Pondering Maunder

“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

–Richard Feynman, in "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", lecture at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, (1964)

Global warming denialists got a shot in the arm in the last few weeks, with news that several prognosticators now believe that we are headed for a new Maunder Minimum type event vis-à-vis solar sunspot activity.  The implication, of course, is that rather than facing catastrophic global warming, we are actually headed (by as soon as the year 2030 C.E., no less) towards a repeat of “The Little Ice Age” which lasted from about 1550 C.E. until roughly 1850 C.E.

Solar weather in the news -- Sun spots are theorized to affect climate.

The conservative blogosphere has, to put it simply, gone giddy with these prognostications.  Unfortunately, the conclusion that warming is going to be magically dissipated is misguided at best, and is more likely calamitously, catastrophically wrong.

To explain why, we will attempt to deliver a crash course in space weather, vulcanology, paleometeorology, the bias of  recent observation, and the nature of ice ages.  After that, we will be making tea, and perhaps taking a nap.

First things first, what is this “Maunder Minimum” of which the news feed speaks?

The phenomenon known as a “sun spot” is a well known solar event similar in nature to a large cyclonic weather system on Earth – basically, it’s a big storm system on the surface of the sun.  We say “big” of course, because it is large enough to be spotted through telescopes and solar spectrometers, but compared to the overall surface of the sun, they are actually pretty small, hence “spots”.

The number of sun spots at any given time is a fairly variable data point.  In modern times, the average is between 40,000 – 50,000. 

During the “Maunder Minimum” there were fewer than 50 observed sun spots at any given time.

And since the “Maunder Minimum” occurred in the middle of the “Little Ice Age” there have been numerous climatologists over the last century and a half who have attempted to draw correlations between the two events.

Wouldn't you just love to be able to explain away the dips
and valleys in this chart?  Too bad it's not that easy.

There are several problems with this analysis, of course.  For one thing, the start of the minimum event was roughly 1645 C.E. – almost a centuryafter the onset of the Little Ice Age.  That alone is cause for healthy skepticism regarding claims of strong correlation between solar weather and planetary climate.  There is still some wiggle room for the possibility of the effect of sun spots on global temperatures, but without even diving into the data, it is easy to see that there is not an overwhelming one-to-one relationship.

Moreover, sun spot activity during the Maunder Minimum was only marginally lower than that seen during the Spörer Minimum, which lasted from roughly 1460 until 1550 – the Little Ice Age began when sun spot activity was coming out of a minimum, not when it was going into one.

To make matters more complicated still, observations of historical climate data are strongly dependent on subjective observations more susceptible to error than would be true of more objective measurements – to whit, the fact that in London the River Thames froze over during several winters in the time period in reference certainly sounds convincing… and evidence from ice core samples suggests that on average, winters in Northern Europe were, in fact, somewhat colder during this time period than for most of the Holocene… but these two facts in isolation do not mean much.   The Thames has undergone so much engineering over the last 500 years that there is no comparing the river today to that of the 16^th and 17^thcenturies – the water was slower moving when the “old bridge” was still in place, so it was easier to freeze.  In the 19^th century, it was removed; no more freezes.  And as for those ice cores?  Yes, they demonstrate that winter was colder… but they also show that summers were right at the statistical mean for the Holocene.

In short, if the Maunder Minimum had any impact, it was only felt for half the year.  Summer was just as warm as ever

The "Little Ice Age" was cold... in winter... (recency bias at its best)

during the Little Ice Age.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report of 2001 noted that “…the conventional terms of ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Medieval Warm Period’ appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries… [Viewed] hemispherically, the ‘Little Ice Age’ can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than °1 C relative to late twentieth century levels.”

There is another potential cause for the cooldown observed from 1550 through 1850 which would go a long way toward explaining this strange dichotomy – and which makes much more sense when accounting for all the data points.

In late spring or summer of 1257 C.E., Mt. Rinjani, on Lombok Island in Indonesia,  shook the world with one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the modern record.  To be precise, prior to this explosion, there were twin peaks on the island – Gunung Samalas and Gunung Rinjani.  After the explosion, there was only Rinjani, with a massive caldera.  Gunung Samalas  was spread throughout the upper atmosphere, along with a sizable chunk of Rinjani.  Deposits found in ice cores from the Arctic Circle suggest that the dust cloud from this explosion would have lasted for several years, dimming the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth, and quite probably having not just short-term impacts such as crop failure and changes to precipitation patterns, but also quite likely leading to shifts in long-term cyclic behavior in ocean currents.

Mt. Rinjani during a recent eruption.

Most notably among the ocean currents affected, of course, would be the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic where the warm water of the Gulf Stream travels towards the North Pole, cooling as it travels northward, finally sinking to form North Atlantic Deep Water, which then flows into the various basins of the deep Atlantic, only to upwell in the Southern Ocean to be heated again.  This ocean conveyor belt is the single greatest driver of climate in Western Europe, and as most of modern history has been written by Western Europeans, their natural biases in described weather will be directly related to changes in the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.

The Mt. Rinjani explosion certainly qualified as an event capable of altering the North Atlantic conveyor belt; several other volcanic eruptions during the same time frame were equally likely to have impacted European winters:  Bárðarbunga (Iceland) blew in 1477;  Kuwae in Vanuatu (South Pacific) in 1452-53; Huaynaputina in South America in 1600; Santorini (Greece) in 1650; Grímsvötn (Iceland) in 1783; Mount Tambora (Indonesia) in 1815.  In fact, the Tambora eruption was directly responsible for the 1816 “Year Without a Summer”.

As it turns out, even short term changes to local conditions can have dramatic consequences for New England, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Britain (and, if the change is dramatic enough, the rest of Europe).  The North Atlantic Oscillation is strongly susceptible to either a rise in temperature, which causes excessive ice melt in Greenland, spilling freshwater into the North Atlantic, decreasing the density of the surface water, causing the Gulf Stream to subside (that is, “dive” further south than it ought, basically turning off Great Britain’s natural space heater), or to a decrease in temperature, which forms a denser layer of surface water, which disperses the heat from the Gulf Stream too quickly, achieving the same effect.

The lake that used to be Samalas... Rinjani's twin mountain

Note that in either case, the total amount of heat transmitted to the planet is more or less the same as it had always been, but the effects on local climate are night-and-day different.  In a plot twist worthy of the most cynical of locally oriented climate denialists, there is a fairly good chance that global warming may actually make several countries (including but not limited to Iceland and the U.K., and possibly the New England states in the U.S.) much, much colder in the future.  No certainties on this score, of course, but it is one of the possibilities in play.

Which brings us to the impending solar minimum of the 21^st century.  The causality of impacts on Earth weather from sun spot activity are still theoretical at best, but even accepting for a moment the idea that the Maunder Minimum caused all of whatever cooling happened during the Little Ice Age… the IPCC finding was that the cooling in question amounted to less than 1°C over a three century time frame.

During the Little Ice Age, carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were around 250 parts per million.  During the Industrial Revolution, those numbers rose to the 300s.  The estimated warming for the 21^st century in a “best case scenario” has involved a 350 ppm cap on carbon-dioxide, resulting in a 2°C increase in temperatures.  At best the upcoming minimum event might reduce the rate at which warming is accelerating, and not even by half, at that.

However, we are already well past 350 ppm carbon-dioxide.  We are soon going to be looking at 400 ppm in the rearview mirror.

In short, catastrophic warming is every bit as much on the menu as it was before all this sun spot ice age talk started.  Don’t let propagandists take your mind off of the actual science.

Now then, not to leave y’all on a down note….

For those who prepare, climate change is going to present some incredibly awesome gardening opportunities.  We’ll tell y’all about them some time, but for right now, we have a cup of tea and a hammock calling our names.

Happy farming!

True Grime... er, Grit... Oh, Never Mind. Just Garden!

"Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars."
--Gwendolyn Brooks, 'Song for Winnie'

“If it comes from a plant, eat it.  If it’s made in a plant, don’t.”
--Michael Pollan

The amount of gloom-and-doom available in whatever may be your media of choice is almost limitless.  Likewise, the amount of doom-and-gloom conceivably constructed from one’s own observations of the world around them is limited only by one’s own imagination.

We try to avoid despair and negativity at all costs – not because we don’t want to know about what is wrong with the world, but because we would rather have problems presented to us as challenges instead of as insurmountable obstacles.  We may not be able to solve every global crisis by playing in our garden or spending a meditative morning watching our chickens be the bird-brains they are… but we like to entertain the notion that playing in our garden and musing with our chickens are helpful things, and that pleasant notion is never more at hand than it is with the coming of Spring.

We have begun our full-on assault on the lassitude of Winter in the last couple of weeks, and hope to completely reinvent our garden by the time tender vegetables go in the ground some time in the next couple of weeks (depending on the long-range forecast).  With this in mind, we would like to express our hope that the truth-telling Gwendolyn Brooks speaks about as a goad toward unhealthy self-medication can be somewhat assuaged by growing and eating healthy and tasty plants in our very own backyard.  The news (however acquired) is much less noisesome through this lens, even when it is entirely unpalatable.

As an example, January 2013 is officially the 2nd hottest January in the records dating back to the mid-19th century for the contiguous United States, and ninth highest for the planet as a whole.  Global warming is real, anthropogenic, unavoidable, and increasing.  While petrochemical robber barons choose to bury their heads in the tar-sand, the rest of us (who opt to be honest with ourselves) know that things will never again be the same, and that some of the consequences of this change will be devastating and catastrophic.

However….

On the bright side, “planting season” comes earlier and earlier each Spring.  Of course, we put quotes around this phrase for a reason – every season is time to plant something.  Still, Spring is the time people traditionally think about when discussing the first part of the cycle of life for garden vegetables.  Mention that you have a vegetable garden, and Texans immediately think of tomatoes, peppers, corn and squash.  Even carnivores and junk food addicts recognize these foods as basic staples, with perhaps a smattering of other favorites thrown in (cucumbers, melons, etc.), and know – more or less – that a Texas gardener should start think about putting these plants in the ground some time in March.

What they may not realize, if they do not themselves have their hands in the dirt every year, is that it isn’t really “March” which marks the beginning of the time to plant these crops.  Instead, it is the onset of warmer weather and in particular warmer soil which determines when these tender vegetables should be planted. 

There are various tables and charts available if you do enough research showing the warmth the soil needs to reach before certain crops can go out safely, and depending on what you want to plant you may wish to google this information.  It will certainly be more accurate than relying on the “When to plant” chart on the back of most commercially available seed packets. 

We have seen suggestions, as a “fer instance,” that Spinach ought to be planted in April in Texas, and we wonder what planet the seed company executive who signed off on that ridiculous suggestion might have been living on… We suppose if you want to harvest precooked spinach in May and June, you could plant it in April…  but for most of Texas, spinach is a Fall and Winter crop, which is harvested from November through April.  If it comes from Texas anywhere from May through October, you can be sure it was grown in an air-conditioned greenhouse.

Be that as it may, even when the timetable oriented charts are relatively accurate (meaning the actual temperature requirements of the plants really do coincide with the suggested planting dates), the dates are getting earlier and earlier.  Some plants have higher success rates than others outside of their comfort zones, and can be planted at earlier dates than other plants sharing the same optimal range – as a consequence, things like cucumbers and some kinds of squash can survive at slightly lower temperatures than other tender veggies like maize or nightshades, or even hot weather herbs like basil or lavender. 

And the only way to know for sure what category things really fall in is to experiment, which we at Myrtle’s place are far more than happy to do.

We have discovered, for example, that amaranth (one of our favorite all time crops) will not thrive unless the soil is at least 70° when the seed sprouts.  As it turns out, in the Brazos Valley, that can happen as early as the middle of March, or as late as the middle of April.  We have also discovered, much to our pleasure, that if we put the seed out in early March, most of it won’t actually sprout until nighttime air temperatures are in the low 60°s… and looking at the long-range forecast this February, we have decided we can go ahead and seed our amaranth beds now. 

We have better-than-even odds of not having any more freezing weather, and better-than-even odds of having soil temperatures in the 70°s as soon as mid-March, a full month earlier than the suggestions in planting guides written back in the dawn of time by experts who thought the climate was less variable.

This means there’s nothing wrong with pushing up the planting dates for a whole host of different veggies – cucumbers, summer squash, amaranth, etc.  One doesn’t usually find these crops going in alongside things like leeks, onions, garlic, spinach or broccoli, but that is exactly what is happening this year, and is likely to happen on a more regular basis as the years go by and the planet heats up.

We don’t pretend that putting in raised beds for our vegetables to give us more control over drainage and soil temperature, and planting crops earlier and earlier each year thanks to warmer soil and air, and a host of other adaptations we are making in our garden to environmental changes we observe through the cycle of each season, are in any way “solutions” to the crises presented by global climate change.

What we are suggesting, however, is that our individual adaptations can and should be part of a global chain of cumulative adaptations, none of them individually making much of a splash, but all of them together making a tidal wave of evolutionary change in the fate of our species (and hopefully the fate of some of our fellow species, as well).

Ultimately, this approach is simply an equal and opposite reaction to the initial chain of unhealthy actions which got us into this mess in the first place.

The heating up of the global climate, after all, is not due to a few isolated decisions made in the course of human history – or even just a few decisions made since the onset of the industrial revolution.  Reading the daily headlines it would be easy to demonize the petrochemical industry and the internal combustion engine, for example, since those are the two greatest contributors to greenhouse emissions over the past 150 years.  But the story actually goes back much further than that.

The Anthropocene (the geologic era demarcated by the time when human inhabitants of planet Earth first started changing our climate) is generally granted to have started at the end of the last great glacial ice age, some 10,000 years ago.  Truth be told, the invention of agriculture, which began shortly after the ice retreated, was in and of itself humanity’s most invasive and consequential attack on the natural world; Gaia has been on the ropes ever since we first started tilling the ground.

Learning to be more gentle and cooperative in our attempts to coax nutrition from the soil is the choice we need to now make, one backyard, porch, windowsill and vacant lot at a time.  We will undoubtedly assault the agribusiness paradigm more fully in the future, dear reader, as we believe the large scale farm to be the cause of hunger and malnutrition throughout the world, not a potential cure for those maladies, but for now we wish to extol the local virtue, not the global vice. 

No one individual family in Bryan/College Station, Texas, nor in Macon, Georgia, nor in Baden-Baden, Germany, nor in the Faroe Islands or in Sri Lanka, can by themselves reverse the harm we have done to the environment over the last ten millennia, but then, we can’t collectively solve our global problems without the contributions of each of those individual families, either.

Only by each of us as individuals deciding to take care of that part of the environment within reach of our own arms can we collectively hope to one day say “Insurmountable problem – mounted!”  As such, we invite all those who find themselves overwhelmed by stories about rising oceans, and dropping water tables, and e-coli infestations on the produce in markets worldwide, and all the other ills inundating our senses every day, to turn off the television, step away from the computer, put the cellphone on idle, and go get dirty.  Put your hands in the soil, smell it, sift it, get to know it.  Listen to and watch all the critters, whether no-, two-, four-, six- or eight-legged who call it home.  Do your own experiments.

And, a little less stressed and a little more hopeful, eat the results.

Happy farming!

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Frying Pan

"Be prepared to appreciate what you meet."
--Fremen proverb, Frank Herbert's 'Dune'

With very little fanfare last November, the International Energy Agency announced that by their calculations (which we at Myrtle’s place believe are conservative by an order of magnitude), the point of no return for avoiding a 2° Celcius increase in average global temperatures is coming in the next five years -- that we are on a collision course with having over 420 parts per million of the atmosphere, at all levels, comprised of carbon dioxide, and that due to qualities of persistence, at that point there will be nothing we can do to stop a host of negative consequences:

• Melting of all arctic sea ice every summer and possibly not completely freezing over in winter, either
• Sea level increases sufficient to swamp low-lying islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but also negatively affecting to one degree or another numerous low-lying cities in the developed world, including New York City; New Orleans; Houston; Miami, and on and on
• Persistent drought from which places like the American Southwest, and the central plains (particularly those areas fed by aquifers like the Ogallala) cannot recover, in any way
• Extreme events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, on a more regular basis and with more intensity when they do occur
• Shorter growing seasons in many locations due to extreme heat, particularly high nighttime low temperatures which thwart set of many different types of fruit and vegetable crops
• Reduced chilling hours required by many varieties of stone fruit and other plants requiring vernalization
• Extinction of many plants with narrow temperature tolerances… examples include coffee and chocolate trees
• Shortages of water not just in drought-prone areas, but also in coastal areas where rising sea levels also mean a rise in the salinity of the water table

We could go on, but, really, do you want us to?

While we are astonished on a regular basis that there are still folk out there too dense to pay attention to what is happening, the fact is, it really is too late to bother with trying to convince people about the danger of our addiction to fossil fuels – we can no longer prevent global warming, nor can we mitigate it all that effectively, either.

No, what we are left with is learning to adapt.

Fortunately, coming from a long line of Celtic forebears on both sides of our family tree, Myrtle Maintenance Personnel are that wonderful combination of foolhardy, optimistic, and stubborn.  We feel quite ready for the challenge, and on some twisted level, we are even looking forward to it.

So, what, exactly is the challenge, and why do we feel optimistic while going into it?

In a nutshell, the challenge is to adapt to a world in which the difficulty of several elements which we currently take for granted will constitute the rule and measure of personal and social success – and to globalize from that level, the success of our whole species.

What do we take for granted now that we will soon no longer be able to take for granted?

·    Availability of nutritious food
·    Availability of clean potable water
·    Ability to keep cool in summer and warm in winter
·    Ability to get from here to there in a reasonably affordable manner

Those are challenges enough to be going on.  There will be others, of course, related to the shifting of societies and economies northward, and away from our current form of resource consumption towards something new, but we’re thinking here on a micro level, the level of homeowners and families struggling to survive, rather than on the macro level of urban planners figuring out how to provide livable spaces for millions of people at once.

So… what are we prepared to do about these challenges?

Availability of nutritious food

This is probably the easiest challenge posed by climate change for most people in the developed world.  There are exceptions, of course, based on local variables, but in general it is possible to grow enough food for the typical family of four on as little as a quarter acre of ground.  In some places, even less space than that would be sufficient.

In addition to the typical vegetable and herb garden, use of spaces currently taken up by purely aesthetic plants or knick-knacks can be replaced by productive plants – citrus instead of decorative ficus on a porch or in an alcove; rather than a hanging pot of bouganvillia, a hanging industrial pickle bucket with holes cut in the side for tomatoes, peppers or cucumbers to descend; or (one of our favorites, popular in many African cities) a burlap sack with holes in the side for potato plants to poke out.  In short, on just the typical balcony, or in the typical urban window, there is enough light and moisture to grow a much larger percentage of the typical diet than is generally appreciated.

A relatively small chicken coop with a relatively small run (say, six feet by six feet) would give three or four hens far more space than their factory farmed compatriots ever dream of getting; three or four hens could supply the entire protein needs of a family of four without even counting in however much protein they might acquire from vegetable sources (which, frankly, typically exceeds the protein needs of practically anyone practically anywhere – protein deficiency is a vastly exaggerated nutritional problem).

And dwarf varieties of goat need less space than many of the dogs currently occupying so much space in our currently underutilized backyards.  We don’t know about you, but we’d much rather milk a goat than a dog.

In short, the availability of nutritious food will only be a problem for those who simply refuse to take advantage of their opportunities.

Availability of clean potable water

Water fit for human consumption may well be the greatest challenge faced by humanity in the coming decades.  Already, vast numbers of people in the developing world live without sanitary sources of water for drinking, cleaning and cooking.  The single greatest inducement for migration in the coming century of climate change will be the search for water.

In the developed world, we have come to take clean water coming out of our faucets so much for granted that it is difficult for many folk to fathom the possibility that even here, clean water is not a given.  However, the cold, hard facts are these:  many areas are served by water pumped from sources which cannot indefinitely support the demands currently placed upon them, let alone the increased demands which will be placed upon them by the joint pressures of increasing temperatures and increasing populations.

The two primary examples are the desert Southwest and the central plains served by the Ogallala aquifer – Nevada, Utah, Arizona and California all draw water from rivers and reservoirs which are shrinking even in wet years, and those years are becoming fewer and further between.  Northern Texas up through the Dakotas are served by pumps tapping into an aquifer which is only very very slowly refilled by rainfall, which is increasingly rare for the region.  When these sources are no longer available, these regions have no other sources to which they may turn.

Even areas with plentiful moisture, however, are not immune to the effects of climate change.  New York City, as one example, is served by sources of fresh water which are not likely to dry up any time in the next several tens of thousands of years – unfortunately, though, those sources are likely to be increasingly tainted and less and less fit for human consumption.  The entire Hudson River valley is slowly but surely increasing in salinity because even small changes in sea level create drastic changes in the chemistry of the water table, often tens or even hundreds of miles inland.  Houston, New Orleans, and many other Gulf Coast communities are also subject to this phenomenon.

So what can we do about this problem?

For one thing, collect rainwater.  The runoff from a ½” rainfall event on a 1,000 square foot roof (smaller than most American homes) will easily fill a 100 gallon tank.  Even in a relatively dry location such as West Texas, where rainfall is often in the 10” per year range, that means that the typical family (living in a 1500 square foot home) should be able to collect somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 gallons of rainwater to supplement whatever other sources are available (well or river water, most likely).

Bathing requirements might have to change, but not radically; most water usage would not need to change much, if at all.  Obviously, xeriscaping would be preferred to the planting of lawns in such a scheme… but that is true already, given how expensive lawn maintenance can be in areas where rates for city water supplies are high due to laws of supply and demand.  Industrial use of fresh water will have to be radically altered – cooling stations, for example, need to be re-engineered to make use of briny waters unfit for human or animal consumption (this is a difficult task, but not an impossible one, once the necessity for change forces us as a society to think seriously about it).

In places where rainfall is more hospitably reliable, rainwater can easily supply all needs potable and otherwise.  It is easier to filter or distill water for one family than it is to do so for an entire city; as a consequence, it just makes more sense to collect water from as local a source as possible – and nothing is more local than one’s home – and treat it there.  The salinity of the water table therefore ceases to be an issue.

Some places, of course, will still be impacted beyond help, but as most people do not live in Yemen, Turkmenistan or rural Arizona, we will have to merely sympathize from a distance and wait for those folk to migrate to relatively wetter climates.

Ability to keep cool in summer and warm in winter

In the Brazos Valley, we really don’t have too much to worry about in terms of keeping warm in winter – all three days of our typical winter are perfectly comfortable, provided one stays out of the wind.

Keeping cool in summer, though, is another matter altogether.

We have written before about the wisdom of painting one’s roof white as a means of reflecting heat-generating sunlight in summer.  Obviously sufficiently insulating one’s attic is another necessary bit of home maintenance in preparing for the brutally hot summers we will be facing in the decades to come.  Other forms of weatherization for both cold and hot weather should be looked into as well, such as adding good weather stripping to doors and windows, and replacing merely decorative curtains with more functional tapestries which keep heat inside in winter, and reflect heat back outside in summer.

Landscaping, too, can assist in temperature control – if you don’t have tall shade trees on the western exposure of your home, it’s a good idea to look into planting shade trees or a tall arbor of some kind on that side of the house.  A tall trellis, or even vines grown directly on a brick wall are exceptional heat barriers; the green leaves of an English Ivy, or of any variety of grape, or of a half-dozen other decorative or fruiting vine, can reduce the temperature in western-facing rooms by as much as 10-15° Fahrenheit.

Additionally, two different though related considerations of economy must be evaluated when planning for future cooling technologies.  We will likely see (and soon, at that) increasing stretches of consecutive 100°-plus days; it is simply not tenable for the very young, very old, sick, or disabled to survive in this sort of climate without some means of staying cool and hydrated; air-conditioning is the single most effective means of surviving extreme heat.  However, air-conditioning is likely to become increasingly expensive both in terms of personal economy and also in terms of ecological impact.

Both of these factors need to be resolved as we embark upon our future in the age of global warming.

The biggest cost savings are likely to come from changing our sources of electricity from our current emphasis on burning fossil fuels to wind, solar and geothermal sources of energy.  In particular, home cooling systems dependent upon geothermal energy are already increasing in popularity, and improvements to the technology mean that soon, over the lifetime of the components of the system are likely to be much less expensive than conventionally powered air conditioning systems.

Solar powered A/C units are also increasing in popularity, particularly because these units allow a homeowner to maintain most of their current electrical infrastructure, only changing out an isolated portion of their home grid (albeit the most expensive part!), thus avoiding complicated power load calculations.

For those whose homes are not so large (increasingly another good idea, by the way, since smaller homes are easier and cheaper to heat in winter and cool in summer), it might be possible to shut off a few rooms during the day, and only cool one or two rooms with either a window unit or a standalone A/C unit.  Many mainstream architects scoff at the notion… but that is because their frame of reference is the mainstream American desire for a large home.  One of the biggest benefits of the “microhome” revolution is not just that folk with tiny houses can take advantage of the best interior design ideas available at IKEA; it is that for just a tiny fraction of the cost of a central heating system, they can cool their entire houses with just a $100 window unit. 

It is entirely conceivable that a small home-built solar array smaller than the roof of a typical carport could be used to provide all the power necessary for such a small-scale A/C system, which means not only would all the comfort of 20th century American decadence still be available, but at an almost microscopic percentage of the historical cost of such comfort.

One thing is certain, however:  such comfort cannot be maintained with the status quo.  A 2,000 square foot home will no longer be within the purview of the average family’s budget simply because few will be able to afford to cool such a home in summer the way they have always been used to doing.

We at Myrtle’s place do not believe this is a bad thing.  It’s time to simplify anyway; this is just one more excuse to do so.  And, frankly, our European and Asian guests have always expressed quiet amusement that we describe our own 900 square foot home as “small”… because by comparison with what they are used to seeing, well, it might not be as gaudy as most American homes… but it’s still pretty big.

Ability to get from here to there in a reasonably affordable manner

One of the more amusing internet memes we have seen recently was a quote attributed only to “the Mayor of Bogota”; which mayor, we can only guess, but even if it was made up by some guy in Peoria, it’s still a pretty good slogan:  “A developed nation is not one in which the poor have cars; it is one in which the wealthy take public transportation.”

Barring the sudden onset of wisdom necessary for an immediate decision to build useful infrastructure, however, we foresee the need to rely on other trends to bring American transportation habits into line with future needs.  For several years now, the trend has been for the typical American driver to put fewer and fewer annual miles on their vehicles.

As petrochemical scarcity becomes a problem over the course of the next few decades, this trend is likely to continue, even with the advent of alternative fuel vehicles.  The dirty little secret of electric, hydrogen fuel cell, and liquefied natural gas vehicles is that even if the fuel is not petroleum, the components used in construction of the vehicle still require a lot of natural resources which are either scarce in and of themselves, or which require the use of increasingly scarce fuel sources in their acquisition.

There are several strategies to mitigating the high cost of getting from here to there, though, so we are not particularly worried about the fact that these costs will likely only continue to rise.  First and foremost… stop going from here to there.  A disturbingly large percentage of the travel we are currently addicted to undertaking is simply frivolous.  There is no reason other than vanity to buy a home thirty or forty miles away from our workplaces.  There is no reason other than vanity to vacation a thousand miles away from home.

Likewise, there is no reason to transport goods halfway around the world when they can be produced either at home, or only a few miles away from home.  We have already addressed the notion that self-sustenance vis-à-vis food security is a simple undertaking; in addition to providing  a source of fresh and healthy food, however, growing our own fruits and vegetables would go a long way to reducing transportation costs.  Currently, the average item of produce travels more than 1,000 miles from the farmer’s land to our kitchen table.  Little wonder, then, that the resources involved are the object of high demand, driving prices ever higher as the supply dwindles.

These costs, though, go away if we listen to the Buddhist maxim:  “Don’t just do something… Sit there!”

Cautiously optimistic for most folk

There are accidents of birth and station which are simply unfair, and have always been so; global warming will make the unfairness of the rich-poor divide even worse.  There is no sugar coating the fact that untold scores of people will suffer, and often die, as a direct result of the thoughtless consumption ethic which has dominated the industrialized world – indeed, predating industrialization, though only reaching its current nightmarish peak with the advent of centralized wealth which came on the heels of capitalism – and there is no escaping the negative consequences of the reckless behavior of our forebears, not to mention ourselves.

However, all is not doom and gloom.  The original strengths of our species are still with us – hominids were never the biggest, nor the strongest, nor the swiftest.  We have almost always been the most adaptable species on the block, however, and we will soon be facing a new test of that adaptability.

One would hope that learning from our mistakes would be one of the adaptations we adopt in the near future; necessity is sometimes a cruel teacher, but we at Myrtle’s place are hopeful that her lessons will be taken to heart.  We believe it is likely that most people around the globe will have the opportunity – and hopefully the wisdom – to move away from our historically destructive disregard of the world around us.

Now then… if you’ll excuse us, we’re going back outside.  It’s almost Spring planting time.

Happy farming!

Hot Times, Winter in the City....

"Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day."
--Anton Chekhov, 'Uncle Vanya' (1897)

For the better part of two months, ever since in late November/early December 2012 it was announced with great fanfare by the National Climatic Data Center that 2012 was officially the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States, right-wing conspiracy nuts went to great lengths to say “See?  It’s a hoax!  They talk about global warming, and then only produce local data!”

Well, brace yourselves.  Yes, the unexpected has happened.  The global data has been released, and sure enough, 2012 was not the warmest year on record for the entire Earth.  It was only the 10th warmest.  Aren’t we all feeling relieved now?

Snark intended.

Alarmingly, in addition to being a top 10 year for warm temperatures, 2012 was the warmest “La Niña year” on record.  Usually, La Niña cools global temperatures slightly, which suggests that if it were not for sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific Ocean, last year would have been even more of a scorcher than it already was.

Other highlights from the NCDC report:

• 2012 was the 36th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average.  “The last below-average annual temperature was 1976.”
• Most of North and South America, most of Europe and Africa, western, southern, and far northeastern Asia all experienced above average temperatures; Alaska, far western Canada, central Asia, and a few island nations experienced cooler than average temperatures.
• Ice melt in the Arctic was not only record breaking, it was record shattering; peak ice melt is usually measured in late September, but the record was broken by the 3rd week of August.
• The global annual average temperature was 0.90°C (1.62°F) above the 20th century average.  Contiguous U.S. temperatures were 1.0°C (1.8°F) above the long-term average, and we beat the old record for hottest year (1998) by 0.6°C (1.0°F).
• While precipitation averages were almost exactly statistically normal… extremes were more common, with some parts of the world experiencing extreme drought, and others experiencing record flooding.

The upshot, of course, is that global warming is real, and continuing.  Denialists will continue to spout nonsense every time a scientific survey is released, but we ought not to allow the background noise to drown out the cold (hot?) hard truth.

Meanwhile, there are numerous means of adapting to the warmer, more turbulent era upon which we are embarking, and this weekend we will elucidate on some of the reasons to be optimistic in the face of climate change.

Seriously, there are some reasons.  Unless you are from Vanuatu or Bangladesh, in which case, sorry, you’re fighting a losing battle, and will undoubtedly have to migrate soon.  Most of the world, though, can make some lifestyle changes, and live comfortable, productive, and even happy lives in the hot new world.

More on that later.  Anton Chekhov was not alone over a hundred years ago in seeing the danger of human disregard for the environment; unlike Russian novelists, though, it is our job to paint a picture of a more hopeful world, even if the facts are bleak.  We accept that challenge.  We’ll explain how after we finish our weekend chores.

Happy farming!

On Depth and Deepness

We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.
--Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

We recently read a game-changing work by paleoclimatologist Curt Stager, entitled Deep Future:  The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, and its implications have somewhat staggered us.  Stager asks that mainstream thinkers move beyond the question of global warming to consider “then what”?  This is a natural concept for someone whose daily fare involves the study of geological time – not days or weeks, or even years or decades, but minimally centuries and milennia.

Why, then, if we wish to discuss one book, do we start with a quotation from a different book, nay even a totally different author?  Simple, really.  Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy forms the intellectual backdrop against which the depth of Deep Future may be plumbed.

Progressives, Liberals, Hippie Freaks, and other post-modern intellectual types append the word “deep” to practically any form of endeavor in which they wish to express the notion that even after all the measurements have been taken, and all the facts have been explained, there’s still something else going on. 

This is the ineffable je ne sais quoi of every pseudointellectual charlatan of the last two hundred years, and yet the concept lingers.  Why?

We would contend that this notion, the idea that the truth is something other than what you happen to be seeing, or hearing, or touching, or tasting at any particular moment, has such staying power because ideas which tend towards preference for empiricism and inductive reasoning have every bit as much susceptibility to the bias of invalid predicates as do the a priori prejudices of religion – which is to say, garbage in, garbage out, and the more sophisticated your input mechanism, the more sophisticated your garbage.

Basically, ecological economists like McKibben get into arguments with environmental economists, and on the basis of rational scientific evidentiary inquiry, the environmental economists (who have much better math skills) are right practically every time.  The ecological economists, though, get invited to better parties, because they have a more robust message to spread, having moved beyond simple measurement of sensory data as is expected of an impartial observer – the role science has always claimed for itself – into the more contentious role of social activist – a role the environmental economists claim is inappropriate for anyone involved in the exercise of “science”, not because activism is wrong (the environmental economists are almost universally also politically active in advocacy of a wide range of issues), but because activism is not a form of inquiry.  The activities, they say, ought by nature to be separate.

The ecological economists, though, counter that the very act of deciding what to measure is a form of activism, and that the environmental economists, even those who vote for radical political candidates and petition for radical direct-democratic causes, are actively supporting status quo economic and political structures through their adherance to status quo scientific methodology.

Fascinating stuff, really, if you’re sufficiently geeky for it.

And this is where Stager’s Deep Future comes into play.  Stager is not the first person to use the word “anthropocene” but he is the first to introduce us at Myrtle’s place to the idea.  We are living in the first geological epoch which is not merely marked by the presence of a particular species, but is defined by that species.  Everything about our world is changing, and it is changing because we have changed it. 

Most paleoclimatologists tend to mark the beginning of the anthropocene, the Age of Humans, with the invention of the steam engine in the 17th century, but there are those who argue that many thousands of years before that, when humans were still hunting and gathering, we wiped out large mammals, and chopped down forests, and began belching excess carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere in quantities larger than the ecosphere could reabsorb.  Much if not all of the holocene, they argue, should actually be subsumed by the anthropocene.

And when what you are studying is the impact of everything done by humans upon everything surrounding humans, dividing what you are studying from what you intend to do about it becomes a blurrier proposition.

 This is the point at which we become less sympathetic to those who insist upon scientific and academic integrity and more sympathetic to those who argue for redefining the very field of inquiry from economic growth to something less tangible – economic satisfaction. 

Stager, of course, ignores economics altogether, because his field is climate, and he does a remarkable job of explaining the various scenarios in which global warming will eventually peak (in as little as a few centuries, or as many as 50,000 years), and will be replaced by a time of global cooling, as all fossil fuel is already spent, and all the excess carbon is eventually subsumed in the oceans, and things “return to normal” at some far future time.  He then turns to a discussion of the various scenarios of necessary cultural adaptations to the changing climate, and the sorts of communities that are likely to thrive, and those that are likely to suffer.  The time frames?  Far longer than most contemporary climate writers have bothered to speak about.

But when Stager speaks of the conditions to be faced by future civilizations, it gives us pause to think about posterity in entirely different ways.  We are all used to the platitudes of politicians who speak of leaving a legacy for our descendants, a world in which our children and grandchildren have at least as much opportunity for success and happiness as we have enjoyed, and these platitudes have replaced much of our serious ethical thinking, because they are easier than would be a studied analysis of what we are actually passing on.

We are used to the notion that we can grow out of any crisis, that by the time one resource is depleted, technology will have found its replacement.  This notion is a prima facie lie, but we have continued to believe in it since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution because it is a comfortable fiction.

We can’t grow forever, nor should we want to.  The ecological, physical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual costs are simply too high.  The scars on our planet and on ourselves are too obvious for all but the most hardened to ignore for too much longer.  Growth has not made the masses happy even where growth has been the most impressive.  Growth has definitely not made the masses happy in those places where resource exploitation has been the greatest.

As it turns out, the legacy we ought to be passing down, if we are to reclaim any kind of life worth living in future years, addresses both the needs of “deep economy” and of “deep ecology”.  Learning to live sustainably has the potential to soothe our tattered nerves, and to level off our abuse of our planet and our neighbors.  Living, and buying, and eating, and entertaining on a local scale will do more for our personal happiness than any amount of growth could, and will do far less harm to the world around us.

These are things we all know intuitively, if only we allow ourselves to listen to that quiet voice in the back of our heads that says, “Yes, this is pleasant.”  There is a concept in Sweden that the Swedes insist has no valid translation in English – “Lagom”.  We at Myrtle’s think we know an idiom from the American South that is a fairly close approximation:  “Plenty good.”  And we say plenty good is good enough. 

Plenty good is as deep as depth ought to get.

Thanksgiving in Texas... Climate is Changing and So are We

Vernalization, stratification, weatherization, whatever you want to call it, the concept is one we hadn’t really bothered ourselves with much until this fall at Myrtle’s.

However, several events have conspired to make us pay even as much attention to climate as we do to weather.  This is a subtle distinction, but one which will become increasingly more important as as climate change takes fuller hold over the course of the next several decades.

The Brazos Valley is not quite in the wettest region of Texas, roughly defined as the greater Houston area eastward.  We joke in our family that if there is a 40% chance of rain, “Sure hope they enjoy it over in Huntsville.”  Houston gets over 50 inches of rain a year; College Station gets just under 30 inches a year, for now.  This makes us wetter than most of the state, even if not quite putting us in the rice-growing marshes of the eastern sliver of Texas.

We are likely to get less rain in coming years, though.  A wide variety of climate change models suggest that we will increasingly look less like a sub-tropical climate, and more and more like a semi-arid climate, with some suggesting that in as few as ten years, we may see our precipitation averages drop by 1/3rd.  That would mean that instead of getting around 30 inches per year, we will likely get roughly 20 inches per year.

Our normal precipitation pattern is changing, too.  Not only will rain be less abundant in the Brazos Valley, it will also come at different times.  Normally, we have a wet season in May and June, followed by a dry summer, with mild fall and winter months.  In future years, however, winter will be our wettest time of year; May and June will only see significant rain when we get moisture from tropical storms.

And then there will be fluctuations such as those caused by El Niño and La Niña.  This year is a strong La Niña year, so our fall and winter are proving to be excessively dry.  In fact, some models show that tropical moisture during El Niño years will be so prevalent that we may actually on average get more rain, even as soil moisture disappears during our rain-free months – we’ll be both wetter and drier, like some sort of crazy climatic performance art piece.

So what does this have to do with seeds, and planting, and Myrtle’s place?

As it turns out, quite a lot. 

We have spoken before of our strong preference for collecting rainwater; we have spent the last several months working on our collection system.  Roughly 80% of the rain running off our roof will now be collected – first, into two 50 gallon barrels, and next, after the barrels are full, into our fish pond.  These preparations are vital – the fact that our pond is currently sitting dry really stands as the only evidence you need that we just don’t get enough rain here to grow crops without supplemental watering.  We are now prepared to do supplemental watering without relying on the city’s untrustworthy water.

There are other elements of our little experiment in self-sufficiency which are also heavily affected by climate change.  Not only how we are watering, but what we are watering.  Traditionally, the Brazos Valley has two basic growing seasons, spring and fall.  There are winter gardens with greens, but typically very few local gardeners even bother with these tender plants – usually broccoli, kale, spinach and maybe radishes or potatoes, but very little else.  No, for the most part, gardens in Bryan/College Station run from March through June, and August/September through November.

However, while the July/August heat will continue to make that the one time of year when nothing gets planted, and what little is still growing must be tended very carefully to keep it alive, the rest of the year is changing ever so slightly to make our climate a year-round growing season.  The traditional spring and fall veggies won’t change – corn, squash, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, peppers – these are timeless and are likely to be grown here as long as there are people with garden hoes to grow them.

But there is now more than ever a need to diversify, and our changing climate has provided not only a greater need, but also a greater opportunity.  We have spoken before of our desire to branch out into grains.  We started our experiment in grains this fall, with a small planting of quinoa.  While our planting was somewhat small (only about fifty seeds total), our crop will prove even smaller, as only a handful of the seeds actually germinated.

Concerned that perhaps we overestimated the ability of this crop from the colder climates and higher elveations of the Andes mountains to thrive in the still-subtropical Brazos Valley, we did a little research.  What we discovered made us slap our heads in self-accusation, yet also gave us tremendous hope.

As it turns out, in Colorado, several farmers have been experimenting with quinoa for years.  This makes a lot of sense, as they are farming in a mountainous region with much more in common climatologically to the Andes than our own garden can boast.  The planting season in Colorado starts in late May, when the ground has warmed enough, with a harvest in September and October, just before the freezing precipitation begins.

The limiting factor which has prevented quinoa from becoming a major cash crop for this region is the fact that sometimes the summer heat is too much.  When the temperature is in the 80s or 90s for an extended period of time, the quinoa doesn’t go to seed – the heat stress doesn’t always kill the plant, but for all practical purposes, at that point it is not a grain crop any more, it is a greens crop, and in a nation of carnivores, that really isn’t a great sales pitch.

However, several elements of this story stand out to us as hopeful – first, we need a stronger period of vernalization.  We planted our quinoa in late september, when ambient temperatures were still in the mid 80s in the Brazos Valley, and goodness only knows how hot the ground still was.  Next fall, we will wait until early October, and we will have had our seeds in the refrigerator for a week before we put them in the ground.

Second, we are hopeful that our growing season for quinoa may be, in most years, a full six months long – from October to March, there is a risk of temperatures above 90 degrees, but in most years, it will not happen.  Thus, we can stagger planting from October through December, and guarantee ourselves that in most years, we will get grain from our quinoa.  There is also a slight risk of killing frost early in the season, but not much.  Once it gets to flowering – typically somewhere between 45-60 days – quinoa will survive temperatures into the low 20s, which are already extremely rare in the Brazos Valley, and are becoming even more rare as each year passes.

This means that we will be able to rotate several of our newfound favorite crops from a variety of places of origin in such way that we will always – spring, summer, autumn, winter – have a green, a legume, or a grain, and in many cases a combination of the three, growing in one patch or another.  Amaranth will sometimes have delayed germination if the ground has not sufficiently warmed, but even so, a staggered planting from March through May will overlap nicely with the staggered quinoa plantings.  Interspersing velvet beans, cow peas, and maize in these plots will give us a colorful and tasty year round edible landscape.

The coming era of permanent drought in the greater part of the State of Texas will cause hardship for many, and will lead to social and economic unheaval unprecedented in this part of the country, but it needn’t be the end of the story for us.  The time to adapt is upon us.  Ironically, as winter warms up, it is the time of year we need to start leaning on.  We have some heretofore unavailable opportunities coming our way.  Quinoa is just the tip of the iceberg.

When approached calmly and rationally, the problems presented by climate change on a microeconomic level do not represent any particularly terrifying difficulties – finding climates which currently have limits roughly approximating those projected to be likely in the future gives a pretty good indicator of what needs to be done. 

In future years, the Brazos Valley will get roughly the same amount of rain as is experienced in a good portion of southwest Texas today, on a line from roughly Kerrville to Uvalde.  This is excellent territory in which to raise crops only slightly different from what we currently grow. 

Rio Grande peaches have low chilling requirements and thrive with hot and dry summers.  Pomegranates produce exceptionally sweet fruit under these circumstances.  Blackberries and plums also excel in this semi-arid climate.  One particular species of wild black cherry does exceptionally well in this region, even thriving southward into the arid reaches of northern Mexico.  The most prolific olive orchard in Texas sits in the middle of this region.  Corn and okra are ubiquitous here; imported grains like amaranth and millet could (and if we have anything to say about it, will) grow like weeds in our new climate.  And in our mild, wet winters, we will be growing short-day cool weather vegetables that elsewhere only grow at altitude on the shaded slopes of mountainsides in summer.

If the world is going to evolve as a result of humanity’s collective bad behavior, it is only right that our behavior and culture, including agriculture, should evolve right back.  This means things like making the kinds of good friends who will help you replace a burned out stove at a moments notice (thank you Browns!) to collecting all the rainwater that falls on your little tin roof, to planting crops you've never heard of before if that's all that will grow in your new climate.  This ain’t your grandaddy’s farm.  With a little forethought, though, and a for us, a newfound attention to winter gardening, it could belong to our grandchildren.  As long as we can still work a garden hoe, we can adapt... for which we give thanks.

Happy farming!