Cartoon Time.

Book Lovers....

Snow (at least for a while)

After much chatter in the media it finally snowed here on Friday. It wasn’t much to write home about – around 3 inches at most – despite snowing (lightly) for over 12 hours. Temperature wise it was just a few degrees above zero (Centigrade/Celsius) with a light breeze so, all in all, not too bad. I checked my local bus company website and everything looked OK so I went to work as expected. When I got there – without a single problem – I found that out of a team of ten I was one of three to make it in. But at least things were rather quiet and I got a lot done.

It doesn’t snow very often here so people do seem to get a bit overexcited when it does. Where I was born/lived most of my life (around 140 miles north as the crow flies) it snowed a LOT more so I’ve pretty hardened to it. In fact I remember when I was at college (doing my A levels – University entrance exams basically – for the third time) walking there in a blizzard and nearly deciding to curl up in the snow whilst the worst of it passed over. Luckily my survival instinct kicked in and I turned around and went home before my brain literally froze in my head. I learned later that around 50 miles south of there was the coldest temperature ever recorded in North Wales up to that point. I can well believe it!

Getting on a bit now I don’t like snow as much as I used to. These days I worry about falling badly on ice and breaking something important. Naturally as a child this was never a consideration and, as children do, I threw myself around in snow with complete abandon. Back in those days too I felt the cold a lot less and cared about being cold even less than that. But there are many things about snow that I still enjoy a great deal. Maybe not so weirdly (as it seems to be shared by a significant number of people I’ve spoken to) I love the sound of walking in snow – that almost compressed truncated crunching sound. It’s hard to describe but I think we all know it when we hear it. Then, of course, is the pleasure in making and throwing snowballs and making snowmen (can you still call them that?). So when I left the house on Friday to first thing I did was to scoop up a handful of snow to test it. It was GOOD snow. You could tell straight away that it had a good consistency. Not too dry and powdery (terrible for snowballs) and not too wet (although wet snow is GREAT for making slushbombs!). I actually envied my boss building a snowman with his little boy and his wife on Friday when he came home from school. The pictures on his phone made me smile a lot.

On my way home – after ignoring for most of the day advice to go home before it got worse -  I noticed what must have been 20-30 snowmen of various styles and sizes on my 30 minute return trip. A lot of people had been having a lot of fun out there. By Saturday it had all started to melt. I avoiding going out because the melting snow had frozen to a glass like consistency over the pavement (that’s sidewalk to my American readers) so I decided that discretion was the better part etc… By Sunday only patches remained and by today only dirty slush hidden in corners would alert you to the fact that we’d had snow at all. The forecast for the rest of the week is mild with regular light rain. So that might have been our first and last bout of snow. You never can quite know though. This is England and the weather here makes up its own rules. I’ve known snow in March and into April. Apparently snow has even been recorded in JUNE but I can’t quite believe that! But we’ll see. Maybe next time I’ll build my own snowman….. 

Cartoon Time.

America colonisation ‘cooled Earth's climate’

By Jonathan Amos, BBC Science Correspondent

31 January 2019

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate. That's the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK. The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation. This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet. It's a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the "Little Ice Age" - a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over. "The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures," Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The team reviewed all the population data it could find on how many people were living in the Americas prior to first contact with Europeans in 1492. It then assessed how the numbers changed in following decades as the continents were ravaged by introduced disease (smallpox, measles, etc), warfare, slavery and societal collapse. It's the UCL group's estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years. The scientists calculated how much land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and what the impact would be if this ground was then repossessed by forest and savannah. The area is in the order of 56 million hectares, close in size to a modern country like France. This scale of regrowth is figured to have drawn down sufficient CO₂ that the concentration of the gas in the atmosphere eventually fell by 7-10ppm (that is 7-10 molecules of CO₂ in every one million molecules in the air). "To put that in the modern context - we basically burn (fossil fuels) and produce about 3ppm per year. So, we're talking a large amount of carbon that's being sucked out of the atmosphere," explained co-author Prof Mark Maslin. "There is a marked cooling around that time (1500s/1600s) which is called the Little Ice Age, and what's interesting is that we can see natural processes giving a little bit of cooling, but actually to get the full cooling - double the natural processes - you have to have this genocide-generated drop in CO₂."

The drop in CO₂ at the time of the Great Dying is evident in the ice core records from Antarctica. Air bubbles trapped in these frozen samples show a fall in their concentration of carbon dioxide. The atomic composition of the gas also suggests strongly that the decline is being driven by land processes somewhere on Earth. In addition, the UCL team says the story fits with the records of charcoal and pollen deposits in the Americas. These show the sort of perturbation expected from a decline in the use of fire to manage land, and a big grow-back of natural vegetation. Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, was not involved in the study. He commented: "Scientists understand that the so-called Little Ice Age was caused by several factors - a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, a series of large volcanic eruptions, changes in land use and a temporary decline in solar activity. This new study demonstrates that the drop in CO₂ is itself partly due the settlement of the Americas and resulting collapse of the indigenous population, allowing regrowth of natural vegetation. It demonstrates that human activities affected the climate well before the industrial revolution began."

[You have to wonder what other human events had an impact on the global climate. Did WW2 affect it for example both with the massive reduction in human population and the CO2 generated by burning cities? Or was the overall effect too small to be noticed? Interesting that the European colonisation of the America’s contributed to the Little Ice Age though. Kind of an ironic payback!]

It's February and that can only mean ONE thing here @ SaLT! That's right - it's Love & Relationships Month. Enjoy!!! 

Just Finished Reading: Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz (FP: 2002)

If there was still any doubt that the process of Globalisation was in trouble it became starkly clear during the Battle of Seattle. Opposition to the seemingly inexorable progress of globalisation – seen by many in the West as an unqualified good – had been growing (inexplicably according to some) for years. Here is was, naked before the world’s cameras, for all to see. But why was such a thing even possible never mind so deep and so widespread? Didn’t the underdeveloped world want to join in the world’s economy to drive wealth generation, along with technological and cultural progress?
Of course the reality of globalisation on the ground hardly ever met the expectations of so many economists and others in the lofty offices inside the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and along Wall Street. The IMF in particular seemed wedded, indeed welded, to what became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’ which included fiscal policy discipline (dealing with deficits), redirection of public spending from any subsidies, market determined interest rates, liberalisation of trade, foreign investment and money markets and radical deregulation to free up market forces. In other words moving, as quickly as possible, from the original economic conditions on ‘first contact’ to as free a market situation as possible. It was very much a one size fits all model and was fully aware of the pain it caused (in the short term) to produce a vibrant western style economy with all the benefits that go with it.

Unfortunately, time and again, in South East Asia, South America and, most obviously, in Russia the application of the Washington Consensus often produced the exact opposite of what was intended with hikes in interest rates, destruction of local businesses, asset stripping by foreign short-term investors, widespread, deep and lasting unemployment, political upheaval and, almost as a side effect a few people becoming increasingly very rich whilst many were pushed ever deeper into lasting poverty. Looked at cynically it almost looked like that was the intention and that the beneficiaries where those lucky enough to be friends of the west in the guise of smart Wall Street investment banks. But this is not an outsider’s story. The author, a Nobel Prize winning economist, was at the heart of things as an advisor to President Clinton and as Chief Economist at the World Bank. This is VERY much an insider’s story.

Much of the book is dedicated to a criticism of the IMF (although the US Treasury and even the World Bank itself comes in for criticism too) which did, at times, become a bit wearing. The author writes well and certainly gets his points across but the impression is definitely of axe grinding with little love lost between him and the IMF in particular. However, even with that taken into consideration (I’m pretty convinced that this almost personal aspect of the book made me DNF it the first time when I tried to read it over a decade ago) this is still an interesting insight into the very top levels of economic planning on a global scale. To get a full appreciation though I’ll need to read more about the subject – both economics and globalisation – in future. Fortunately economics has become a recent topic of interest for me and I have about another 10 books on the subject yet to be read. So much more to come! A reasonable (very) high level view of later 20th century global economics.   

Cartoon Time.

Oh, oh.... Someone's going to GET it!