Amid the gaudier, more noticeable flowering plants of spring are the things most people miss. Here’s a very nice clumping sedge that populates the area around the house and south through the Fairy Ring and the Kat Sematary. It’s almost certainly a Carex. Glenn says it keys out perfectly to Carex scabrata, Eastern Rough Sedge, but that he’s almost sure it is not. This one is a native perennial, and is in flower, although it’s not immediately obvious. The flowers are wind-pollinated and have no need of steenkin' petals.

UPDATE - Glenn keyed it out to Carex communis. If it is var communis, then it is Fibrousroot Sedge; Or it might be var amplisquama, Dixie Sedge. The former is found throughout the eastern US; the latter just in Georgia and the Carolinas.

At first I thought this might be the sedge flower that Karen posted a few weeks ago, but now that I look at it again, I don’t think so.


Now reproducing is what I think is probably Mnium spp (pronounced ni-um), or Carpetmoss. Even from a five-foot altitude the bright orange sporangia are eyecatching and obvious.


And yet another violet that is abundant all over right now. This is Viola bicolor, or Field Pansy. It’s a native annual. The dissected, lobed leaves are not at all what you see in perennial violets with their lush heart-shaped leaves.

Ravioli isn’t my favorite pasta dish, but it was a convenient one to try to make. I’ve already played around with making noodles and spaghetti, and wanted to try a filled pasta.

First, the ingredients:

Dough

2 c. flour
2 eggs
enough water to make a non-sticky dough

Because this was a 2x2 experimental design, I did two batches of dough, one with bread flour only, and one with half and half bread flour and durum wheat flour. The eggs were powder - 1 tablespoon powder mixed well with 3 tbsp water is equivalent to one egg.

Filling

16 oz ricotta
1 egg
1/2 c. parmesan cheese
1 c. meat or TVP
salt, pepper, etc.

Mix well. Again, and this is the second part of the 2x2 experimental design, I made two batches, one with browned ground round as the meat, and one with hydrated “beef” textured vegetable protein (TVP) substitute.

Sauce

4 cans diced tomatoes
1 chopped onion
salt, pepper, basil, oregano, etc

The same sauce was used overall. I chose to make it fairly simple.

The experimental ingredients:

One of the things I discovered was that the durum wheat “flour” I thought I had purchased was actually durum wheat whole seeds (left pile, below). I used a hand-cranked grinder to reduce it to flour in two rounds (middle pile, below). The pile of dry TVP is shown on the right, below.

Here’s the grinder. It’s intended for grinding seeds, not meat. It can grind beans and corn and wheat and most other seeds. I chose it primarily because it is hand-cranked and not electric, and it will build up your pecs for sure. I was sore for a day after grinding four cups of durum wheat seeds. You might remember the bloody butcher corn that I harvested at the end of last summer. It’s not meant to be used as a sweet corn, it’s a dent corn and therefore meant to be used for corn flour. I ground that up too, and it was much harder than the wheat seeds, but made an excellent fine flour.

The grinder comes with stone burrs (the two round grinding pieces). The outside one rotates against the inside one and is fed from the hopper using an auger, a rotating screw to deliver the whole seeds in the first round, and then the roughly broken seeds for one more round.


Once the dough is made and kneaded a bit, it’s balled up and allowed to sit in the fridge for at least a half hour. I then divided one batch (comprising 2 cups flour) into four pieces and used the Atlas pasta roller (also hand-cranked) to roll out the dough. You could probably use a rolling pin, but it would be hard to get the dough rolled out into such a nice rectangular, uniformly thin slab of pasta. At this point, if it were to be noodles or spaghetti, the slab would be run through the appropriate cutters. But it’s to be used for ravioli.


To make the raviolis, you drop in the filling on one half of the slab.


You then fold over the other half of the slab and push the two halves of the dough together. Cut across the length between each mound of filling.


Finally, take each ravioli and seal the two halves of pasta together by pinching the three overlapping sides. Voila! (Or “viola”, as they say on Usenet.)


Drop the raviolis into boiling water for 1 minute or so. Fresh pasta only takes 1-2 minutes of boiling water to cook.

So how did it turn out? First, the durum dough formulation made a firmer pasta, as expected. But it also stuck after sitting stacked as above for more than an hour and was hard to separate raviolis. So I suggest immediately cooking the raviolis and placing them in a pan ready to be covered with sauce.

The second half of the experiment involved the TVP vs ground round. First, you can tell the difference. But the TVP is not at all bad, it’s just different. The texture is fine, and the size of the chunks is just right.

The experiment ended up producing 70 raviolis, so we’ve been eating them for awhile now.

Despite the title, after I write this I notice there’s virtually nothing about ravioli. This is a story that has developed over the last year, and I realized it needed to be broken up in two parts so that I gave the preparation aspect the emphasis it deserved. Part 2 comes later.

In the last six months we’ve been putting together what all American households should have - a cache of supplies that gets you through a period of emergency, whatever it might be. This encompasses first aid, candles and matches, batteries for flashlights, toiletries, over-the-counter medicals, prescription drugs, basic hardware and *hand* tools, not electric, and more, but food is essential. As you might know, I don’t accumulate anything that can’t be used anyway so I’ve been working out ways to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. Not only should the items be essential but so should be strategies for selecting them, rotating them, and using them so nothing goes to waste.

One constructive benefit of this is reducing the amount of pre-prepared food and replacing it with basic food components to be combined in what is actually a cooking operation. It’s the sort of thing where spoiled brats look in the pantry filled to bursting with ingredients and exclaim - there’s nothing to eat here!

It makes me shudder to read of people who prepare by buying MREs (military Meals Read to Eat) or ready made food, like 140 bags of Ramen noodles. I’m skeptical of those who fill their freezers with perishables like meat, when an emergency could well cause power outages that would render all those supplies useless. (Remember all the refrigerators and freezers on the streets after Katrina?) The problem with prepping for an emergency with the very items that make our lives easier, if less fulfilled, now, is that they are not only much much more expensive (more than $10 per day per person if you buy MREs, if you can find them, which you can’t), but they don’t require any time or flexibility to prepare.

And that’s another aspect that comes with emergency situations: boredom. In any emergency in which you are isolated for a period of time, there is going to be lots of time to kill. People, especially kids, are going to go stir crazy. They are going to need things to do. Take your kids, for instance, if you have them, and if you don’t, well hell, take yourself. Those kids you’re worrying about entertaining should they be out of school or isolated or quarantined in an emergency? They can make the noodles or bread. That can be *their* job. They can keep track of rotating supplies. And by the way, there’s no reason on earth under *any* circumstances why any kid who gets out of school at 3pm and has nothing to do for 3 or 4 hours can’t cook a meal for his or her weary tired parents who get home at 6 or 7pm instead of whining about what’s for dinner the moment you walk in the door. *That's* what you do to solve the latch-key problem.

Now you may still say, “But we don’t have time to cook!”, and this could have some truth to it *now* in the absence of an emergency, although I’d offer the tentative suggestion that even now it has more to do with a reluctance to plan. Glenn and I tend to cook several days of food on one day once a week, maybe even a week’s worth, ahead of time and then use it as needed. Instead of a teensy saucepan of spaghetti sauce, originating from a bottle of ragu at great expense, we make 2 gallons of it at a time, from canned tomatoes, peppers, onions, ground meat, and spices, and then use it in various ways over the next week with whatever pasta or rice can be whipped up in a few minutes. The whole process takes about an hour. The next week it might be a big pot of chicken or other kind of soup. I’m a great believer in tomato and soup and rice and pasta-based dinners, provided I make them myself.

To these ends I’ve been trying to simplify and streamline cooking and cooking materials so as to provide the greatest amount of variety with the greatest potential for storage and an outlet for relieving boredom. The two outlets I’ve picked are gardening and cooking. Let’s focus on cooking.

Here’s an example of a few ingredients that can provide the basis for a good deal of variety. Flour, yeast, water, eggs - and we’ve been playing around with dried egg powder as ingredients, and flavored textured vegetable protein (TVP) as a meat substitute. Why the latter two? Because you can get them in large quantities and store them at room temperature for long periods of time. TVP, which you can buy in large quantities, is not simply a valueless additive - it has a high protein and fiber content (although it does not provide the full array of amino acids). And those little packets of activated yeast are fine and can be stored at room temperature for quite some time, but you can also easily make a yeast culture with the remaining bits of bread dough and store it away, feeding and using it as necessary.

With five pounds of flour, which is easily stored, you can make those 140 bags of Ramen noodles in an afternoon. Or you can make a dozen loaves of bread. Or your kids can.

Cooking is NOT hard. You don’t have to be a “gourmet cook” (*gag*) to cook well. Understand that neither I nor Glenn are “gourmet cooks” (alright, once Glenn played around with Beef Bourguignonne, I admit it, but he gave it up). We are, nonetheless, very good basic solid cooks, and neither of us ever took a “course”. We know how to crack and cook eggs in all kinds of ways. We can work with flour to make bread, and now pasta; I at least can whip up a cake quickly (although that’s mere fluff). We can grill and brown meat, and know how to use the residues to make hefty soups. We can make quite a few hefty sauces, and we can lightly cook various vegetables so that they are edible and not mush. We’re great with potatoes. We are working on beans, but to be honest, neither of us has much use for them (although hummus holds a great deal of promise!). I’ve been experimenting in turning oatmeal, which I can’t stand as a porridge, into a granola-like material using minimal ingredients. There are just a few basic skills that are easy to acquire, and you can make anything you want. Best of all, you can make it up as you go, and damn the torpedos. In fact, my style of cooking can no longer be called ethnic (Indian, Chinese, Western, Mexican, Thai, or whatever) in any way - it all tends to blend together and has elements of each, elements I may not even know about. It’s what I like.

(You’ll notice I haven’t gotten much into vegetables - this is an arena that I haven’t streamlined to my satisfaction. I expect to store away garden-grown vegetables, and to use fresh particularly during the summer, but I need to work on that group for awhile longer, including growing them.)

So just to get you ready for the post to come, here’s the basic ingredients. Flour (which as it turned out was regular old bread flour, but also a little complication in the Durum wheat flour for pasta that I will get into). Powdered eggs (because I can’t store 100 dozen fresh eggs at a time and thought I’d play around with this). Textured vegetable protein (as a meat substitute, for all kinds of reasons, including the problems with storing meat at room temperature). And ricotta and parmesan cheeses (not particularly storable, and not essential, as I’ll point out later, merely one of many possible bases for pasta fillings). And for the sauce: canned tomatoes (which I certainly have no objection to using), onions, and pesto (which is my way of storing summer-grown basil).

Ravioli 2 will explore the possibilities and evaluate the edibility in a 2x2 analysis of variance experimental design.

Generally when I see a violet around here - I just want to run. Most of ours are invasive non-natives that we’ve been trying to get rid of since Glenn planted them, saying, “oh they’re not invasive”. (Same thing with wild strawberries, btw.)

USDA Plants lists 156 species of violets (Viola spp.) in the US. Only four of these species are introduced, though, and of these four three are found in Georgia, as are 31 of the natives, by my count.

Violets are among those plants that produce cleistogamous flowers, i.e., flowers which don’t open. Since they don’t open they are necessarily self-fertilized, and seeds usually don’t develop from fertilization by other plants.

This species, which I have not yet figured out, is not one of the invasive ones. It might be a variegated morph of Common Blue Violet (Viola sororia).


We found it growing in the mayapple forest that I mentioned last year, which also includes among the community species painted buckeye, wild geranium, and poison ivy. I haven’t found it growing in other places, but I have transplanted a few plants to the woodsy north side of the house, next to some wild geraniums, and they’ve taken four years to get to this size.

One of the characteristics that stands out to me is the variegation in color of the leaves. The tissue close to the veins is a darker green than the tissue further away from the veins. Any ideas from violet experts as to what this is are appreciated!

I know what this is. I’ll bet someone else does too You can look for new plants all over the place - like Dorothy, over the rainbow, and then, just by chance you find the one you’ve been looking for no further than your own back yard. I’ll post the answer tomorrow. Jenn got it. It’s Yellowroot Xanthorhiza simplicissima. In the buttercup family, Ranunculaceae. I should point out that Glenn also got it, and he actually keyed it out!

Golden Ragwort is one of our early spring natives that surprises us with its yellow flowers so early in the season.


It’s a multi-headed large-flowered daisy-like aster (family Asteraceae) that has been victimized as have so many asters with a name change. This particular species is found primarily east of the Mississippi, but there are a lot of ragworts found US-wide.


Ragworts and groundsels used to be in the Senecio genus. Golden ragwort was Senecio aureus. Now the more closely related members have been placed in the genus Packera. Golden ragwort is Packera aurea. The new genus is named for John Packer, at the University of Alberta, Canada. He’s done a lot of the work teasing out the relationships within the Senecioneae, the groundsel tribe.

It looks to me like most of the plants remaining in the Senecio genus are those not native to the US; the ones native to the US have been lifted out. This isn’t too surprising. The non-natives would have come from Europe and named first, would have the priority. Later New World discoveries would have to get new names as it’s determined they’re not as closely related to Old World Senecio and should put into a new genus.

The same thing happened with asters. Once all in the genus Aster, now New World asters are grouped in a number of different genera like Doelleringia for the whitetops, Eucephalus, Eurybia, and the large genus Symphyotrichum. Oh well.

I don’t find any culinary uses for ragwort, but I have a neat version of “Culpeper’s Color Herbal” by Nicholas Culpeper, the 17th century astrologer and herbalist. This is for Senecio jacobaea, Stinking Willie, so probably doesn’t relate reliably to the New World species of ragwort:

It cleanses, digests, and discusses.

It goes on and on. If there’s anything more charmingly bewildering than 300-year-old archaic language, it could only be 21st century scientific name changes.

Mostly used now for external ointments and infusions for ulcers and wounds. Like comfrey, it probably damages the liver after extended use.

I make no apologies for this post.

I had the plans for a ravioli, or maybe a golden ragwort post today, but upon the recommendations of some acquaintances, Glenn and I, with some skepticism, listened to a download of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt’s speech before the American Medical Association’s Legislative Healthcare Conference (March 13). My skepticism vanished. My ravioli won’t save your life, but this could.

I suggest that if you have not been paying much attention to avian flu virus H5N1, or if you have regarded it as hype by your favorite media, or would rather not think about it, that at least you listen to this speech. If you haven’t been paying attention, you’ll learn something. If you thought it was all “liberal” hype, maybe Bush Administration HHS Secretary Leavitt can convince you otherwise. And if you’d rather not think about it, consider it entertainment.

UPDATE - April 3: I’m embarrassed to say that after two changes in the links to CSPAN, I can no long find this speech supposedly archived by CSPAN. You may completely neutralize any positive things I had to say about the Bush Administration’s admittedly weak, but at least *something of a*, response to this issue. Maybe someone else can find it. I’ve done an intensive search on this date and have failed.

It can be viewed by RealPlayer through CSPAN here. It’s a 12MB download, and I haven’t been able to find a transcript for those who can’t view it because they’re on dialup or can’t get it to work, but I’ll keep looking. In the meantime, here’s my impressions of it:

Several things struck me. First, and to my astonishment, HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt knows his stuff and is clearly working to warn people. Second, he’s recommending all households have at least two to four weeks' worth of supplies. Third, he’s pushing forcefully the position that this is not just a federal responsibility but a local community responsibility as well. And fourth, and most alarmingly, he’s right up front saying that if communities and individuals are ignoring the potential problem because they think the federal government will take care of everything, they’re tragically wrong. Whether you view these points seriously or cynically, and I do both, it’s probably worth listening to if only to hear a Bush cabinet secretary sound like he actually knows what he’s talking about, and I don’t say that with the slightest amount of snark.

He also states that we don’t KNOW that a pandemic will happen imminently, *BUT*...

Last year H5N1 was present only in a few countries in Southeast Asia.

This year it’s in 23 countries. It’s in Southeast Asia, including now Indonesia, AND Eastern and Western Europe, AND several countries in Africa. It is likely to arrive in North America this year. For the moment it’s confined mainly to birds.

H5N1 is mutating vigorously. Human to human (H2H) transmission is rare, but humans can get it from close, very close, proximity to infected birds. That in itself is cause for alarm, because humans don’t get flu from birds, normally. (Note: the North American situation is a little different - we don’t have the intimate proximity to birds that Southeast Asian cultures do. But Southeast Asia, not North America, is where the Ground Zero Mutation is likely to arise, and it will spread from there at the speed of a jet plane, sneering at the plans to isolate or quarantine it.)

Very recent scientific reports (Science (24 March 2006)311, 1692 (2006)) suggest the rarity of H2H transmission is because H5N1 is localized to cells in the human lower respiratory tract at the moment. Should it, through mutation, become able to invade the upper respiratory tract, it can be sneezed and coughed out, and thereby contracted by the unlucky recipients.

As Michael Leavitt said, the evolution of H5N1 is frighteningly close to what we now know of the 1918 Spanish Influenza that killed at least “40 million people across the planet” (estimates go up to 100 million), when there were only 1.8 billion people. (Now there are 6.5 billion much more closely and quickly connected people. Do the math. Apply the 2.5% mortality rate estimated for the 1918 flu.) And yes, he actually said “evolution”. Good for him.

And it’s that *BUT* coming from him that concerns me and should concern you.

If you’re a reader here, you know I have not only no love, but also the utmost contempt for the Bush Administration. When it comes to that, I’m a real skeptic, and yet what Leavitt is saying makes a lot of sense, especially in view of my close observation of H5N1’s accelerating spread in the last two years. It makes me sit up and take notice for a Bush Administration official to be this direct and upfront, willing to rock the boat, make waves, and offer fairly brutal honesty, a rare treat indeed from this Administration. This unexpected honesty is what convinced me.

If you think I’m lionizing Leavitt because the federal government is abrogating responsibility, you’re wrong. I’m crediting him with helplessly having to warn us before the fact, instead of waiting until afterwards, as we saw with DHS and FEMA with Katrina, and he speaks to that issue too.

He speaks of a Katrina-style emergency that lasts not days, but weeks or months, maybe in two or three cycles, and affects not the Louisiana, Mississippi, and a sliver of the Alabama coasts but the entire country (and world, if I might add).

If you’re astonished that the federal government could be admitting it can’t take care of us, look no further than the near-top part of this blog’s right sidebar to find out why it’s the case, and this IS snark. In the next two days, we will have passed the quarter-trillion dollar mark in Iraq, an imbroglio that has sapped not only financial resources but also focus and attention to a myriad of real matters, of which this one is only one.

Oh - and if you think that H5N1 influenza is just a normal flu, think again. It’s a killer. Listen to what Michael Leavitt has to tell you. You’ve never had a flu like this, unless you’ve had one that causes unbearable thoracic and abdominable pain, inability to breath, secondary pneumonia, and hemorrhaging. All within a few hours of the first headaches or aches and pains, and lasting 10-12 days. If you’re lucky. Currently the mortality rate from H5N1 infections in Southeast Asia is more than 50%.

If you can’t get his speech, but are increasingly concerned, you can find a lot of information at the Flu Wiki.

If somehow you need more validation of a real potential danger, you might also consider this buried treasure from the US Department of State:

Families should stock cupboards with enough nonperishable and prepackaged food products to last four weeks to five weeks. Supplies should include bottled water, canned meats, fruits, vegetables, soups, protein or fruit bars, dry cereal, granola and fruit bars, crackers, peanut butter or nuts, canned juices, canned or jarred baby food and formula, and pet food.

To avoid opportunities for exposure, shoppers should consolidate trips to the grocery store by purchasing larger quantities than normally and avoid dining outside the home during the initial months of a pandemic.

Other important precautions include stockpiling prescription drugs, if possible, as well as medical supplies like insulin and blood-pressure monitoring equipment, soap and water or alcohol-based hand wash, anti-diarrheal medication and fluids with electrolytes and vitamins.

For additional information, see the “Pandemic Flu Planning Checklist for Individuals and Families” on the U.S. government pandemic flu Web site.

If all else fails to convince you, there’s a very good and sobering interview, in transcript form here with Michael Osterholm, University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

One last thing - if you scorn the idea of being prepared to isolate yourself for a few weeks, consider this: A lot of people scorn this idea. A lot of people may also be deluging overloaded hospitals in the first few weeks, should a pandemic happen. If you must catch it, wouldn’t you rather catch it later, when it’s at least possible that hospitals will be up to snuff, rather than earlier, when they can’t take you?

If you don’t like this, if it bothers you, I understand completely. Tune in later for pretty pictures and ravioli.

UPDATE: The Bush Administration has cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control. Brilliant move. See more at Effect Measure.

It was Laura at Arcol-o-Gist, I think, who brought this remarkable website to my attention a couple of months ago. It’s so remarkable that it’s time to mark it again, to make sure no one missed it the first time around.

Elena takes us on a multi-chapter motorcycle tour of the countryside largely abandoned around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. It’s an amazing story.

Just by chance I was doing some light entertainment style reading from my favorite chemistry text, General Chemistry (Whitten, et al.). In the chapter on displacement reactions I ran across the description of the reaction that led to the failure that led to the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine in 1986. The meltdown spewed at least 10-20 tons of the uranium dioxide fuel and its fission products high into the atmosphere, producing a radioactive fallout that circled the globe.

You might recall from, oh, way way back, that there are some metals that are extremely active. Throwing sodium metal into water is a very bad idea. Sodium is so active that it rips the hydrogen out of the water molecule producing large amounts of heat that ignite the produced hydrogen gas in air, causing an explosion.

Other metals are not so reactive in cold water, but if the water is hot steam, can accomplish the same reaction. The metal zirconium is one of these, and zirconium was used in the construction of the reactor. Ordinarily the surface of zirconium metal reacts with oxygen in the air to produce an oxide coating, which protects the underlying metal from further reaction. However this coating breaks down at high temperatures, exposing the metal.

When the exposed zirconium metal encountered superheated steam, it reacted with the steam to produce a huge bubble of hydrogen gas, which ignited.

At Chernobyl, there were other failures too, but in 1979 at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg PA this reaction produced 1000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas, which fortunately did not ignite before it could be removed. Otherwise TMI would have gone up like Chernobyl did.

There’s a terrific science fiction story, "Omnilingual", by the excellent and tragic writer H. Beam Piper in 1957. The story revolves around the efforts of a linguist who, along with an exploration team encountering high tech ruins on Mars, is attempting to translate the written language. Ultimately she discovers the rosetta stone by which any alien language will be translatable: chemistry.

Regardless of what you may think of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it makes for some fascinating reading, especially the Third Annual Report, the Scientific Basis. One way the IPCC evaluates predictions for the future changes in climate is to input into Global Climate Models (GCMs) data that reflect the world of tomorrow.

To do this they’ve come up with four major future worlds, their IPCC Emissions Scenarios (SRES).

Here’s the main scenarios. Some are pessimistic, some optimistic.

The Emissions Scenarios of the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES)

A1. The A1 storyline and scenario family describes a future world of very rapid economic growth, global population that peaks in mid-century and declines thereafter, and the rapid introduction of new and more efficient technologies. Major underlying themes are convergence among regions, capacity building and increased cultural and social interactions, with a substantial reduction in regional differences in per capita income. The A1 scenario family develops into three groups that describe alternative directions of technological change in the energy system. The three A1 groups are distinguished by their technological emphasis: fossil intensive (A1FI), non-fossil energy sources (A1T), or a balance across all sources (A1B) (where balanced is defined as not relying too heavily on one particular energy source, on the assumption that similar improvement rates apply to all energy supply and end use technologies).

A2. The A2 storyline and scenario family describes a very heterogeneous world. The underlying theme is self-reliance and preservation of local identities. Fertility patterns across regions converge very slowly, which results in continuously increasing population. Economic development is primarily regionally oriented and per capita economic growth and technological change more fragmented and slower than other storylines.

B1. The B1 storyline and scenario family describes a convergent world with the same global population, that peaks in mid-century and declines thereafter, as in the A1 storyline, but with rapid change in economic structures toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity and the introduction of clean and resource-efficient technologies. The emphasis is on global solutions to economic, social and environmental sustainability, including improved equity, but without additional climate initiatives.

B2. The B2 storyline and scenario family describes a world in which the emphasis is on local solutions to economic, social and environmental sustainability. It is a world with continuously increasing global population, at a rate lower than A2, intermediate levels of economic development, and less rapid and more diverse technological change than in the B1 and A1 storylines. While the scenario is also oriented towards environmental protection and social equity, it focuses on local and regional levels.

An illustrative scenario was chosen for each of the six scenario groups A1B, A1FI, A1T, A2, B1 and B2. All should be considered equally sound.

The SRES scenarios do not include additional climate initiatives, which means that no scenarios are included that explicitly assume implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or the emissions targets of the Kyoto Protocol.

Here’s some of the parameters they use for these possible future worlds, and their predictions for the next century. The parameters include such things as global population, CO₂ levels, per capita income, global sea level rise, etc.

Which world would you prefer to live in?

It may have been the first day of spring, but it was cold and we had several hours of heavy heavy rain. Most of the 2" fell over the 2-hour period that surrounded my challenging drive home at 10pm last night, avoiding the idiot Athens sukmobile drivers who never worry about conditions.

I’ll have to get some pictures up later in the day (DONE!), but there was some interest in our electric fence construction so here it is.

First, all the conventional electric fence parts: power supplies, wire, insulators, and spring-loaded hooks, are readily available at your usual big-boxes places which shall not be named. Even rebar, cut to order, is.

Second, an electric fence is not for everyone and I suspect it isn’t a good idea if you live in an urban or suburban area. It’s one of those “attractive nuisances” that gets neighbors upset. For us, it’s ideal. It keeps the deer and raccoons out of the garden, and monsters away from the house. A lot of solicitors will just drive away rather than braving someone who has electric fence up.

(I should point out that our motivations are in part professional and amateur. One of our goals is to create a nucleus for native plants that gradually disperse their seeds outside the protected area. But you have to have plants for that. Another is to have a garden we can actually harvest things from. But you have to have plants for that. A third is to protect our animals from monsters like coyotes and other predators. A fourth unexpected advantage is that Jehovah’s witnesses and the like seem to be intimidated by it. No offense, but I don’t like dealing with them. It’s better than putting out bottles of urine.)

Here’s the layout of the fence area:


The fence is in green. It’s about 1000 feet all the way around. The rebar posts are about 10-20 feet apart; as I recall there’s about 70 of them. There’s five strands of wire from a foot off the ground up to the top, so that’s about a mile of wire. The area enclosed is about two acres. Obviously it doesn’t have to be this big!

It was Glenn’s idea to use 12' lengths of rebar - seems contraindicated, metal rebar with electric wire, but it has worked very nicely, because the insulators (see below) keep the wire an inch or two away from the rebar. We hammered the lengths 2-3 ft into the ground, slid on five insulators each, and they keep the wire away from the rebar well enough.


If you’re not familiar with rebar - it is a 1/2" thick ridged iron pole that is normally used to keep bricks or concrete blocks straight during construction. We used it for its strength and length. Normally you’d use these pissant little plastic stakes that are about five feet tall. Deer laugh at these.

(And by the way, helpful hint: 5' or 6' rebar makes excellent tomato stakes that never wear out. Just stab them into the ground and tie the tomato stems to them. Next year, they’re easy to pull out and move somewhere else if you rotate your crops.)

Here’s the insulators. We have five of these spaced about two feet apart on each rebar. The wire threads as shown and on to the next fence post.


In operation:

Around the perimeter of the fence we put in various “gates” (little red lines on the green electric fence on the figure at the top). All it is is a spring-loaded plastic handle with a hook, insulated, that allows you to hang it on a loop of wire on one side to close the “gate”, and easily removed when you want to go through.

The five wires going from top to bottom have to be connected together, and we chose to do this at several of the gates. We just ran a length of wire vertically from top to bottom, twisting it around each horizontal wire so they’re all connected.

An electric fence is an incomplete circuit until needed. Across the drive we actually don’t have any wire connecting one side to the other. That’s so when a varmint touches the wire, the charged wire zaps a current through the varmint, down into the ground, and completes the circuit as the current travels to the battery or charger. As long as nothing walking on the ground touches the wire, no current flows. The wire is simply charged and waiting.

Close to the charger, you pound a few iron or steel tubes into the ground and connect them to the ground portion of the battery or charger. Any purchased battery or charger should tell you how to do this.

And that brings us to power supply. We’ve used several versions. You can use a battery which isn’t connected to the line power. You then have a charger which charges the fence from the battery, usually in pulses a second or so apart. If you don’t have a short the battery should last forever.

Or you can use line power that plugs into a regulator, accomplishing the same thing.


Don’t be put off by this photo - it’s the result of several experiments we’ve tried.

Whichever power source you use, it must be intended for electric fences, giving a high voltage, but a low current. We don’t want any frying here, just a jolt.

The top wire is about nine feet off the ground, which means the deer won’t jump over it. The only time in the last few years that deer have gotten in was when a baby would squeeze through the wires, then mama would come get him. Mama will never be denied.

Since we put in this fence, we’ve had a lot of our original plantings finally start growing; things we didn’t remember we’d planted. Maintenance is easy - if a tree falls on the fence, the rebar bends, sometimes the wire breaks, but it’s easy to splice the wire together and the rebar can be bent back into shape. AND the fence is remarkably invisible. Very few people guess we have an electric fence until they get right on top of it. Ouch!

You might think this is overly elaborate, but if you’re going to put up an electric fence it’s no different from what you’d ordinarily do anyway. The only real difference is the use of the rebar for the fence posts, and that’s just to get the height of nine feet.

As for problems - we’ve had none associated with the rebar. In fact, using the rebar has made maintenance very easy. An ordinary pansy-type plastic fence post would break and have to be replaced if a deer tangled with the wire. The rebar just bends a little and can be bent back into shape easily.

Occasionally, when a deer has tangled with the wire, the wire has been forced along the rebar, causing a short circuit. This isn’t a problem; just rotate the insulators until the wire stands away from the rebar again.

Our only real problem has been with power chargers. We lost one to an electric storm. We’ve buried the cable to the fence underground and a couple of times that cable has degraded and shorted into the ground, and has had to be replaced. But that’s all in the set of problems any electric fence gives.

Finally, all electric fences have to be routinely scanned by walking around them to make sure branches haven’t fallen on them, or growing grass coming up isn’t touching the bottom wires and causing tiny current leaks.

Solar powered fences: like the solar-powered twinky lights, the disappointment comes in the amount of charge the solar powered battery gets and faithfully stores. The batteries are substandard and usually die pretty quickly. Don’t bother unless you put together a system of your own that will really work.

Right now the beds around the house are choked with two main species. Not shown is Common Chickweed (Stellaria media), which of all the native chickweeds we *could* have, is the extremely common non-native. They’re edible, at least, and can be used in salads.

We’ve pretty much given up on weeding these things out. They died back in a month anyway so we just keep them away from any beds in which we already have early desirables.

Here’s the second species - Lamium purpureum or Purple Deadnettle. It’s a mint, in the Lamiaceae family. Very pretty flowers up close - look at those brilliant orange anthers! It’s a fairly small extremely sociable plant. Unfortunately it’s also non-native.


Someone likes it, at least. I’ve seen a number of butterfly species in the last week - the azures I mentioned before, plus glimpses of eastern swallowtails. This is, I think, a Cloudless Sulphur. It’s a fairly large butterfly, but this one was very shy. The pic was made from about 20 feet back, so it’s not the best but I wanted to document its feeding on the deadnettle. Its green caterpillars like plants of the legume family, especially wild senna which we have a lot of.

Thingfish23 had several nice posts with some great photos of sennas and sulphur caterpillars awhile back.


Yes, we should be weeding but it’s conveniently placed at the bottom of the priority list, below planting the garden, getting the e-fence fixed, cleaning out the attic, and about a million other things.

Early last February I posted a summary of the January temperatures, here in Athens and US-wide. It was a particularly warm month for many, especially in the north.

Here’s the results for the month of February. Generally it was normal. Yawn.

Remember that for my Athens, GA analysis I only use the last 16 years: 1990-present. The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center (and you can do your own analyses at that link) uses data for hundreds of stations as far back as they go.

Here’s the plot of high temperatures for Athens for 1990-2004 (black dots), 2005 (green line), and 2006 (red line). We got a little warm in mid-month this year but by and large the red line snakes well within the black dots. There was only one day when temperatures went more than one standard deviation above the mean for that day.


Here’s the plot of low temperatures for Athens. Again, not a huge departure for what we’ve seen over the last 16 years. However we did have 7 nights when the temperature got more than one standard deviation below the average low for that date.


Given the number of days above and below the highs and lows, Athens experienced a mildly colder Feb than usual. Quite a change from January.

Here’s what you’ve been waiting for. First, I gotta tell you it bugs me no end that the data aren’t continent-wide, including Canada and Mexico.

Nonetheless, from the above NWS-CPC link, this is a plot of temperature anomalies for the US. That’s the difference in the average temperature for this February above or below the average for February over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit, because US citizens are very delicate about that (sorry!).


February has not been an extreme month. Only a few places in the US have seen temperatures more than a couple degrees F above or below the average. Again, it’s the upper midwest, the southwest, and the northeast that have seen a little warmer February than usual.

If you’ve been in the eastern US, then I know you’ve probably been sitting back in your rocking chair on the porch for the last couple of weeks fanning yourself and remarking “*My*, it’s close for March”. I know I have, with 5 of our 15 days so far more than one standard deviation above the average. And indeed it has been for us in the east. March so far has been a pretty warm month, especially for the southcentral US, with up to 10 degrees above normal. Poor Texas!:


To offset that, the western US is colder than normal by 4-8 degrees for the last couple of weeks.

Geekstuff:

We were able to match up our warm January with a high North Atlantic Oscillation index value +1.3. Our slightly cooler February coincided with a lower NAO value of -0.5. You might recall that high values of the NAO send arctic blasts east into Europe, leaving the US warm; low values do the opposite. The values aren’t up for March, of course, but I bet anything they’re high. And we’re also into an increasing La Nina, which might have something to do with it.

A few posts back, Karen at Rurality asked how to go about harvesting seeds. So here’s a few simple guidelines.

First, remember that the flower (which you may not recognize as a flower, like in grasses) comes first. During flowering you get pollination and fertilization, often the flower withers away, and the fruit develops. The seeds are developing inside the fruit too. Depending on the species it may take a few days or a few weeks.

Second, keep in mind that the mysterious ovary, which is a part of the flower, is the part that contains the seeds, the center of our zen, equally mysteriously fertilized during flowering. (Botanists, understand I’m keeping the terminology short here.) That ovary is going to become the fruit, but it takes time. This is the part you will harvest.

Remember too that seeds are not only produced in the late summer or fall. There are fruits and seeds forming right now. The timing is species dependent, and the flower is key to predicting when the seeds will be ready.

Here’s an earlier post showing the diversity of seeds from various groups of plants.

There are basically two kinds of fruits - fleshy fruits and dry fruits.

You’ll be mostly familiar with fleshy fruits that you might grow in a “vegetable” garden. Fruits like apples or cherries or tomatoes, peppers, blueberries, blackberries, and so forth. These fruits usually change color or texture when they’re ripe, and when they’re ripe the seeds inside will be ready. Take the fruit down (or pick it off the ground) and get rid of the flesh, retaining, washing, and drying the seeds inside.

Here’s some fleshy fruits. This is Coralbeads (or Moonseed, or Snailseed), Cocculus carolinus, a very nice native vine. Each individual red fruit contains one or more snail-shaped seeds (see the above link for pictures of these seeds). The seeds wouldn’t have been ready if the fruits had been green, but now they’re red and just fine to harvest. Simply squish the red fruit and pop or wash out the seeds.


I might mention here that fleshy fruits can contain compounds that might be annoying - everything from pigments that stain to substances that might cause a rash. You wouldn’t want to prepare poison ivy seeds from their fleshy berries without a good set of gloves! I was a little concerned about squishing Yaupon Holly fruits - Ilex vomitoria - the “vomitoria” part made me decide to use gloves. Best to google the plant whose fleshy fruits you’re going to squish and make sure it doesn’t contain noxious compounds, especially if you’re subject to allergies or dermatitis reactions.

There’s a few variations on dry fruits, and harvesting the seeds inside them. Basically, if the plant you’re interested in makes a dry fruit, wait til it dries. Often it will change color from green to brown.

Group 1. You’re familiar with most garden beans - many of these are dry fruits that you wait for to dry before you harvest them. Mustards and radishes behave the same way, forming dry pods when they’re ripe. Same with a lot of wild plants that form legumes, pods, or capsules: dry fruits that are filled with seeds.

Here’s one variation that fits the above group. This is a little mustard that produces pods, Cardamine hirsuta, or hairy bittercress. You’re probably familiar with it right now, since it’s flowering and making the pods you see on the right. This is the little plant whose pods explode when you walk through them or wave your hands through them. Very entertaining, but makes it a little hard to collect seeds! You can tell that the earliest flowers must have been the lower ones. The pods nearest the bottom have already exploded; a little above those are some brownish ones - they’re ready right now. A little above those they’re smaller and greener. They’re not ready yet. To collect you could just pick off the ones that are now turning brown and put them in some container that will contain them when they explode.

The hinged valves on the fruit, as they dry out, produce pressure on their attachment points. All you have to do is touch them and it’s enough to break the attachment points and then the valves fly off, tossing the seed five feet or more. Very nice dispersal mechanism!

Before touching:


After touching. There’s just one tiny seed left at the tip. By the way, see those tiny threads that formerly attached to the seeds? The thread is called a funiculus, and it attaches to the placenta (yes, fruits have a placenta too!) that runs all the way around the rim of the pod, servicing each seed through its own funiculus.


Group 2. Grasses might pose a bit of a problem. The flowers may not be easy to detect because they’re so minimal. In this post I showed the flowers of a sedge - best indication of a flower are the threadlike pistils that wave gently in the breeze, or the pollen that can be dislodge into the air when you tap the flowering stems gently.

After flowering the seeds will appear along the lengths of stems, and usually those stems will begin to dry up and turn brown when the seeds along them are ready. You will also be able to gently run a stem through your fingers and the seeds fall off easily, without tugging, then they’re probably ready. This is Beaked Panicum, Panicum anceps, fairly typical of how grasses produce their seeds.


Group 3. A third group that’s sometimes a little hard to judge contains asters, goldenrods, and sunflowers, the family Asteraceae, and there’s lots of natives and horticultural plants that fit in this group. The flowers form in a more or less tight cluster or wand, and they open at different times.

Take sunflower, as the easiest example. Each sun"flower", is a head of many many florets, and each produces a seed (actually a fruit itself, but you can’t tell the difference here). The tiny florets tend to open from the outside to the inside, so the seeds on the outside will be ready before the ones in the center. It’s not hard to tell when the seeds of sunflowers are ready - if they’re soft and green or white, they’re not; if they’re hard and brown or gray, they are. Best course: wait until the heads are drooping and dreary, and hope they haven’t dropped their seeds or the birds eaten them.

Here’s Sneezeweed, Helenium autumnale, which flowers late summer. There are hundreds of tiny florets; some have already flowered, and some have yet to flower. At this stage, this head is *nowhere* near ready to harvest. By that time it will have dropped its ray petals and the stem holding it will begin to shrink and color to brown, a good indication that it’s ready. It will look sad and dejected, and that’s just perfect.


For goldenrods and asters, most produce some kind of hair cluster that lets the tiny seeds fly through the air. The hairs project above the receptacle where the seeds are forming. They’re ready when you can pull gently at the hairs and the seeds come loose without effort. This might be mere days after flowering, and it might be weeks.

To complicate matters, many plants of this family produce lots of empty seed. Some sunflower types only produce viable seed at the outside rim; the inside florets are sterile. They’re a major headache. Glenn and I often examine a harvest with a magnifying glass or a dissecting scope and discard 90% of the seed, because they’re empty.

There are a number of variations beyond this - nuts, underground fruits like peanuts, seeds that can’t be allowed to dry out, like buckeyes - but I won’t get into them here. Best thing is to google a species you want to harvest and find out when they flower, when the seed are ready, and what the fruits look like.

For most seed you’ll want to dry them out well and then store them in a coin envelope which you do not seal. They should be kept in a cool clean dry place, and should not be sealed into plastic bags or anything like that, or they’ll rot.

If you’re collecting seed from a vegetable garden for next year’s plantings, keep in mind three things.

First, for garden fruits, remember that some are so bred for modifications that their fruits have become the exception, not the rule (brocolli, cauliflower, bell peppers, and so forth). We harvest snow peas early, for their succulence, but if you want seed you have to let a few pods stay on the vine until they’re dry.

Hybrid plants will produce seed, but they won’t give you a plant next year that’s anything like the original. If you’re into collecting seed for garden plants, use heirloom or true-breeding varieties, not hybrids.

Also remember that a lot of garden vegetables that involve eating the non-fruit parts (carrots, radishes, turnips) have to be left to actually do their flowering, which many of us are hardly interested in.

Finally, if you are collecting seed from plants in the wild you should know to always leave the majority of seed. For a short (pdf) document that Glenn wrote, see here. Some say collect no more than 50% of the seed - I’m a little more conservative and would not collect more than 5-10%, leaving the rest to regenerate the population. Of course this depends on the species and whether it’s common or rare. And there are laws about collecting seed from rare or endangered plants - be aware of these in your state. Native plant populations have a hard enough time without erswhile collectors making it harder still.

The temperatures have been down in the 30s the last couple of nights and will be so for the next few. But we had a good half-inch rain night before last, and the days have been warm, and spring is definitely here, a week ahead for most things. The greening is beginning with the Six-Weeks Fescue (Vulpia octoflora) grasses really thickening up now. You can see what it looked like last November, when the native fescue was just beginning to come up.

One thing worth noting - two or three years ago, the November pic would be of that area rife with browning and dead Microstegium vimineum. There wouldn’t be any obvious greenery in today’s pic. It would be covered over with a foot of packed dead brown Microstegium vegetation from the previous summer.

Here’s what it looks like now.


Eastern Redbuds (Cercis canadensis) may have put in an appearance several weeks ago for Floridacracker, but we’re getting them now. And yes, the sky really is that blue.


If you’re in the north, just think of it as a preview of things you’ll be enjoying while we’re picking ticks off in a few weeks.

Redbud flowers are edible. They’re mildly sweet and have a nice texture.


The crabapples (Malus hupehensis) are putting out leaves and flowers soon to come.


The jack-in-the-pulpits (Arisaema triphyllum) are emerging from the muddy bog.


The coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) is flowering vigorously.


And we can’t forget the first of the viburnums to flower: Burkwood Viburnum (Viburnum x Burkwoodii).


The dogwoods haven’t flowered quite yet, but they’re due shortly. Not shown: lots of winter annuals and cool season grasses and sedges putting out their strange little flowers, with stranger fruits to come in a month or two.

Take a look at these two red circles, each embedded in a different field. Which is the redder of the two?



If you said the one on the left, that’s what I want you to say. Actually they’re equally red, and I can’t tell any difference, to be honest.

Oh well, another failed illusion.

However, if you look to the South in the a clear pre-dawn sky, and slightly east, you’ll see the bright red star Antares, in the constellation Scorpio. For me it’s about 40 degrees up from the horizon - if you live much farther north than I (at 34 deg North latitude) it will be that much lower down in the sky.

But wait until the sun begins to lighten the sky slightly. As it just begins to get a deep blue-violet, the red color of Antares will intensify greatly.

At least it seems so to me

The other day, Pablo asked in comments if the “Methane Outburst” label on the figure below was a joke or real? The answer is that it’s real, and the phenomenon is also called “Methane Burps”.

(In retrospect, the terminology “burps” is amusing, given where so much of methane comes from - cow stomachs. I presume this is a euphemism, similar to “burpless cucumbers”. I think we know what the real word is



Methane (CH₄) is a greenhouse gas like CO₂ is, but much more potent. The good news is that there isn’t as much of it (1.8 ppm vs 371 ppm) though it has more than doubled in the atmosphere in the last two hundred years. Methane is also less stable, having a residence time in the atmosphere of 10-20 years compared to more than 200 years for CO₂. A rather old (2003) article from The Economist online is a pretty good introduction, and this one is even better.

Methane can be produced abiotically from organic matter, but is produced biotically mainly by methanogenic bacteria, odd little guys who hate oxygen and feed off hydrogen (H₂). They live in anaerobic places, like the bottoms of swamps, cow stomachs, sewage treatment plants, and peat bogs and on the continental shelves.

If methane is produced in warmish places, it just goes into the atmosphere. Sure, it’s troublesome, but at least it’s not accumulating like a bomb. If it’s produced in icy, cold places, it forms a complex with the water which retains and stores it as a clathrate, sometimes called methane hydrate. The methane accumulates, and two places where it accumulates are on the continental shelves and in peat bogs and permafrost in the Arctic, e.g., Siberia.

There’s an estimated 2-8 trillion tons of methane locked up in the seabed on the continental shelves. Human release of CO₂ into the atmosphere amounts to around 7 billion tons per year - that’s about 1% of the original amount already there every year. It’s also 1/1000 the amount of methane that *could* be released, which, remember, is itself 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas. The estimates for the amount of methane locked up in the Siberian permafrost vary from 8 to 400 billion tons.

(Because methane is a natural gas, and can be burned for producing energy, there’s a lot of interest in harvesting natural sources of methane clathrates. Of course this is just a continuation of the reliance on fossil fuels, with the net result of putting more CO₂ into the atmosphere.)

That’s the methane part, and the end, I’m afraid, of the good news. Here’s the burp part.

We all deal with linear and nonlinear situations everyday. A linear trend is one that is smooth, proportional, and predictable. You can gradually increase the pressure on the trigger of a gun - that’s linear. A nonlinear trend is one that is nonproportional, perhaps because a second factor cuts in at some point. You reach a point where the trigger releases the hammer of the gun and it goes off.

You can predict nonlinear trends. You just have to be clever about guessing what new factors may be introduced at some point along the way. Global climate models, which input a myriad of data and attempt to output a nearly equal myriad of results, are a beautiful example of clever intuition combined with some hard mathematics to analyze nonlinear trends. Trends, like, when is that gun going to go off?

Lately you’ve been hearing about “tipping points” in the media. This is just another phrase for the point at which a nonlinear trend produces some weird and possibly unexpected result. And methane outbursts or burps are the focus of a lot of attention because they could happen as a result of a linear trend turning into a nonlinear one.

Here’s how it might happen. Global temperatures are increasing more or less linearly. As they do, the oceans absorb more heat. Their temperatures increase too. If the pulse of heat reaches the bottom of the oceans and warms the methane clathrates they could catastrophically decompose, releasing the methane into the atmosphere. This would itself increase the rate at which temperatures increase, releasing even more methane. What starts out as a linear trend becomes a nonlinear one through positive feedback.

(Just an aside: we don’t see positive feedback very often in well-regulated systems: positive feedback is a terrible way to regulate a system. Your body only uses it very infrequently, during blood clotting, for instance, or labor during birth.)

There’s evidence that this has happened. From yesterday’s pretty pictures you’ll remember this, and pay particular attention to the PETM box at the top right of the panel.


That’s a temperature spike that occurred at the end of the Paleocene (therefore: Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), 55 million years ago. It’s estimated that temperatures rose 4-8 degC in 10-20,000 years. That’s extremely fast on a geological scale. In the mid-1990s fossil and isotope evidence began to accumulate (see here, for instance, although the entire Science article is behind a subscription wall) that a methane outburst is exactly what happened and that perhaps a trillion tons of methane was released. That’s the equivalent of 21 trillion tons of CO₂, or 3000 years of anthropogenic release, all in one burp (albeit a burp lasting 7500 years, perhaps).

So the question is, is this going to happen? When? And the answer of course is, we don’t know, we don’t know.

RealClimate has dealt with this subject a few times, e.g., in a discussion of James Lovelock’s book “Revenge of Gaia” and more directly in Methane Hydrates and Global Warming, by David. I can’t improve on what the article has to say, but here’s a couple of tidbits.

Since we were talking about the stability of ocean bottom methane:

For most parts of the ocean, melting of hydrates is a slow process. It takes decades to centuries to warm up the water 1000 meters down in the ocean, and centuries more to diffuse that heat down into the sediment where the base of the stability zone is. The Arctic Ocean may be a special case, because of the shallower stability zone due to the colder water column, and because warming is expected to be more intense in high latitudes.

We were also talking about the methane locked into the Siberian permafrost, RealClimate continues:

The grand-daddy of subsurface sealed ice layers is a very large structure in Siberia called the ice complex [Hubberten and Romanovskii, 2001]. The most important means of eroding the ice complex is laterally, by a melt-erosion process called thermokarst erosion [Gavrilov et al., 2003]. The ice layer is exposed to the warming waters of the ocean. As the ice melts, the land collapses, exposing more ice. The northern coast of Siberia has been eroding for thousands of years, but rates are accelerating. Entire islands have disappeared in historical time [Romankevich, 1984]. Concentrations of dissolved methane on the Siberian shelf reached 25 times higher than atmospheric saturation, indicating escape of methane from coastal erosion into the atmosphere [Shakhova et al., 2005]. Total amounts of methane hydrate in permafrost soils are very poorly known, with estimates ranging from 7.5 to 400 Gton C (estimates compiled by [Gornitz and Fung, 1994]).

7.5-400 gigatons of carbon in the form of methane is about 20 to 1000 years worth of anthropogenic release of CO₂ from burning of fossil fuels. Quite a range.

So I think the answer goes something like this: we don’t know but it doesn’t seem like we’d be reaching a tipping point anytime soon. A lot of conditions must be fulfilled for methane hydrates to be released from the ocean bottom sediments. The Siberian permafrost, which holds much less methane, is a less certain situation. See thermokarst erosion, for instance.

The earth has been alternating between a “hothouse” world and an “icehouse” world for at least the last 700 million years. One of the best websites for exploring the details of this time period is Chris Scotese’s Paleomap Project.

Now try to get your head around a 500-million year time span, from the Cambrian to now. It’s just a little over a tenth of the time of earth’s entire 4.5 billion year existence. It’s the time that life went from very simple multicellular forms to complex multicellular forms and began to invade the land. It’s the time we know the best. Before that things start to get a little fuzzy what with subduction and all the continental and oceanic plates disappearing into the earth.

Here’s a plot that shows how the temperatures, followed by the amount of O-18 in foraminifera, have changed over the last 500 MY. (The link provides a nice explanation of how temperatures in the distant past can be estimated.)


Four hothouse worlds, and as many icehouse worlds, including the one we inhabit, in the last half-billion years. We can thank, I suppose, the hothouse world 350-400 million years ago, in which the organic carbon was laid down to rest, awaiting all that time for us to resurrect it as fossil fuels.

The Permian inhabitants 250 MYA wouldn’t thank the next hothouse world; it resulted in the extinction of more than nine-tenths of all species on Earth.

Notice that time period, from about 300 MYA to 180 MYA, that the continents were all lumped together as Pangea. This was a particularly hot time, and may have contributed to the mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period, 250 MYA. And what was the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere then, 250 MYA? Somewhere around 1800 ppm, more than four times higher than today. We could probably have breathed that air, but might have noticed ourselves hyperventilating.

Notice also where the dinosaur killer asteroid hit, 65 MYA. This marks the end of the Mesozoic Era and the beginning of our own Cenozoic Era.

There are lots of possible reasons why the earth experiences hot and cold times. Many don’t specifically apply today, with our continents arranged as they are, but the underlying reasons such as carbon dioxide levels and heat transport through the atmosphere and upper and lower oceans are still operating.

As a kind of an aside that really gets me going, one very interesting time was 750-630 MYA, before the far right on the first plot above, when the entire earth was glaciated for millions of years. This has been called Snowball Earth, and was an extreme glaciation event indeed - the temperatures probably averaged -50 degC over the entire planet. The thawing was probably even more extreme, with air temperatures hitting 50 degC (120 degF) for millions of years. Thank goodness there wasn’t any surface life to begin with! That had yet to come.

Since you are an old hand at envisioning 500 million years now, consider just a little over a tenth of that time, the time since the end of the dinosaurs, 65 million years. This is the “Age of Mammals”, if you want to be chauvinistic, and the “Age of Flowering Plants”, if you don’t.

The last 65 million years since the Dinosaur Killer Asteroid has seen the earth gradually cooling back into an icehouse planet.


Again, the temperatures are inferred by the amount of the oxygen isotope O-18 found in foraminifera shells - pay no attention to the y-axes labels, just view the green graph line as roughly indicating temperature.

Why would the earth be cooling over a 65 million year period? It’s not an unusual situation; as you saw in the top figure, it happens all the time. Again, there’s all sorts of possibilities but for much of that time carbon dioxide levels have been dropping gradually. During the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) CO2 levels might have been 800 parts per million, with average temperatures of 22 degC. Since then both values have declined to our own pre-industrial 280 ppm with average temperatures of 12 degC. Now they’re up to 370 ppm. Too, the continents are fortuitously placed with a broadening Atlantic Ocean and a dynamic “oceanic conveyer belt” transporting heat efficiently from equator to poles.

Then, about 2 million years ago, something interesting began to happen. Periodic glaciations, or ice ages, began occurring, especially in the northern hemisphere.


Since that time, there’s been at least eight or nine such cycles. The glaciations (stadials) last about 100,000 years, and then there’s a warm interglacial (interstadial) lasting 10-20,000 years. We’re now in the middle of a warm period.


There have been all sorts of explanations to suggest what might be happening to cause this cyclic behavior, and they probably all have some validity. Milankovitch cycles, or the variations of the earth’s orbit around the sun suggest that the variations mean that during some times less sun hits the earth than at other times.

Milankovitch cycles have been analyzed and the longer of them correlate roughly with the glaciation periods of 100,000 years (note that correlation does not always imply causation). Interestingly, if you project the future orbit of the earth, the amount of sun hitting the earth continues to increase for tens of thousands of years into the future.

This suggests that there’s no hope for a cooling phase to help mitigate the global warming we see now due to anthroponic releases of CO2 into the atmosphere that has not seen such new carbon for hundreds of millions of years.

There’s another event that occurred 2 million years ago and may have been ultimately responsible for sparking off this series of glacials and interglacials: the emergence of the Isthmus of Panama connecting the North and South American continents.

A few posts back I mentioned that the land bridge that appeared between North and South America resulted in the extinction of a rich megafauna of marsupials. It had other effects too. With the rising of the Isthmus of Panama, the gateway between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans was blocked. From WW Hay’s very neat paper modeling the effects of “oceanic gateways” and their openings and closings on climate change:


His modeling suggests that prior to the closing, the Pacific and Atlantic were free to interchange and that the distribution of heat was radically different. There was probably very little heat transport northward in the Atlantic, as there was no Gulf Stream. Rather, the heat transport in the Atlantic was southward, toward Antarctica, which would have been warmed more than it is today. The closing of the Panama Gateway switched on the Gulf Stream and the now-famous Atlantic Conveyer Belt sending more heat to the Arctic and less toward the Antarctic.

So why would this have sparked off periodic glaciations? This may be the wrong question. Suppose the Northern Hemisphere glaciations were permanent?

Then the right question might be: why would the closure between the Atlantic and Pacific periodically interrupt with idyllic warm periods what might be a permanent Northern Hemisphere glaciation?

One possibility is that without this closure the Arctic would have been much colder and the glaciations permanent. (This is of course an aspect of the scenario in "The Day After Tomorrow", in which a suddenly slowed Atlantic Conveyer belt results in catastrophic glaciation of the northern hemisphere.) We would then see the closure of the Panama Gateway as a lucky event (for us!). It resulted in the Gulf Stream, and the extension of the Atlantic Conveyer Belt. This dumps heat in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in periodic interruptions of this glaciation. Sadly, Antarctica suffers the permanent glaciation instead of the Arctic. Cool! Especially since most of the land mass on the planet is now in the northern hemisphere rather than the southern!

There’s other gateways too - the Drake Passage between Antarctica and the southern tip of South America opened up 20-30 million years ago, and the Tasmanian-Antarctic passage at about the same time. This permitted the Antarctic circum-polar current to flow, thermally isolated Antarctica and allowing its continued cooling.

Now this isn’t an apocalyptic post. But don’t mistake - neither is it one suggesting as some try that our planet has had climate changes in the past and so changes now are a-ok. They’re not. Locked into our little hundred year mindset, we might refuse to comprehend without a little effort, just how fast these changes are occurring, and that we’ve nothing to worry about.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of changes in the Earth’s CO2 levels and temperature changes have occurred over tens of millions of years, and not merely decades, or tens of decades. The time difference is a million-fold. The former time frame allows organisms time enough to adapt; the latter does not.

Remember how I mentioned that we, as humans, might have found ourselves hyperventilating in the 1800 ppm CO2 environment of the Permian? Thrust us into that and it’s the same thing as expecting whole ecosystems today to adapt to the new climate we ourselves are reconfiguring in matter of mere decades. This is why a majority of scientists worry.

I don’t have a lot to say today - look to yesterday for that. Well, maybe I do but it’s not ready to say yet. Let’s at least say “ice ages”! And perhaps “Isthmus of Panama!”

Here’s what’s flowering right now. Nice to see them!

Bloodroots! The ones I’ve transplanted up to the house flower before the ones in the woods down to the creek. Bloodroots come up with flowers ready to open.


Sharp-lobed hepaticas! I love their leaves and their flowers.


Purple trillium leaves! No flowers yet though. Something to look forward to.


Plus a lot of henbit and bedstraws and chickweed. Mayapples emerging. Coral honeysuckle in bud. Many cool season sedges and rushes and grasses in flower.

Looks like spring is here!

Two posts today, at least!

The serious one earlier was to pull together things about mammals I should know and probably neglects things I missed. And it has a couple of almost cute pictures.

And then there’s this one, which - let’s face it - is more fun than anything, if you think being labelled a terrorist or finagling nickles and dimes with your loan company is fun. We grimly died laughing while composing it, but still...

First, you might have heard last week of the couple who tried to pay off their credit card debt, $6,522, on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard. *They* weren’t laughing.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.

Isn’t that nice? Try to be responsible, pay off your debt, please the wealthy Dick Cheney, who scolded us all a few days ago for not saving, and get labelled a potential terrorist and have your money snatched away.

We don’t know whether there were additional interest payments incurred while Homeland Security determined whether or not the schoolteachers were terrorists, nor whether DHS compensated them for that additional charge. We do know that *eventually* it was resolved. Thank goodness for them, but still....

Hey, if you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about!

Second, for our own little confrontation, admittedly MUCH littler compared with what this couple endured, with what is essentially the invasive roots and the pernicious shoots of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about 50 years ago and that have been watered and fertilized so generously in the last five years. OK, that was a rant. I knew you’d enjoy it. But still.....

You might recall from a few weeks ago that we (thought we) had paid off all our mortgage. Apparently Synovus, the “$27 billion company committed to the single principle of doing what is right for the customer, always”, loves us so much they just can’t let go - we owe $13.35, they inform us in a letter arrived yesterday Mar 10. It must be paid by certified check or cashier’s check by the 16th, or there will be additional charges. Hmm. Today, the 11th, is Saturday. What to do?

Now, the $13.35 isn’t part of the deal - Glenn’s quite clever about calculating what we owe - he knows. Yet there’s always that apocryphal fine print, which reads essentially, you may *never* be rid of us. So we owe $13.35, which is a trivial amount and well worth it to get these weasels off our backs.

But a cashier’s or certified check also costs. So it’s annoying, especially since Synovus lets us know five days (not business days, mind you, that would be two) in advance that “omigod, if you don’t get this money in the sky will fall and the american economy will collapse and you’ll owe us an additional 25 cents, and ANYHOW, we can come up with charges you never dreamed of until your nieces' and nephews' kids are in the grave, and if we run out of ammo we’re sure Congress will pass some new laws”.

Well, ok, that was snark, but still.......

You might also recall that we did some spring cleaning, and when I cleaned out the kitchen drawers I found some nice change. It wasn’t *quite* $13.35, but we can match that with two crisp one-dollar bills.


The above pic is what everyone increasingly, with great laughter, calls “legal tender”, increasingly less good anywhere anytime but still hypothetically valid here and now. We’re quite willing to pay the postage for the coinage, because it would be worth it to our sense of humor. Unlike a certified check or cashier’s check, it will probably get there in time. We’re told, not just because I determined it by a call on the cell phone I don’t have, but because it’s *written RIGHT there on the money* that it isn’t a mere promise, as a check would be, it’s the REAL THING.

Will they accept it? Will the Department of Homeland Security investigate us? Will the IRS audit our last twenty years of finances?

The question is, is it worth it?

Leona, our wisest cat, says no - just go find a nice frog and tear its legs off - you’ll feel better.

But still..................

Last night we caught this varmint raiding the suet feeder. If we didn’t know better we might call him cute, but we do know better. The Virginia Opossum, Didelphis virginiana, or possum, as I call it, is North America’s only marsupial. There are those who would call him stupid, but possums are great survivors. Its ancestor was the only marsupial that managed to both make it *north* across the Isthmus of Panama when it formed and joined North America and South America during the Pliocene several million years ago, *and* survive. From there it has colonized much of the North American continent. So not very bright, no. Adaptable and successful, undeniably.

Most people are probably aware that there are three major surviving lines of mammals. Monotremes, not a part of this story, are the result of the earliest radiation from the mammalian line, and still lay eggs: platypus and spiny anteaters are pretty much what remains of this line. More successful were the marsupials, mammals that give live birth, but soon after development is completed. Later growth of the fetus occurs externally protected by the mother’s pouch but only after a perilous migration from inside the mother’s body up her fur and then into the pouch. And then there’s the third radiation of placental mammals which we are most familiar with and include us, of course. The embryo and fetus develop completely within the mother’s body. (Other unrelated groups include the multituberculates, which no longer exist.)

250 million years ago, all the continents were joined in one: Pangea. That continent began to break up into two huge landmasses around 180 million years ago: a southern continent, Gondwana, and a northern continent, Laurasia. Gondwana was comprised of South America, Africa, Antarctica, and Australia; Laurasia included North America, Europe, and Asia. The breakup wasn’t clean - in places there were still connections between the two giant continents for millions of years. It was during this time period that mammals first appeared.

Marsupials probably evolved in Laurasia, but made the crossing to Gondwana before the complete breakup. Placental mammals also made the crossing but only managed to colonize Africa before it broke off from the rest of Gondwana. Marsupials died out in Laurasia, probably competed out by placental mammals, but radiated into a rich diversity of megafauna in Gondwana. Further independent evolution of two groups of marsupials took place when South America separated from Antarctica/Australia. Some placental mammals did make it to Gondwana, but they evolved mainly into herbivores. The carnivores of those times in Gondwana were marsupials. And that was the situation until about 3 million years ago.

Edward O Wilson, in his wonderful “The Diversity of Life”, presents us with this comparison between the marsupials of Australia, and their placental analogs:


Each member of each pair of mammals resembles the other but neither are related, except that they are mammals. The similarities come from similar adaptations suitable for the ecological niches that the animal occupied.


Paleocene marsupials independently occupied the same niches that the more familiar placental mammals did, but were isolated to different continents. It’s not surprising that they would look fairly similar. What’s surprising to many people is the enormous variety of marsupials that used to exist in South America and Australia.

Wilson describes in his book the amazing diversity of marsupials that constituted the South American ecosystems up until a few million years ago. Besides the large variety of possum-like marsupials that still exist, there were fierce carnivorous marsupials: saber-toothed cat-like marsupials instead of the placental felines we’re familiar with. Marsupials that resembled weasels, canines, pigs, horses - all gone. Placentals also existed on the South American continent, mainly as herbivores: toxodonts instead of rhinoceros; giant sloths instead of elephants.

(Apparently the only niches marsupials seem to have not filled is that of the cetaceans - ocean-adapted mammals, and the chiropterans, the placental bats.)

The event that consigned this vast “splendid assemblage”, as Wilson puts it, to the dustbin of evolutionary history was the joining of North America to South America a few million years ago, when the Caribbean plate moved eastward to complete the connection. North American placentals were able to slaughter and out-compete their distant marsupial counterparts. Some South American marsupials, placentals, and other animals, such as the ferocious giant (10' tall!) birds, Titanis, or Terror Birds, as well as the giant sloths, armadillos, porcupines, and anteaters did move across the land bridge from South to North. But of the marsupials it was only the stupid, almost-cute ancestor of the Virgina Opossum that was tenacious and adaptable enough to have survived to this date, and repopulate the marsupial-deficient North American continent.

However spectacular the extinction was, we don’t usually think of what must have happened three million years ago as being a Great Extinction event, or at least not one of the Big Five. There weren’t a huge number of species across the kingdoms that became extinct, only a large number of highly visible mammalian species, replaced by their analogs.

The isolation and evolution of mammals are just one way of viewing the effect tectonic plate movements have had on the evolution of living things. Plants too were separated by continental movements and subsequently diversified into new families: Cactus in North America and South America versus the unrelated but similar-appearing Euphorbs in Africa, for instance. But that’s another story.

This one is going to be heavy on the pics, but I’ve sized things down to a fairly manageable download even if you’re on dialup. And since I always specify my height and width attributes, you can read my wise prose while things are downloading! How about that!

First, the big event is the arrival of the Watermaster described by Fire Chief Phyllis Jackson in detail in the post below. We’ve been waiting for it for four months (at least), so we were as excited as the kids who showed up with their folks to see it. The tanker is somewhere in the neighborhood of $170,000, 95% paid for by DHS and 5% that we had to raise ourselves as matching funds. The Wolfskin Community responded very generously and we passed the $8500 mark at the end of January.

So let me introduce you to Phyllis. A lot of people worked hard on the grant, matching fundraising, and facilities to house the supertanker, but without Phyllis having had the idea last March and providing the impetus, enthusiasm, and most of the grant writing this wouldn’t have happened. “We can DO this”, was her mantra. And today she’s a happy camper.


I arrived at Phyllis’s (three miles away by road, but a half-mile if I tromp through the woods) at 3pm; the tanker had just arrived.


I’ll have more to say about Jeff and Phyllis’s house in a moment, but here’s the “wolf” skull (actually not) that Phyllis wired up with red LEDs.


The tanker is a beast. 2500 gallons. Automatic transmission


Now I know you’re curious about the house you see in the background of one of the above pics. That’s Phyllis and Jeff’s. Jeff is a wildlife biologist. They built the house gradually over several years and have added their own unique touches.


It was probably 12 years ago that we had a training session using ladders on their upstairs balcony.


Isn’t that an interesting ornamentation embroidering the trim? Let’s look a little more closely.


And then there’s Frankie. Now Frankie is a sine qua non. Without whom nothing. He fixes things. He fixes everything. Right now he’s trying to figure out how to fix something. He’s on the left, which is probably fairly appropriate.


Here’s the front of Frankie’s car.


And here’s the back.


Frankie mosied over while I was being charmed by the car, and I said “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your car in the daytime”. “Oh”, he said, have you seen the nameplate?"


Yep, that’s Frankie.

And then it was time to drive the tanker to WVFD to get ready for the fete. I could hardly keep up. The road, by the way, is Blacksnake Road.


And here it is, 6pm already. I missed most of the fun part where it was discovered that the tanker, at 119" high, didn’t quite fit under several items on the 121" high ceiling. You can probably tell that everyone is pensive.


No problem for Frankie. He pulled off the stack, cut a few inches off, and put it back on. Presto!


The brains of the system.


By this time, folks were arriving and it was time for company owner Richard O'Neill (in the yellow jacket) to show us how things are done. We’re getting out the drop tank here. It’s a big plastic tank that opens out. The idea is you drop your water from the tanker into it for other trucks to use, and then you take off to get more. (Or stay - the tanker is fully equipped as a regular pumper.) We must have filled it and sucked it back into the tanker a couple of dozen times during the course of the evening.


The hose is big because this tanker sucks water fast. It attaches to that neat metal strainer. The design is very clever. There’s a seal air chamber so it can’t turn upside down or sink, and it allows 2500 gallons to be pulled out of any body of water at least three inches deep, and in 2 minutes.

Around here you can’t rely on fire hydrants. You make an onsite pond instead.


The drop tank is filled from the side of the truck. It can be filled slow, or really fast. The kids liked this a lot.


While this isn’t necessarily normal procedure, we used the sucker to pull the water back into the truck, so it could be used again. Less than a minute to pull it all back in.


Everyone needed a lesson, so this went on well into the evening.

Wolfskin Volunteer Fire Department is expecting its new supertanker to arrive in just a few hours. You can probably expect a blog and pics of the giant baby.

From Fire Chief Phyllis Jackson just moments ago:

FF and Friends,

Yee-Haw!!!! The WaterMaster super vacuum
pumper/tanker arrives in Wolfskin—after lunch today.
Richard O’Neal, one of the 3 owners of Southern Fire
Equipment is bringing it from Laurel MS, with a stop
in White Plains AL. “The Liquidator” (Wayne came up
with that ) will be parked at my house this
afternoon—drop in! I took a vacation day.

Spectating, Truck Training, 6 PM. Lee Shearer
from the Athens Banner-Herald is coming to do a story
for Friday paper. Family members and Wolfskin
neighbors, y’all come check out the new razzle-dazzle
mobile water supply unit. Let’s get some civilians in
the newspaper photo, and maybe some gung-ho kids.

FYI: Check our www.southern-fire.com for info on the
truck and the company owners—all 3 are volunteer
firefighters, and developed the first truck and
low-level water strainer (fills from just 2 inches of
water source) for their own rural department. The idea
came from—not real exotic here— “Hey, lets modify and
outfit a septic tank sucking truck.”

Also, type “watermaster truck” in Google.

In the FEMA Grant application, I wrote that this
vacuum tanker is perfect for our rural fire department
needs: “Sucks, safe, simple; swift, solo, and
shallow.”

Here are some specs:

2500 gal tank on Freightliner chassis (International
would have been my first choice, but the demo was a
Freightliner—and okay, it’s similar.)

Maximum water with minimum personne needed. Wittig 430
CFM vacuum system; fills tank in 2 ½ minutes from
static water (dry hydrant). That thing sucks!!!
(Guaranteed to out perform conventional tankers 2 :1
in a two hour water shuttle. Video cameras so you
can sit in the cab, operate the “command center,” and
watch your back.

Will draft around 35 feet, vertical! (I got 90 ft of
suction hose, w/ rapid Storz connections—should get us
to about any stream from parked a road in outlying
areas. 10 ft vertical draft is about what our
conventional trucks do easily.)

1000 GPM Hale fire pump (Had that added, to make it
also a Pumper for firefighting. We need 2 Class A
Pumpers for ISO Class 8 rating)

No-rust aluminum tank. Tank can be chloroxed and used
to haul potable water in event of disaster. (Of
course storing the amount of chlorox needed for that
would make us a haz-mat site.)

2500 gal portable drop tank, stored on fold- down
carrier on side.

Wolf skull with red blinking lights in eye-sockets—Our
mascot for the dash!!! (Well okay, that was not
standard equipment, and it’s actually a big coyote
roadkill, but hey, it works in Wolfskin.)

See y’all tonight! Peace in Wolfskin,

Phyllis

Early in February I took a walk along Goulding Creek northward toward the dam. Yesterday I walked 0.6 miles southward along the creek. My agenda was formless for the most part. I was interested in surveying the signs of spring, here at the end of the first week in March. I didn’t quite get to the merging of Goulding and Moss Creeks, but I did see some interesting things and spring does appear to be here.

First order of business is to lock up Genie-weenie. I didn’t do that the day before and my plans were scuttled. No sooner had I reached the floodplain when I heard “mew! mew!”, and there he was.

We walked though not in the direction I’d hoped. By the end of it I’d tired him out considerably, and yes, cats do pant. Look how he points, too!

Glenn has suggested that I get one of those little papoose things to carry him in when he gets tired. Is that weird, or what?


But let’s get back to yesterday’s more successful agenda.

First, the mighty Goulding Creek, winding its way toward a loss of identity as it merges with Moss Creek, and then a little further south, with Barrow Creek. You’ll recall that Goulding Creek is not very wide, and it’s not very deep. It is however, *our* creek, and we love it. My northern hike was along a relatively unimpeded creekbank, sometimes along wonderfully broad paths. The southward trek has fairly extensive stretches with dense growth of crownbeard, deer-pruned treelets, blackberries, and native bamboo.


Here’s our first butterflies of the season, what I’m guessing are Spring Azures Celastrina ladon. Hyperactive little butterflies that I was never able to photograph with the little Nikon Coolpix because I could never get close enough. The D70 got these from three feet back.




The two above are of the same butterfly; the one below was taken the previous day of a different butterfly. There are tiny differences in the marking patterns but amazingly, not many.


I’m always on the lookout for grass types that grow in the shade, and this is the time of year for finding cool season types. So I was delighted to find this little sedge of unknown Carex species.

The white strands are the female flowers, which are separate on the same plant from the male flowers. The male flowers are above, and haven’t opened yet. Neat little plant - sedges are *very* important plants. Sedges have edges! Glenn has narrowed it down to two possibilities: C. nigromarginata, Blackedged Sedge. Or maybe C. artitecta, which is now considered to be C. albicans, Whitetinged Sedge, by USDA Plants. Oh what great fun sedges afford us with.

On the way back I discovered on the bank a patch of emerging mayapples. And then there was this unusual deerstand, probably purchased from a big box store.

A few days ago I mentioned that a number of climate hot spots have been identified, somewhere around twelve such. These hot spots are climate cycles that are under especially intense observations because deviation from their normal pattern are indications that climate is changing.

Some of these you may be familiar with already. The North Atlantic Deep Water Formation has to do with that “Atlantic Conveyor Belt” that was used to such an extreme of special effects in The Day After Tomorrow. Most people are aware of the Southeast Asian Monsoons. Some are becoming aware of the possibility of release of methane hydrates in the Arctic. Although we all know where the Amazon rainforests are, and the Saharan Desert, or let’s hope we all do, most people probably don’t know there’s a very strong connection between the two. Salinity valves are probably not in everybody’s day-to-day conversations.

The known cyclic behavior of all these climatic hot spots are indicators of “normal” climate. Anomalous changes in them can be meaningful. This is why they’re critically important.



I’ve written about the well-known El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the ENSO (aka “El Niño”) cycle that occurs every 2-5 years, causing world-wide changes in weather all over the world. This is, as you might expect, one of those climate hot spots.

Another hot spot, less well known, is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Like El Niño, this is also a cycle, but it occurs in cycles of decades - 40-50 years to complete a cycle. Also like the ENSO, the PDO was identified by its effect on a fishing industry. Sometimes the PDO is called “the El Niño of the North”.

Stephen Hare noticed this cycle in 1996 while he was working on an explanation for the cycle of salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest. He concluded that there was a Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cycle of cool and warm North Pacific sea surface temperatures, that could explain the cyclic salmon runs. During warm phases of the PDO, such as have existed since the late 1970s, salmon runs are particularly active. During cool phases, e.g., mid 1940s-late 1970s, salmon runs are poor. (In warm phases, the North Pacific is actually cool, and vice versa. Don’t be confused!)

Here’s a plot of the PDO over the last century. The individual points are monthly values, and the line is a 61-month running average that smoothes out the noise and shows the cycle itself. The red color indicates warm phase; the blue indicates cool phase. We seem to be trending down from a warm phase into a cool phase, and this would be expected about now. We would expect this cool phase to last until 2020 or 2030.



The PDO overlaps the ENSO geographically, off the coast of South America. Whereas the ENSO cycles between warm and cold (or high and low pressure) between the west and East equatorial Pacific, the PDO cycles between warm and cold between the northwest Pacific and the east Equatorial Pacific.

In a warm PDO, the waters of the east Equatorial Pacific are warm compared to the northwest Pacific. The situation is reversed in a cool phase PDO.

Because of the overlap in the east Equatorial Pacific, off the coast of South America, a cool phase PDO accentuates La Niñas and a warm phase PDO accentuates El Niños. So we are in for two or three decades of La Niña-like weather, good fishing off the coast of South America, and poor salmon runs.

We’re also in for more intense hurricane seasons. You’ve probably heard the prediction that we can expect a decade or two of more intense hurricane seasons, well, this is why. You might remember that El Niño suppresses hurricane activity in the North Atlantic, and La Niña intensifies it. There you go. El Niños will be weaker in a cool PDO phase, and La Niñas will be stronger. This is one reason why climate scientists are a bit reluctant to attribute the intense hurricane seasons of the last few years *solely* to global climate change - the completely normal PDO cycle kind of messes with that reasoning. On the other hand *if* the intense hurricanes in the last couple of years *are* due in part to increased global warming, the cool phase PDO might be expected to add to that intensification.

Here in the Southeast US we can expect more periods of summer drought, and warmer winters, dammit. Droughts will be more common across the entire Southern US. The Northwest US can expect more rain and more snowpack in the winter and higher risk of floods.

Take a look at what your weather was like 1999-2001, when we had a series of strong La Niñas. Expect more of the same, more often.

What causes the PDO cycle? No definitive answer, just as there’s no definitive answer for what causes ENSO. The best answer is sort of vague - ENSO, and possibly PDO, may be relief systems for heat accumulation. Just a for instance, heat accumulates in the West Equatorial Pacific to a certain point, gets dumped, and we have an El Niño.

This is entirely non-mathematical supposition on my part, but just for fun: Heat gets dumped into cold regions when it accumulates enough. With global warming, bets are off: if cold regions are not so cold, heat may accumulate more before being dumped and triggering a cycle change in ENSO or PDO. Or heat may be dumped in a different place. Regardless, there would be way significant changes in weather. If this is so, then this is an ample reason for keeping track of both climate hot spots, as global heat accumulates in the foreseeable future. You can be sure that climate scientists are watching to see what the PDO does in the next decade or two.

As Bill and OW guessed, yesterday’s plant is a buckeye, a red buckeye Aesculus pavia. OW pointed out that he recognized it as a plant he used to have to pull out of the fields because it was toxic to cattle and horses, and this is true. All parts are poisonous. A great understory plant though!

Here’s a photo of one that’s a bit further along:


You can now confirm that the leaves are compound, palmately (like a palm) compound). This feature could be seen in yesterday’s photo of the emerging shoot. Along with the woody stem, that pretty much narrows it down.

On the other side of the house, various crises are always emerging.


With purple finches, as with sparrows, first you have one, then you have two, and then there’s a thousand. These females are showing their true feathers. About as nicely as they get, they’re dissuading a fourth female from joining their little group.

We tolerate them though. Maybe they could be hawk food.

The male is close by. He has a definite purple back and neck, unlike the females.

As of yesterday, Mar 5 the Hepaticas are now in flower. Probably opened several days ago. Last year they opened Mar 3. The bloodroots are just coming up, complete with flowers as usual. Last year it was Mar 9. So the bloodroots things are at least three days earlier than last year. Or you might view them as being oddly close to last year’s timing, given how warm January was.

Here’s a little plant puzzle. Who is this?

I was making pita bread for the week and washing dishes (of the past week) yesterday afternoon when I heard that Octavia Butler had died. She was only 58. For the past 25 years she has been among my dozen or so favorite science fiction writers in a field of hundreds that I otherwise pay little attention to.

If you don’t read science fiction you may not have ever heard of her. I’m pretty selective these days about my science fiction reading; so much is derivative or unoriginal, but this can’t be said about Octavia Butler. She wasn’t a writer of fine literature but she was a writer of great stories that inevitably involved threads of racism and xenophobia.

I picked up “Mind of My Mind” in the late 70’s, my first contact with her, and immediately loved it - I still have the same book, as well as its partners “Wild Seed” and “Patternmaster”. Superficially at least the books relate the story of a 4000-year-old mind vampire who over the millenia breeds a hidden, scattered population of human talents because they taste good. Her book, “Clay’s Ark”, is peripherally involved with this trio. And you can read them and enjoy them, if that’s your goal, for the plot because it is entertaining, but Octavia Butler had much more in mind.

Her eerie and sad book “Kindred” relates the story of a black woman, who just happens to be a writer, repeatedly jerked back to the early 1800s and her remote ancestor, a slaveholder. The twist apparently is that she must save his life again and again until his illegitimate daughter, our hero’s ancestor, is born, thus ensuring her own existence. (So that, of course, in the manner of the grandfather paradox, she will exist to save his life again and again.)

Since the first of her wonderful books, she has been one of the half-dozen or so authors that I’ve periodically searched for on the internets, or in a bookstore, to see if anything new had been published, and ecstatic was I on the several days I was rewarded with a find.

Although they aren’t usually listed in her repertoire of favorites, the Xenogenesis trio of books “Dawn”, "Adulthood Rites", and “Imago” are my own personal favorites. She had the ability to weave a complex storyline around a set of fantastic events that were entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time. It was her contention that Homo sapiens has a mortal instinctive conflict - a combination of intelligence and hierarchical tendencies (i.e., pecking order and bullying) that ultimately leads to species suicide. As good an explanation as any, I suppose.

So when I heard the intro yesterday, I immediately thought - GREAT - an interview with Octavia Butler! And then my heart fell, and I followed it up immediately with “oh no”. The tribute by her good friend Sharon Ball on NPR is well worth listening to or reading.

I’ll be celebrating her life by pulling out all her books and rereading them.

I haven’t taught Organismal Botany in several years, but for the five years that I did teach it, I most enjoyed developing lectures on broader topics like carnivorous plants, extinction events, climate change, and wetlands. Don’t tell anyone but these were opportunities for me to learn new things too. The course had been entirely a dry recitation of the taxonomy and characteristics of the four or five kingdoms of living things - Bacteria, Archaea, “Protista”, Fungi, and of course Plantae (and excepting Animalia), and leavening the agenda with peripheral topics was a way to break up that monotony.

One of my favorites was the Everglades Restoration Plan, a massive project to remove the barriers to water flow from Lake Okeechobee and once again permit that thin, hundred-mile-broad sheet of water to flow slowly through South Florida.

The short story: in the early half of the last century, the Army Corps of Engineers built an extensive system of dams, levees, and canals to block the flow of water southward from Lake Okeechobee into the Everglades, and shunt it east and west toward Florida’s booming coastal population centers. This of course had the effect of not only drying up the Everglades and allowing salt water to intrude, essentially choking off the vast ecosystem.

The Plan has remarkable support across the political spectrum, which is a good thing. Of course not everyone likes it - development and farming south of Lake Okeechobee also depends on water, but with Lake Okeechobee becoming more and more eutrophic, full of nutrients, it was only a matter of time before that source would become undependable anyway.

DarkSyde at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has a fantastic interview with Washington Post journalist and writer Michael Grunwald, who has followed much of the activity in the last five years.

A definite recommendation.

OK, I’ve been a good boy, really good, and I know many of you don’t come here for politics, but you know that this happens every few months and then I’ll be relatively ok, or at least depressurized and a little ashamed to have fallen prey. But enough is enough.

When I vote for a candidate for public office I guess it’s laughably naïve that I would expect the winner, whether my preference or not, to do a better job than I could have done. It’s probably unreasonable of me to also demand of them that they not lie, at least not to a pathological degree, and that they accept responsibility for their mistakes. I count it as part of my winning laid-back personality that much is forgiveable if someone learns from his mistakes and improves.

Since that’s not the case here, I feel a little justified in presenting these objections, along with a list of some concerns for the future.

A little of the evidence, and these are just the highlights; dig a little deeper into more obscure issues and you’ll find a helluva lot more:

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I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees. - GW Bush, 4 days after Katrina.

A newly leaked video recording of high-level government deliberations the day before Hurricane Katrina hit shows disaster officials emphatically warning President Bush that the storm posed a catastrophic threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and a grim-faced Bush personally assuring state leaders that his administration was “fully prepared” to help.

It “seems they were aware of everything . . . that we would need lots of help,” Nagin said after a post-Mardi Gras news conference. “Why was the response so slow?”

When the video ended, Nagin turned away and said, “Oh, God.”

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No one could have known insurgents would arise in Iraq. Iraquis were to greet us with flowers and candy.

Intelligence agencies warned about growing local insurgency in late 2003
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.

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And I said, “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon” – I’m paraphrasing now – "into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile. - Condoleeza Rice, then NSA head.

BEN-VENISTE: Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”

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This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen. - Ari Fleischer, then White House Press Secretary.

Yesterday evening, the White House confirmed a just-broadcast CBS News report that the CIA had warned President Bush last August that members of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network might try to hijack U.S. airplanes. - The Presidential Daily Briefing - PDR - Aug 6 2001.

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And then there’s the Iraq War itself: Of course it was Rice, as well as a number of Administration officials including President Bush who also said of Iraq, and the necessity for invading it:

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

And of course, not only have no weapons of mass destruction ever been found, but there’s ample evidence that the Bush Administration was just using that as an excuse anyway to do something they were going to do, anyway.

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There’s a common thread running through all this - good advice to the contrary, President Bush made the wrong choices, and not just once, but repeatedly in situations where thousands of lives and vast amounts of money are at stake. There’s a problem with a faith-based Administration that listens only to what it wants to hear, and fires anyone who offers contrary advice.

The *nicest* thing we could say is that the president is a fool, but that connotes too much innocence on his part, for my taste. There is, after all, the tiny detail of so many large corporations making so much money off his choices, which only strike *us* as poor.

Sure sure, we’re supposed to “move forward” and all that, and for sure it’s unpatriotic to criticize, and of course, why buy trouble, when it’s so obviously available at no cost? Still, since Mr Bush has learned so little about learning from the mistakes he claims he doesn’t make, here are some predictions of what is to come:

It certainly wasn’t clear to anyone that global warming was a clear and present danger.

No one could have foreseen that the Greenland and Antarctica ice caps would melt so *fast*.

But Michael Crichton *promised* me global warming was all a scam. Who could have thought a fiction writer would know less than climate scientists?

No one predicted that avian flu would mutate to human to human transmission.

No one anticipated that China would foreclose its loans.

Who would have thought that cutting services in this country would make people so angry?

Surely no one thought that mercury and arsenic would do *that* to our children!

Who could have believed that oil demand would exceed production so *soon*?

No one would have thought that the deficit could have had such enormous ramifications to the US economy.

Who knew that there would be so *many* seniors?

Who would have believed that The Republican War on Science might have stripped us of the ability to solve problems?

Now chicks, we’re held to a higher standard than the president, and you can be sure there will be no Republican sycophants shielding *us*, so I don’t recommend you play this game of deniable implausibility at home, unless of course, home happens to be the White House.

Still, how far do you think any of these would get any of us?

Who would have thought the IRS would be so *touchy* about me not paying my taxes?

Who could have dreamed that you could get into so much trouble driving drunk?

No one made it so clear that there was all that interest on credit card debt.

Who would have thought that my boss would get so *prickly* about my coming to work an hour late each day?

Who could have anticipated that forgetting to turn the stove off would have burned down the house?

Feel free to add your own predictions. After all, we still have three years left of this Administration asleep at the wheel, waking up only to find excuses.

Haven’t done one of these in a long time. Yesterday I took a little walk looking for a sedge that was in flower a week ago. Of course Gene had to track me down, you knew this was going to happen. Could we get that tail up a little higher, please?


Every tree has to be climbed, every tree has to be sampled. It takes a long time. Some of our cats flee at the sight of a camera. Genie-weenie is the quintessential ham. Feles longa, vita brevis!


Speaking of the brevis of vita, the Kat Sematary, current occupation somewhere around twelve, is the perfect place for Genie-weenie to meditate on matters of mice and mortality.


Aunt Donna sent Genie-weenie a care package. He hasn’t read the little books on cat-etiquette yet, but he and Squit are checking out the stuffed companion. They’re not quite sure what to do about it.

A few posts back Floridacracker asked if I ever played around in the creek making dams. Indeed I have - there are few things more fun than slopping rocks around blocking the path of flowing water and then watching the rising pool behind the obstruction!

Click pic for crosseyed stereo images (Instructions)

There is an exquisite little area down below the house, about halfway up Sparkleberrysprings Creek. A waterfall and three pools are formed by a very large rock blocking the path of the creek. Behind the rock is a broad pool, and the rock is just the right slope to allow the water behind it to rise and overflow into a second pool below. The two or three heavy rains we get most years swell the creek and wash over the rock, keeping it fairly clean of loose vegetation and detritus, leaving behind moss and lichen and a few clinging plants.

It wasn’t always like this. Here’s a view from a little farther back from the creek. The left arrow shows the position of the large rock; behind it are the pools and waterfall. The right arrow shows the former course of the creek behind the rock.

This former course left the lower pool now fed by the waterfall stagnant and unappealing. Since the former course of the creek, disappearing behind the rock, didn’t do anything for me, about five years ago, I built a sophistocated little dam that diverted the creek over the rock itself. Now the lower pool is lively and fresh with frogs and tiny fish, there are two upper pools, and a nice boggy area is formed as indicated by the ellipse in the foreground.

Click pic for crosseyed stereo images (Instructions)

You can see at back left that eroded bank - it’s about 10 feet tall. I keep an eye on it. It seems to be stable, at least over 15 years, but it would certainly look nice planted in coral honeysuckle.

Click pic for crosseyed stereo images (Instructions)

Here’s a view from across the creek, standing on the rise 12 feet above the lower pool and looking down on the upper pool. The arrow shows the position of the dam that diverted the creek over the rock, rather than behind it. By the way, that *is* the fallen tree I’ve written about recently.

"When I was a kid"... I read a lot, or tried to; there was a lot less to read when I was a kid. It was harder to come by. (Sometimes I had to walk four miles in a blizzard to get to the library. ) Really though, the library was about it if you wanted to read, and a trip to the Dekalb County Library came about once a week. Four books, tops, that’s all we could take. And really, the selection wasn’t great. My real ambition was to go to the *Atlanta Public Library* which was enormous. And I did go once, but it was a lot farther away than the much smaller library in town.

In reviewing my life as a kid, which is one of those things we do when we engage in consciousness, I often remember the books I read. There’s one that I found when I was probably 8 or 9 that struck me vividly. There’s this kid, see, this kid who finds a huge egg under his bewildered chicken. The egg hatches and it’s a dinosaur, a Triceratops, in fact.

The book was fanciful, of course, but it was also somewhat dark to me. One of the most vivid scenes from the book involved a woman with lots of cats, and one of the reporters drawn to this amazing tableau, this enormous egg, steps on a kitten, crushing it mortally. The woman sweeps the kitten up and breaks its neck and then turns on the reporters in fury. This was very disturbing, but also satisfying - I felt like I was being trusted with far more information than just knowing about a huge egg; I was being informed about the ways of stupid, grasping people.

It took me awhile to google for the name of this book, and googling, kids, wasn’t available in the mid 60’s. While googling, I learned that not only can kids now google, but there are enormous resources for kids who want to read about dinosaurs, and they can get those books at the click of a mouse or a call from their cell phones, with a number from one of their credit cards!

There’s books for kids who want to read about bear detectives trying to find dinosaur bones, and a book about Tom, who “disobeys his mother when she tells him not to play with her new kitchen timer and finds himself transported to a time when dinosaurs are alive.” (And how fortunate for Tom, able to get away from his philistine mother who wouldn’t let him play with a harmless mcguffin. Won’t *she* rethink her fascist tendencies when and if he gets back!)

There’s a book about the Magic School Bus: “On a trip to a dinosaur dig, the Magic School Bus is suddenly back in the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth.” (Our school bus was yellow, picked us up to take us home after everyone else had left an hour before, and was driven by an incredibly disgusting and vile man who smoked incessently while driving, had rotten teeth yellower than the school bus and glared at the kids through the rear-view mirror. No, Mr Chambers had no dinosaur trips for us. And definitely no Magic School Bus.)

In the end I did locate "The Enormous Egg", by Oliver Butterworth.

The reviews are almost uniformly good: One morning, as Nate Twitchell goes to the hen house to collect eggs, he finds one of his chickens sitting on an enormous egg...it’s even bigger than the hen. No one has ever seen anything like this before and Nate is determined to take care of the egg and make sure it hatches. But, taking care of the egg is a big chore. Nate has to turn it often, to keep it warm and watch it carefully. After six weeks it hatches and out comes, not a baby chick, but a baby triceratops. News of the birth of a dinosaur travels fast and soon doctors, scientists and even politicians are coming to town to have a look. As the dinosaur grows larger and larger, some decisions have to be made about where it will live and who will take the best care of it.

There were, I’m sorry to say, a couple of spoilsports. Damned with screaming faint praise in all caps: I REALLY DIDN’T LIKE ALL THE EVOLUTION TALK IN THIS BOOK. I READ THIS BOOK ALOUD TO MY CHILDREN AS A PART OF A DINOSAUR UNIT STUDY. MY 7 YEAR OLD REALLY LIKED THE STORY BUT, MY 4 YEAR OLD NEARLY CRIED EVERY TIME I PICKED UP THIS BOOK TO READ. ...A NICE STORY FOR THE CHILDREN, I HAVE READ WORSE. and from someone who is *very* sensitive: I was forced to read this book in fourth grade, and I still cannot forgive the school board for making me read such a deplorable book. If I wanted to describe how awful this book is, I’d need to speak in Mandarin, and have Harry Browne translate. If you must read this book, read it as quickly as possible, and try to put your life back together.

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Here and there among the reviews was an unexpected discovery, revelations of political indoctrination, that I do not at all remember:

Author Oliver Butterworth has gifted generations with a classic satire on the American economic and political system, peopled by a cast of amusing characters with some really unforgettable names.

In trying to protect his odd pet from a veritable army of hucksters of every stripe who are trying to exploit “Uncle Beazley” for their own ends, Nate Twitchell teaches us a crucial civics lesson on the importance of free speech in a free society.

So there it is, the explanation I always wanted , a gift from a book written in the mid 50’s by a fellow who was probably called before HUAC.

What explanations have you found?