wood. 

** The atomic weights of C and O.

We don't stop there.  We pyrolyze (gassify) all the off-cuts and sawdust unless there is some more profitable use for these materials.  This produces a range of fuels such as 'natural gas', gasoline, diesel, airline fuel and right on up to tar.  This is completely green fuel and displaces crude oil we have to extract from the ground but (in the words of Dr Seuss) 'that is not all, no that is not all'. The by product of the pyrolysis of wood is charcoal. This we incorporate into agricultural soils.  It serves almost the same function as humus and sequesters more carbon - long term.  Charcoal is very refractory (hard to break down) in soil but fills many of the functions of humus.

Last but not least, single and multistory buildings built from engineered wood are very very earth quake resistant and displace concrete, itself a major source of Carbon dioxide.

Recycling

The ongoing effort to recycle must continue.  Note that any organic material for which there is not a more profitable second life can be pyrolyzed (see above).  Thus we should never have a mountain of used tires or plastic, pools of used engine oil, discarded electronic equipment (mostly plastic) and so forth.

As for batteries, once there are enough of them to make it worthwhile we can recycle the minerals they contain.   I can't believe it is more difficult to separate out the metals contained in solar panels, batteries and wind turbine motors than to separate the metals from ore which in addition to various other metals, contains gangue (waste rock).  

I've recently read that the problem with recycling solar panels is that they are lasting longer than was expected when they were installed so the volume of used solar panels is still relatively low. 

Nodule Mining

Of course we must mine mineral nodules from the ocean's abyss.  They are needed for our transition to a fossil fuel free society.  But whether we create another mess or do it responsibly depends on the details of how we do it.  Nodule mining is not like bottom trawling for marine life.  First of all, it can only be done once.  It will be many thousands of years before Nodules have grown there again and by that time, we may have knocked ourselves back into the dark ages or even a new stone age.

We must not mine the whole area.  Untouched areas must be left to seed the mined areas

The crawlers that move along the bottom must be designed so that all the organic 'snow' that they raise is sucked to the surface and not allowed to smother un-mined areas.  

Bottom water with it's dissolved nutrients and bottom 'snow' must be sprayed over the surface of the ocean and not released in a solid plug that will plunge back down to the bottom.

Note that there may be some rather surprising benefits from nodule mining besides the obvious access to minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.  In places in the world where bottom water is pulled up naturally into the photic zone, such as off the coast of Peru, we see incredible productivity resulting from the minerals dissolved in the bottom water.  The same will likely be the case when we spray the water, which is brought up with mineral nodules, over the surface of the ocean.  In addition, the organic particulate material entrained in the bottom water will likely feed surface filter feeders.  

The ocean surface, above areas where there are mineral nodules are usually marine nutrient-deserts and a mining operation will likely become a nutrient-oasis in the ocean desert.  One other aspect is worth mentioning.  

Climax ecologies are often less varied in terms of the species composition than disturbed ecologies*.  Mined areas could well provide a nitch for pioneer species, enriching the ocean bottom biodiversity.

*A tree falls in the jungle

Fishing the Oceans

Of course we are going to continue to fish the oceans and once we have set aside huge areas where no fishing is allowed, the fishing in the rest of the ocean will be fantastic.  We may not reach the populations that occurred before the advent of commercial fishing but we will be well on the way in that direction.  Best of all, with fishing so good, we can abandon destructive fishing methods such as drift nets and bottom trawling.  Fishing will be so good with purse seines and long lines that those destructive methods will not be necessary.

However, we need a 'wee tweak' in our attitude to fishing.  Just imagine when the first people of South America were eating Teosinte, the precursor of our magnificent corn plants and they started to grow it.   Imagine if they always ate the biggest and best cobs and planted the seeds from the scrubby little cobs.  Fortunately they instinctively recognized that like begets like and saved the best cobs for seeds.  Now, unless you are a trained biologist, you would have a hard time recognizing the original Teosinte plant that gave rise to corn.   

We need to adopt such an attitude to our commercial fishing.  It won't be easy.  After all, it is easier to sift out the biggest fish, scallops, clams or prawns with a net, allowing the small ones to escape through the mesh.  But we have seen how an attitude based on the simple premise that like begets like has resulted in pretty well all our agricultural animals and plants today.  We could actually be improving the oceans fauna instead of degrading it. Considerable human ingenuity in each branch of fisheries will be necessary.

Fish Farming

Fish farms are not farms at all.  They are feed lots.  The feed for the fish is not grown on the farm but is harvested from other places such as the up-welling areas of the ocean and the soy fields on land.  And one of the main areas growing soya are cleared areas of the Amazon jungle!!! 

Salmon farming, in particular, has to be the the most egregious example of our stupidity.  If we were to take care of our rivers, we would only have to wait until the salmon returned each year, harvest most of them and allow the best to continue upstream to spawn.  What a waste of effort to compensate for our lack of ability to care for our rivers.

Soil Restoration

Since the invention of the plow a few thousand years ago, many soils have lost most of their carbon content*.  It all ends up in the air where some of it is sucked back into plants.  This process has accelerated up to the present.  Soils have been lost at one two and even three orders of magnitude greater than they are produced in nature from the bottom up  (10,100 or 1000 times faster).  America has been one of the most egregious examples with the whole eastern seaboard degraded, followed by the central great plains but it didn't start there.   The Greeks and Romans now farm barely weathered rock instead of the rich soils that existed thousands of years ago.  Fortunately, soils can be build up from the top down with appropriate farming methods and the carbon put back into them.  And it greatly improves farming while lowering input costs.

 

*Read Growing a Revolution by David R Montgomery and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Educate Women 

Never mind that it is totally unfair for one half of the population to dominate the other half.  Never mind the fact that we aren't unlocking the potential of half of our people.  The overarching most important reason to educate women is that they stop having so many babies and, on average, have them later.  In most of the countries where woman are educated, the birth rate has fallen below the magic 2.1 births per woman which is just enough for replacement.  

In these countries the population will stabilize and begin to decline in the very near future.  In fact, if you ignore immigration, it is already happening.  We run our countries as a ponzi scheme in which we always have to be increasing our GDP.  Well guys, we are just going to have to learn how to run our economies with less people and economic contraction.  A good start would be fair taxation.  

With our global companies they are able to pull all sorts of nonsense so that they pay very little tax.  With the increase in automation, for the manufacture of many goods we need fewer and fewer people.  The decreasing population will help with this since there will be fewer and fewer people needed in factories but at the same time there will be fewer people to buy the goods from these factories.  We need a far more even distribution of the wealth of the world and at some point a universal pension will probably be needed.  This isn't possible unless all people and businesses pay their fair taxes.

To be continued:

Atrial Fibrulation

This is a transcript of a talk given by Dr Andria Coley, CardioThorasic surgeon from the University of Texas, Cardiology Institute.  It deals with the present knowledge of Atrial Fibrillation as of 2022.  

Here is the URL if you prefer to watch the Video.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SWiGsBYqw&t=2072s

The transcript can serve as a useful check list.

1/ For decades the medical profession have had the impression that A-Fib is really not that serious.  You have an episode, get over it and carry on.

 

2/ From studies, following up on people with A-Fib it  became clear that A-Fib is a serious problem and it is becoming more and more common.  Recently a great deal of research has been carried out on A-fib, on its prognosis and how to treat it.

 

3/ People with A-Fib have a 5 times greater chance of a stroke, three times greater chance of heart failure and twice the chance of early cardiac caused death.

 

4/ A 5 year study of a group of patients who had A-fib for the first time, which was serious enough for them to be hospitalized, showed a huge increase in a whole range of conditions over the following years.  These included a high rate of heart failure, high rates of stroke, heart attacks, bleeding problems from being on blood thinners, and most serious, just under half of these patients passed away within the 5 year study period.

 

5/ A-Fib is 2 to 3 times as prevalent in the USAas in other 'western' countries.   She puts this down to the American diet, way of life and other medical problems that are common in America.

 

6/ There are a number of new options for sorting out A-Fib.

 

7/ In the healthy heart, the Sinus Node at the top of the Left Atrium starts the pulse.  The pulse is picked up by the AV node which sends it to the Ventricles.

 

Note: the blood enters the Atriums which pumps it to the ventricals which pumps it to the body (0ne side of the heart) or to the lungs (the other side).

 

8/ When a group of rogue cells 'decides' to send a false signal, it causes the Atrium to fibrillate - a little like the twitch you get in your eye sometimes.

 

9/ If this rogue signal hits the AV node it causes Rapid Ventricular Response.  ie.  The heart speeds up.  This is when people typically feel A-Fib.  When the Atrium is in A-fib, it can happen without the person being aware.  What we feel consciously is the ventricle pulsing away at a rapid rate. The complications (see below) from A-Fib occur even when only the Atrium is involved (even without the rapid Ventricular pulsing).

The Pathopysiology of A-fib

1/ AF is refractory (hard to treat).

 

2/ AF can cause heart scarring.  Electrical signals are transmited through muscle, not through scar tissue.  Scar tissue can disrupt normal signal transmission but can also be used by a surgeon to stop abnormal signal transmission.

 

3/ AF can cause the heart to stretch, further disrupting normal signalling leading to more A-Fib, leading to more stretching (and scarring).  A really bad cycle.

 

4/ Early A-Fib is called paroxysmal (comes and goes), usually from one wee cluster of cells that has gone rogue.  Usually this is on the back of the left  Atrium where the veins from the lungs enter the Atrium.

 

5/ About 6 months after this first stage, if it hasn't been taken care of, things change. Scarring and stretching begins to occur, messing up the signaling and starting what the Electro-Physiologists call a rotor.  This causes non-paroxysmal, or prolonged AF.  At this stage the new treatments that are coming on line, are useful. The old methods can't cure A-Fib at this stage in the progress of the disease.

 

6/ AF is responsible for a fifth of the strokes in the USA.

 

7/ The Atrial Appendix is one spot particularly indicated in forming clots since the blood tends to pool there, especially in someone who has AF and hence does not have a completely one-way flow of blood.

 

Note: The Atrial Appendix is a wee pocket in the wall of the heart of no known use.  A surgeon can put a plug in it if he is inside the heart or a clamp, if outside the heart.  This gets rid of the main source of blood clots. If a clamp is used, the wee pocket dies and ceases to be a problem.

 

8/ Of particular concern,  as the heart stretches, it pulls the sides of the vales apart and the valve can no longer close completely.  This allows back flow of blood and increases the chance of a clot forming and hence stroke.

  

9/ This whole process of stretching and scarring leading to more AF is a vicious downward cycle.

What can be done (in increasing order of intervention)

1/ As has been done for some time, anticoagulants are taken to avoid stroke.  Much better choices than Aspirin are available these days. Aspirin only affects the platelets and stops them clotting.  The medicine must be taken continually since one can not tell when one is in A-Fib if it doesn't trigger off the AV node, (causing the Ventricle to speed up).  Clots can form within 5 minutes of A-fib starting.

 

2/  Some people can not tolerate being on thinners.  For these folks a surgeon will often either block off or pinch off the Atrial Appendage/appendix since this is where 95% of the clots are created.  The AA isn't needed for proper heart function.

 

3/ Beta blockers are meant to stop the Ventricle from racing but they don't stop A-Fib or the complications that come with it.

 

4/  Other medications such as Amiodarone HCl are sometimes tried to re-establish normal cardiac rhythm but If AF continues, they can make one feel pretty bad.  These medicines can also affect the liver.

 

5/ Resetting the heart with a shock.  If you already have an advanced AF, the reset from a shock, likely won't last.  Shock is more effective in the very early stages of AF.

 

6/ Ablation(1), using scar tissue to stop bad signals.  Done by an Electro-Physiologist with a probe inserted through a  vein in the groin. This is for the paroxysmal (early) AF in which the rogue signal is being generated where the veins enter the Atrium from the lungs.  If AF is caught early,  it is highly effective.   When done for a later, more advanced case, success is only about 35%.

7/ Ablation (2) (when the surgeon is in your chest),  She scars a maize over your heart which only allows the good signals to propagate. Even for the really difficult cases, this technique is effective in 85 - 90% of cases.

 

8/ The best system - the Hybrid maze.

Cardio-surgeon goes in through a small incision just below the breast bone, and with a probe goes up to the heart and scars the appropriate part of the outside of the heart.  A few days later the electropysiologist goes in through a vein in the groin and finishes the job from inside.  Success is around 80%.

The Hauraki Gulf

Article in the New Zealand Press on April 19, 2022, p6, titled We're Eating the Hauraki Gulf to Death 

 

Of course we are destroying the fisheries of the Hauraki Gulf along with the fisheries resources of many other areas around New Zealand, just as we (humanity) has destroyed every other fisheries of the world. 

 

One of the most egregious, previous examples of destroying a fisheries resource was on the Grand Banks off the East Coast of Canada.  There is no one in Fisheries that isn't aware of that legendary fishing ground.  It was managed by the Canadian Fisheries Department, one of the most scientifically competent well funded fisheries departments of the world.  They allowed this huge resource to be destroyed.  

 

And in case you think, that was then and this is now, just look at our management of the Hauraki Gulf.  I challenge you to find one fisheries resource, anywhere in the world that has been properly, sustainably managed.

 

There is one way and  only one way of preserving our fisheries resources from our Hubris.  Large portions of our EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) must be set aside with no fishing what-so-ever being allowed in the area.  Our small existing reserves are great and seed outside areas with the young of many species but large areas seed outside areas with fully grown fish.  We must stop thinking that we know what we are doing in the ocean and simply do what has been shown to be effective. With such a system, the 'catch per unit effort' in the permitted areas will be so good that we can abandon destructive fishing methods and just use long lines. 

And don't let the scientists tell you which areas should be reserves and which areas should not.  Remember Hubris.  Remember that the scientists don't know what they are doing.  They have proven this time after time.

Here is a possibility.  You will note in the above diagram that the EEZ of New Zealand extends from about 25⁰S to about 55⁰S.  Start at the top.  From 25⁰S to 26⁰S, no fishing.  From 26⁰S to 27⁰S, fishing permitted.  From 27⁰S to 28⁰S, no fishing.  From 28⁰S to 29⁰S, fishing allowed.  And carry on like this right to the South end of our EEZ.  You could do this in 2 degree bites instead.  Whatever you do, don't let anyone manage it.  

Your only management tool is "If you fish in the no-fishing areas, your boat is confiscated and sunk.  Note that the most important aspect of any enforcement is it's inevitability.  We must pursue boats that fish in our reserves regardless of the cost and sink them.  In the not-so-long term, this will be, by far, the most economic policy.

 

And for heaven sake, ban all foreign fishing boats from our waters.  Let them destroy their own fisheries.  If we can't fish all our permitted areas then the fishing will just improve even more over our EEZ and the bottom line of our fishermen will greatly improve as their catch-per-unit-effort increases. 

 

If you do insist on licensing foreign fishing boats to fish our waters, note that the vital step is enforcement.  Any fishing boat that has it's tracker turned off is confiscated.   Any fishing boat, fishing in a forbidden area is confiscated.  Officers of these boats are jailed until a substantial fine has been paid.  Fishermen on the boats are treated really well, given a tour of New Zealand and sent home with their wages (paid by us) and memorabilia.  Imagine their attitude to their officers if they are caught again.  Fossil fuel is taken off the boats and they are sunk in no-fishing areas.  They form great reefs and will snag anyone trying to drag a net in these areas.

https://mtkass.blogspot.com/2010/12/fisheries-policy-lets-change-tacks.html

The actual warming effect of Methane

 

We often hear about the relative green house effect of Methane vs Carbon dioxide on a 20 year basis or 100 year basis.  This is a perfectly legitimate way of looking at the situation since methane is oxidized relatively rapidly in the atmosphere while Carbon dioxide remains much longer.  Carbon dioxide is taken up by various processes and notably by photosynthesis.  The half life of Methane in the atmosphere is about 7 years since it is oxidized to carbon dioxide, while the half life of Carbon dioxide is estimated at about 100 years.

 

What I'm talking about here is the relative green house gas forcing of the amount of Methane and Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a given moment. 

 

In this chart from1998 you can see  that the total radiative forcing of 365ppmv (parts per million by volume) of Carbon dioxide is 1.46 Watts per square meter of the earths surface.

The radiative forcing of 1.75ppmv of Methane is 0.48W per square meter.

So doing a simplistic calculation*, if Methane was 365ppmv it would have a forcing of 355/1.75 X 0.48 = 100.1Watts per square meter.

Since the forcing of the 365ppmv of Carbon dioxide is 1.46W/m2, Methane is 

100/1.46 = 68.6 times as powerful a green house gas as Carbon dioxide.

*The calculation is only a first approximation.  This has to do with the fact that the effect of green  house gasses increases a given amount for a doubling of the concentration.  It is not a linear function.  In other words the increase in the warming effect  would be the same from 100ppm to 200ppm as from 200ppm to 400ppm.

However, at present (April 2022) the concentration of Methane in the atmosphere is 1.91ppm while the concentration of Carbon dioxide is 418ppm.  The effect of Methane is equal to 1.91 X 68 = 130 ppm of Carbon dioxide.  It is, as if we had 418 + 130 = 548ppm of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

What is the importance of this.  It looks as if we are destabilizing huge reservoirs of methane clatherates, both on the ocean bottom and below permafrost.  If we have major blow outs of methane, the effect on our climate could be truly catastrophic.  There will be no controlling the acceleration in warming.  The rate of rise of methane in the atmosphere is accelerating, suggesting that we have already begun to have such an effect.

Another worrying factor is that with a huge output of methane, we might overcome the mechanism in the atmosphere that is responsible for the oxidation of Methane into Carbon dioxide.  That would truly be catastrophic.

The cost of not Pyrolyzing

 Pyrolysis - heating various hydrocarbons to break them down into shorter molecules.  

Feed stock - wood, plastic, tires, used engine oil, electronic equipment etc.

Output - cooking gas, gasoline,diesel, jet fuel, road tar etc.

Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that you use renewable electricity to heat the feed stock and the energy content of the resulting products is only equal to the electrical energy that you used. ( like the processing of tar sands).  Would this be a worthwhile enterprise.  Let's look at the side benefits.

 

1/ You produce gaseous and liquid fuels which are very energy dense.  For quite a long time, we will need such fuels to power long range aircraft, heavy machinery, large trucks and so forth.

2/ You avoid the fee for sending the feed stocks to a land fill.  The pyrolysis company accepts them for free

3/  You avoid the cost of sending them overseas (plastic for instance)

4/ You avoid the cost of storing them somewhere

5/ You avoid the health costs of storing them (Piles of rubber tires breed disease carrying mosquitoes and leach poison into the environment.

6/ You avoid the cost of destroying our ocean fauna. (plastics in the ocean kill ocean animals in a range of ways).

7/ You avoid the health costs of microplastic in our environment.  The effects of microplastics are just now becoming apparent.

8/ You produce a range of valuable side products (steel and sulfur from tires, charcoal from wood)

9/ You reduce the amount of oil that must be pumped from the earth.  Pyrolyzing plastic, basically uses oil that has already been pumped (plastic is made from oil). 

10/ Pyrolyzing waste wood from the production of engineered wood, produces green fuel and sequesters carbon in buildings and in the charcoal which is incorporated into soils.  Using engineered wood, displaces concrete, a huge source of carbon dioxide.

11/ Pyrolyzing treated (tanelized) wood keeps this poisonous product from the environment and recovers the arsenic, copper and chromium.

12/ You recycle vital minerals, reducing the amount that must be mined. (electronic equipment is mostly plastic, with a range of valuable metals which can be refined ((separated)).

13/ You extend the life of waste dumps.

14/ You can pyrolyze, and thus dispose of the contents of old dumps that are problematic.

15/  We add to the amazing story of New Zealand.  We are known for such things as our amazing natural wonders, our stance on nuclear power, our grass fed meat (read The Omnivores Dilemma for the alternative - ug), how we look after visitors if they are injured while visiting, our lack of tipping and our almost unique response to Covid.    Solving our waste problems would add to this.  It all translates into cold hard cash as people want to visit and to buy our products in their own countries.

 

I'll add more as I think of them.  In actual fact, the energy content of the liquid and gaseous fuel produced is greater than the input energy by a considerable factor.  The devil is in the design of the pyrolysis units.  Have units that are designed to pyrolyze  each of the various feed stocks and it will be worthwhile having a fractionation tower to  separate the output of the units into their components.

Note that the energy content of alkanes is greater, the smaller the molecule so methane has the highest energy content than all the other alkanes.  In other words, you are adding energy to a substance as you break it down by pyrolysis.

The Omnivores Dilema

 This is a book-review of a small part of The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.  (starting on chapter 8).  It is the part where he describes how a farmer, Joel Salatin in the Shenandoah Valley, near Swoope, Virginia grows grass and that grass is the foundation of the whole farm.  Actually, to call it grass is a misnomer.  

 

What he is growing is a meadow of a variety of species, somewhat like what used to grow there before man arrived.  Some of the species in the Meadow are Grass, of course, both sweet and meadow, plus Fesque, Clover, Timothy, Millet, Plantain and a bunch more.  

 

Joel and others have described how the appropriate level of grazing (neither too often or too seldom) encourages the growth of a wide variety of plants and maximum total productivity.

 

The farming method is Joel's take on the theme of only grazing an area for a  short time in a  long time and then letting the meadow recover.  Typically the cows are allowed on any one area for a day and then moved to a new area. They are only allowed 'one bite'.  The rotation period varies with weather, season, rainfall and would be different in different parts of the world but it is more or less two weeks on this farm (until the cows are allowed back on a given patch of pasture).

He also 'grazes' pigs on grass (meadow) land.  The pigs are not allowed to totally trash a paddock and are moved from time to time.  Joel has found a neat way to decide when to move the pigs despite the fact that the pigs might be larger or smaller, more numerous or less numerous.  Through expenience, he has seen how much supplemental pig food to give for a given area of field.  If there are bigger pigs or more pigs, the feed will be finished quicker than if smaller or less numerous.  When the feed is finished, it is time to move the pigs.  Only experience will tell a farmer when is the best time, neither to often or too seldom, to move the pigs.

 

 In no particular order: (because one could start anywhere - the farming methods are circular going round and round).

Picture -  Fesque

 

 

Let's start with the beef cows.

First, he only grazes a given area with his beef cattle for one day, allowing only one bite of any plant at one time, never a second bite.  The plant in question balances its roots and top hamper so after being shorn/cropped, roots die back under ground*.  This is dead, energy rich, organic material which is soon consumed by the soil fauna, turning it ultimately into humus.  In other words it is building the organic content of the soil from down below.  As Joel says, the roots of some plants in a meadow go down meters so you are building a very deep soil**. 

*I knew this with respect to punning trees but never thought about it with respect to meadow plants.

**While, of course, sequestering carbon.

 

The plant then begins to grow new photosynthetic collectors (leaves) and begins to photosynthesize again.   As with all organisms, they tend to follow a sigma  growth curve.  This is a curve that starts at the origin (zero zero on a graph), rises slowly in an exponential fashion, straightens out in a very fast increase and then levels out. The following graph is about population growth but the growth of many individual species follows the same pattern.

Graph - The sigma curve

The farmer,  returns the cattle to the field in question when the plants are nearing the level-out-phase.  This way he gets the maximum  grass production possible.  Of course the plant builds new roots to balance thepart of the plant that is above ground.  Most plants exude energy rich compounds into the soil around their roots to feed the saprophytes (fungus) which bring nutrients to the plant.  Saprofites can mobilize nutrients which plants can not  (P* in particular) and which are outside the root zone of the plant.

*Some soils have a chemical make up that fixes the P that farmers put on the field into an unavailable form.  The fungus-es can mobilize this P and make it available to the plant. Some soils have huge,  stores of P which are not utilizable by plants.

 

Picture - Clover

 

 

Now we come to a neat part(one of many).  The cattle do what cattle do and leave big plate sized cow pats in the field.  Flies love to lay their eggs in this warm nutritious muck.  Apparently, the sort of fly where this farm is located has a 4 day cycle.  ie. The fly larvae (grubs) would hatch out into flies in 4 days.  So the eggmobile is brought in on day 3.  It is a trailer pulled by a tractor that houses 400 egg laying chickens.  They get to work, scattering the cow pats in every direction and picking out all those nutritious fly larvae. 

 

This farm apparently only has three external "nutrient" inputs.  One is chicken food, the second is pig food and the third is some green sand for it's mineral content.  Because of the grubs the chickens get from the cow pats plus some grass and insects, they only need three quarters as much bought-feed as would be needed for chickens that only get bought/bought-in-feed - a nice effect on the bottom line.

Picture - a beautiful eggmobile

 

The above image is not the eggmobile on Joel's farm but it is such a 'beaut', I couldn't resist including it.  Note the mobile fence in the background to confine the chickens to the area where you want them  Also note the lack of cow pats in this particular field.  This field hasn't been grazed by cows recently.  If you leave chickens on any area for an extended time, they will reduce the vegetation to zero.  Hence the advantage of having a mobile chicken house. And one last observation.  This field appears to be a monoculture, not a meadow with a wide range of plants for the grazers to eat.

 

Picture - Timothy

 

But we aren't finished with chickens yet.  Joel also raises meat chickens.  They are raised in mobile cages, each containing about 75 chickens and open on the bottom so that the chickens can access the pasture.  They are moved 'one foot print' each day so the chickens have access to fresh pasture and don't decimate a given patch.  Of course they leave their droppings on each area but not in such quantities that they 'burn' the pasture.  As you can imagine, with the above measures, the pasture growth is legendary.  Incidentally, Joel points out that if he increased his production, he would put too much organic fertilizer on his pasture and this would result in exceeding the ability of the pasture to utilize all the nutrients.  There would be a danger of runoff, polluting nearby streams.

  

Picture- Millet

 

 

Grazing has another beneficial effect.  If tall varieties are allowed to dominate, they shade out low growing plants such as clover and the variety of plants in the meadow decreases.  With this sort of management, all the plants have a chance and some farmers have observed that the variety of plants actually increases under 'proper' grazing.  

 

Of course, plants such as Clover are particularly important as they fix Nitrogen.  It is equally bad to graze too much as it is to graze too seldom.  With seldom grazing, tall plants will shade out low growing plants and the variety in the field will decrease.  With grazing too often, or grazing continually you don't take advantage of all of the growth spurt of the meadow plants and some varieties die under excessively intense grazing.  plant variety will decrease with grazing in intervals that are either too long or too short.

 

A good part of the farm is in trees, mainly on northern slopes, where they get wood for construction, fire wood and then chip all the waste wood.  These chips, are a very important part of the farm.  

 

In the three harsh months of winter the cows are housed indoors.  How neat is the following system....  Joel just keeps adding layers of either wood chip or straw for bedding but before each layer is added, he scatters a bucket of corn over the bedding.  The bedding rises up over the three months and the cows remain comfortable due to the heat generated by the bedding.  The bottom of the bedding, is, of course, anaerobic but as there is apparently no net generation of ammonia, the upper, aerobic layers are taking up this dangerous gas.  In the spring, when the cows go back out on pasture, he lets in the pigs.  He calls them his pigaerators.  They root around, mixing up the bedding, looking for those lovely ascoholic kernels of  corn and the bedding becomes aerobic, and heats up, killing any nasties that are in it.  After the pigs have finished he has some lovely fertilizer to use wherever he wants. 

 

Picture - Plantain

 

 

There is much more to The Omnivores Dilemma.   I suggest getting a copy.

 

Authors Notes

Sunshine doesn't reach into the soil.  Pretty obvious, no?  so the soil organisms have to get their energy somewhere else.  We have already described how when the top hamper of a plant is removed, the roots die down to match the top.  This energy rich organic material is available for the soil organisms.

In addition, most plants put out organic material from their roots.  Some estimates say that this is up to 30% of what they produce by photosynthesis.  They don't do this for nothing.  If it wasn't beneficial to the plant it wouldn't have evolved.  These energy rich materials feed the saprophites (fungus) that live in the soil.  In return, the saprophites can not only mobilize materials that the plant can not (notably P), but with their extensive network of hyphae, they can bring such materials from far beyond the root mass of the plant.

There is one more source of energy rich organic material.  This is any organic material that is laid down on the surface of the soil.  This includes mulch, compost and manure.  Earth worms and beetle and so forth use this material and bring it down into the soil where other organisms benefit from it or from the excrement of the worms and beetles.

 

Farm inputs

Besides a little fossil fuel for a tractor and an ATV, the only inputs to the farm are chicken feed, pig feed and Green sand. As the electric vehicle revolution proceeds, more different types of vehicle are being produced which run on electricity.  I wouldn't be surprised if eventually, Joel's tractor and ATV will run on electricity provided by solar panels on his roof.  His in-house battery will probably be a used battery from his electric car which no longer has the range he requires but is plenty grunty enough for his house. Perhaps he has already done this.  My information is far from up to date.

 

Chicken feed

When an animal eats, only 10% of the feed becomes the animal (or eggs).  The rest is excreted.  This may seem strange to you if you have fed animals and use about 2kg of feed to get 1kg of animal.  The apparent anomaly is only apparent.  It is  due to the fact that the feed is dry (typically below 7% moisture or it will spoil) while the animal is 80+% water.  

So the other 90% of the feed is excreted as Carbon dioxide, urine and feces.  This rich material is laid down on the surface of the soil and as mentioned above, is incorporated in the soil.

 

Green Sand

Also called "glauconite," greensand is a material from the ocean floor that is mined to be used as a soil conditioner or fertilizer.  It has a bluish-green color and is made of marine potash, silica, iron oxide, magnesia, lime, phosphoric acid, and about 30 other trace minerals.

In any farm, if you are continually removing  minerals from the farm as chicken and beef, you will eventually have to replace them.  In this farm, some of these minerals come in as chicken feed, some as pig feed and some as green sand.

Further reading

There are three other books that I would highly recommend.  All great reads.

1/ Dirt by David R Montgomery

In this book he describes what happens to a civilization that treats it's soil like dirt.

2/ Growing a Revolution by David R Montgomery

In this book  David describes his journey to realizing what is a better way of farming as he travels the world looking at farms in which the owner has come to this realization independently of each other. The same basic methods were arrived at from the tropics to temperate latitudes, from small holdings to huge ranches and for all sorts of crops.

3/ The Second Half of Nature by David R Montgomery

In this book he describes the inner working of a rich organic soil

4/  What your food eats.  I haven't got this one yet but it is on order.