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!

Be Sensible, Not Common

“Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat.”

-Stuart Chase

Any time a politician tells you something is “just common sense” it’s time to lock up your daughters and hide the chickens, because the drivel that is about to follow will invariably place your personal safety at risk in a multiplicity of ways, from your economic welfare to your very physical wellbeing.

What part of this is "Common Sense" and what part requires someone
 to have made an observation not readily seen from the road?

The world is a complex place, home to myriad interlocking processes about which our five senses (six, if you foolishly include the “common” one) provide almost no direct information.  We seek simplicity, “straight talking” and “unmuddled answers” but the truth is that any simple answers are based on fable, and “straight talking” hardly ever has any evidentiary basis.  As for “unmuddled answers” the reality is this – honest answers to most questions seldom accomplish anything more concrete and settled than yet more questions.

E.M. Forster once quipped “beware of muddle” and, while he is one of our favorite authors, the fact remains that his advice is worthless outside the context of personal relationships, and even then relates only to the question of personal commitment.  In terms of certainty of knowledge?  Embrace muddle – it is the only refuge of truth.  Yes, we should rather betray our country than our friends… but we cannot say that we know with certainty anything for which there is not a verifiable testing framework, a way to validate the hypothesis.  When those hypotheses have been tested, however, for God’s sake, don’t ignore the results.

We are wading into these philosophical waters for a particular reason, naturally, and that is to attempt to bridge the gap between “common sensers” (climate change denialists, lawn care specialists, monocropping agriculturalists, etc.) and cold hard truth.

Merely presenting evidence frequently makes no impact upon the opinion of those who cling to the notion that truth should be “plain and simple”; the claims, for example, that global warming is a hoax (!) fly square in the face of overwhelming mounds of not only theoretical reasoning, but actual verifiable empirical measurements of air and (more significantly) ocean temperatures which are virtually incontrovertible evidence of the idea that global temperatures are not only rising, but rising at a rate never before seen at any point in the paleometeorological record.  Essentially, if you are politically conservative, you are statistically highly likely to ignore this evidence, regardless of your education level, and truth be damned.

Another excellent example of proponents of “common sense” ignoring the myriad complex processes around them involves anoxic waters, the so-called “Dead Zones” in our lakes, streams and oceans where a lack of oxygen causes nothing at all to live.  First reported by shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the phenomenon has grown dramatically over the years, such that in places like Lake Erie, there are only tiny slivers of water in which any fish at all live.

The phenomenon of an algal bloom, of course, can occur naturally due to dramatic changes in wind and ocean currents, floods or droughts upstream at the origin of freshwater streams which discharge into saltwater bodies, and a host of other variables.  However, these natural sources of eutrophication (the rapid increase in the nutrients on which algae thrive, which in turn depletes the water of oxygen) do not account for the massive increases in dead zones throughout the world, nor do they explain why the Gulf of Mexico has seen the occasional hypoxic area transform from a some-time and highly localized event to a permanent description of a vast area ranging from the Texas coast just south of the Brazos River discharge eastward to Mississippi and Alabama.

Vast sums of research dollars, hundreds and thousands of experiments, and a wide ranging array of analysts have been applied to the problem over the last fifty years, and the causes of the problem are now more than obvious.  There are numerous factors contributing to the creation of  dead zones throughout the world, but far and away the most noxious is fertilizer runoff.  The Mississippi River is the drainage zone for a little over 40% of the continental United States; much of that area is the so-called “corn belt” – and corn production is dependent almost entirely upon the presence of nitrogen in high concentrations in soil, a state which cannot exist in monocropped agriculture without constant yearly application of high quantities of industrial fertilizer, the very sort which is most likely to wash away disproportionately.

Corn production in the central U.S. has been increasing dramatically since the 1950s; nearly all the forested regions in the Missouri Valley, for example, have been stripped of trees and converted to corn fields, and thanks to the ill-conceived “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007” still more will be converted to corn production for the purposes of ethanol production.  Even before this stupidity was foist upon us, 1.7 million tons of potassium and nitrogen were being delivered to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River every year.  The size of the Gulf dead zone has essentially doubled since the late 1980s; it is not likely to shrink any time soon, absent permanent and devastating drought conditions throughout the Midwest.

This is not a thermal picture; it is a picture of areas where no fish
or shellfish or coral reefs, etc. can live -- red means dead.

Meanwhile, there is ample empirical evidence suggesting how dead zones may be reversed.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of centrally planned economies in the former communist states of Eastern Europe caused fertilizer use in the nations bordering the Black Sea to drop to virtually zero.  The Black Sea dead zone had, prior to the 1990s, been the biggest in the world.  It shrank to practically nothing between 1991 and 2001.  Fishing – which had completely disappeared from the Black Sea in the latter half of the 20^th century (you can’t catch fish who don’t exist) is once again becoming a way of life in the region.  Likewise, the North Sea dead zone has decreased by about a third since nitrogen and other industrial emissions along the Rhine River have been cut.

Similar progress is not likely in the United States any time soon, however, for the simple reason that any attempt to salvage our ecology is met with incredulity and vitriol about how environmentalists are “out to destroy the economy”.  It is hard to see how it is “common sense” to argue that the economy of a dead region is much of an economy, but so it goes.  The Scots aphorism is perhaps apropos here:  “’tis an ill bird wha’ fouls its ain nest.”

In any event, the fishing economy of the Gulf of Mexico is on the order of at least $10 billion dollars.  Absent appropriate management of environmental policy (meaning banning fertilizer) all $10 billion of those dollars (and by all means, feel free to adjust for inflation) will simply disappear in coming decades.  Not trying to be hyperbolic here – just extrapolating from the data.  Science passes no judgments, it merely provides the tools for analysis, and very few of those studying the data have come to any other conclusion than this:  we ignore natural processes at our own peril.

The scope and scale of our impact on the world around us has always exceeded our ability to visualize and conceptualize, and that reality is becoming increasingly apparent any time we step back and attempt to understand any particular phenomenon.  There is a simple reason people used to believe that the world was flat – when you look from horizon to horizon, it seems flat.  Indeed, without the evidence provided by mathematical analysis of a series of observations and experiments, one would have to be a buffoon to believe anything other than that the world was a vast disk, immense perhaps, but certainly not round.

The truth was, is, and ever shall be much greater than what we can take in first hand.

Because of that “simple” reality, we have an obligation to toss common sense on the dung heap of no-longer-respectable notions, and take a long hard look at the impact we are having on the world around us.  What we eat, how and where we live, what we wear, it all matters. 

We at Myrtle’s place have railed against lawns for a while now, because they are bad for us all (killing bees, destroying soil tilth, causing nitrogen runoff, generally looking icky) but that’s really just a jumping-off point.  We are well aware that the vast majority of Americans think lawns are not only “okay” but that they are essential.  The same holds true for all sorts of other things that most folk take for granted, and giving up those harmful things will not at all seem like “common sense” to most people.  But it’s the only kind of sense that matters, if we want to continue living lives worth living.

And on that happy note…

Happy farming!

Rethinking Our Place in a (Warming) New World

“It is notable that as these data records have grown longer and climate models have become more comprehensive, earlier predictions have largely been confirmed. The only real surprises have been that some changes, such as sea level rise and Arctic sea ice decline, have outpaced earlier projections.”

--“Climate Change Impacts in the United States”, U.S. National Climate Assessment, U.S. Global Change Research Program, page 2

We have, naturally, written extensively before about global warming and its likely impacts.  And most people who find this blog, whether intentionally or by accident, are likely to be of at least a relatively scientific bent, meaning that the obvious truth of global warming is taken, more or less, at face value.  There is legitimate debate in the scientific community over how quickly the Earth is warming, or what particular tipping points may exist, and what impacts will be felt where, and when, but there is no longer any legitimate debate over the most basic of questions, “Is the Earth warming?”

There are some interesting questions to be raised from a purely sociological perspective, however, in recognizing the uncomfortable truth that not everyone accepts the very real, very palpable fact that human activity is largely responsible for changes to our climate which are both irreversible and incomprehensible.  Douglas Adams once quipped that the last thing a human being needs is a true sense of perspective, since our utter insignificance would destroy any individual ego if we ever felt the full scope of it all at once.  In that context, it is perfectly natural that – in spite of overwhelming evidence – any given human being would deny that we have, collectively, done irreversible harm to the very ecosystems which allowed for our existence.

Enough warning flags have been raised about potential disasters related to climate change; we are not writing today to cause any more alarm.  Instead, we would like to suggest some small shifts in perspective which might be helpful to those who will find disaster unfathomable, even as it occurs.  The truth is, our species is likely to survive global climate change, and some members of our species, at the very least, are likely to thrive under whatever conditions emerge at the other end of the change curve.

What we are interested in is teaching people to care about the idea that we should minimize the harm we are doing, and maximize the good we can share.  Plain and simple, why don’t we all try to do what will be of most benefit to the most people?  Sounds simple… but it is a radical idea.

We would like to interject at this point that we are not talking about some utopian ideal.  Socialism, communism, fascism, libertarian capitalism… all of these economic and political ideologies are based upon prima facie assumptions which are not founded in any kind of scientific principle.  And all are inconsistent with the physical realities of human existence.  No economic theory, after all, has ever been formulated with the thought in mind that basic economic activities in and of themselves have an impact on the viability of ecosystems. 

The basis of economics is exploitation, and we do not mean that in a pejorative sense.  It’s the simple truth – some raw material is plundered, molded, and bartered in exchange for either another manufactured good, or else for currency, which may then be used to purchase a manufactured good.  But all of it, every last bit, begins with the extraction from nature of a raw material.  Economics of any ideological stripe are by nature at odds with the environment.

Slowly, humanity has become aware of the impact this friction has imparted – crop rotation, an invention of American farmers in the late 18^th century, is an example of an adaptation humans have made to a uniquely human-caused problem, soil depletion.  There are other examples, and it is no accident that they come primarily from industries in which humans exploit other life forms.  Forestry is largely the study of how to rejuvenate woods which have been exploited for lumber.  Fishery science largely relates to management of fish populations exploited for human consumption.  Even the field of microbiology is inundated with studies related to molds, bacteria and viruses which have undergone wild evolutionary shifts due to human behavior.

So – human beings are changing the world in ways we do not always immediately perceive.  Some of those changes have consequences we would probably not have invited upon ourselves had we been aware beforehand, but since it is too late now to remake those fateful first choices, what ought we to do about it?

*Revisit cosmological assumptions – most world religions (Buddhism being the most notable exception) place humanity at the center of existence.  Even historically, this makes little sense, but it is especially narcissistic and asinine at a time when we know that the universe has been expanding for  14 billion years, and that even if there are other self-aware beings elsewhere in that vast, inconceivable void, we will likely (the laws of physics being what they are) never encounter them.  The basic problem with most human religions is… the stage (aka “The Universe”) is far too big for the drama (aka “our measly little human problems”).  No offense to anyone, of course.  We’re just not really that important, universally speaking.

*Redefine our values – note we do not say “change”; we must merely find a way to restate our human values within a more realistic context.  There is an almost universal moral aversion to murder, for example.  Perhaps we would be better served by asking ourselves why we share so many fundamental moral opinions.  In context of global warming… are there things we would not be doing if only we had the perspective from which to see what impact they are having?  Who would consciously buy a Hummer, for example, if they realized that guzzling gas at a ridiculous 8 miles to the gallon was causing every man, woman and child in Vanuatu to be homeless?  Yet, that is precisely what has happened.  You drive a gas guzzler, you are guilty.  QED.

*Educate ourselves to the degree possible/plausible.  Not everyone is capable of reading through a Scientific American article and making heads or tails of what has been said/described/discovered/discredited.  However, everyone is capable of reading more than one source (yes, I’m talking to you, FOX News viewers), and paying attention to what kinds of consensus are being built around given ideas.  You would never know from talking to a member of John Q. Public who is a “climate skeptic” that 97% of the scientists who study climate hold the belief that not only is warming happening, but that humans are the primary cause of warming.  This is because the general public, in general, chooses not to be educated.

TheU.S. National Climate Assessment released earlier this year is an excellent place to start, for those who do not truly understand the issues involved.  For one thing, over 300 different scientists both in and out of government worked on this document.  For another, the issue is broken out into a variety of contexts – global warming is discussed in terms of each sector of the economy, and for each section of the country, and response strategies are laid out (both for government and the private sector).

Perhaps the saddest (most telling?) part of the whole story is that much of the American South – home to some of the most closed-minded, bigoted, ignorant climate change deniers in the world – is actually experiencing either only modest temperature increases, or even (particularly for large swaths of Mississippi and Alabama) declining temperatures.  For a self-absorbed population with a history of egocentrism (okay, too polite – we’ll go ahead and say it, racism), it makes perfect sense that there would be an inelegant ignorance of what is happening in the rest of the world.

But make no mistake, we are all in this same lifeboat together.  There are few local advantages to be gleaned from a collapse of global ecosystems.  Adaptation and survival will depend very much on not only our own actions, but also on the actions of our fellow humans hundreds and thousands of miles away from us – we must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.

As a healthy place to start, we humbly ask that you read the U.S. National Climate Assessment.  Even if you find it a bit dry, we promise… it’s better for your brain than turning on the tube to find out what that wacky Kardashian clan is up to.  Seriously.

Happy farming!

On Myrtle's Preparations for the Coming Koala Invasion Apocalypse

Modern life – meaning life in the context we think of as modern, a distinction we are less and less certain has any significant meaning, really – allows very little time for reflection. As such, when we catch a hint of outside perspectives, a word or two from strangers about the impact our work has on them, it can tell us some very basic things about ourselves which, frankly, we should have already known.

A recent example at Myrtle’s place – a neighbor (probably a transplant from California) complimented us on our young eucalyptus tree. This having been the second such compliment received in a week… maybe we should pay attention, and stop to consider what the presence of this one individual plant amongst so many in our front yard herb garden might be trying to tell us about ourselves.

A bit of back story – we planted a couple of seedlings found in the discount bin at Farm Patch a few years ago, with faded tags reading only “Lemon – Corymbia citriodora”. And, yes, they smelled faintly of lemons, and we are always game for trying new things, so into the ground they went. It being a fall garden, and us not knowing what they were (though fully intending to eventually getting around to finding out), we mulched them, watered them, and then promptly forgot about them.

Chores, kids, day job, presidential elections, missing cat, found cat, oil changes on the Toyota… think of a distraction that came before looking up what the heck it was we had just planted, and said distraction surely took place. And over the winter, one of our nascent corymbia citriodora plants froze to the ground. The other didn’t look happy… but then, winter here is just harsh enough to kill lots of things that are tropical or semi-tropical, and just mild enough that a handful of such plants occasionally make it through. African basil, for example, will come back from its sturdy roots every spring.

So, we left well enough alone. We mulched it on a balmy January interlude between cold fronts, right along with our hardier perennial herbs (notably rosemary and oregano), and hoped for the best.

The best became apparent that March, when “Lemon – Corymbia citriodora” demanded to be upgraded to its more common nomenclature, owing to the fact that it sprouted up to a 3 ½’ height, towering above its neighbors in the herb garden, and threatening (if we were any judge of what the pinkish-green shoots at the top of each of its branches might mean) to keep right on growing. So, that’s when we finally gave in, and looked up what turned out to be our lemon eucalyptus tree.

Native to Australia, and not typically hardy below 30° fahrenheit (which explains why its sister snuffed it), there are nevertheless plenty of anectdotal examples of trees surviving frosts and freezes once they reach maturity. There are several examples scattered throughout Northern California, for example, where other varieties of eucalyptus thrive – which is, presumably, where our complimentary passersby became familiar with them.

And now, another winter has passed, and another spring and summer, and it now stands at 8’ tall, and is unmistakably a young eucalyptus tree.

We have no idea whether it will continue to thrive in the balmy Brazos Valley climate, though we are hopeful. The long range forecast is for the El Niño Southern Oscillation effect (ENSO) to remain stuck in “neutral” through at least Spring 2014, and the seasonal outlook forecast maps from the National Weather Service all show expected above average temperatures until at least then, so the odds of prolonged exposure to temperatures below 30° fahrenheit are somewhat low.

Assuming it survives to adulthood, this tree (which, remember, we thought was going to be a modest bushy variety like basil or sage) could conceivably be 30-40’ high by the time our daughter graduates college. It would, if this happens, tower over our driveway. Only a deep freeze, or an invasion of koala bears, could keep this from happening.

And as we reflect on the coming wave of unschedulable changes related to global warming, our lemon eucalyptus serves as something of a bellwether. Happy accidents of this sort will occur whenever and wherever folk are prepared to experiment – not blindly, but definitely wildly – with a wanton disregard for preconceived ideas about what must be put where, and what grows, and what does not.

There are some rules, of course, that will continue to be functional in the scary new world to come – mulch, for example, is always a good idea, as it helps plants retain moisture and self-regulate their tolerance to extreme temperatures – but not every rule handed down from master gardeners is going to continue to be valid, regardless of how “tried and true” that rule might be.

And not every experiment will end well. We are quite prepared for the possibility that we will have a freak snowstorm this winter (it happens every few years here in Bryan-College
Station, after all), and we will walk out to find an eight-foot-tall freeze-dried twig collection in our front yard, instead of a eucalyptus tree. We can’t count how many “fails” we have accumulated, in the form of plants that didn’t do well where we put them, or of arrangements that maximized thorns and fire ants and minimized fruit production and enjoyment.

We have also noticed, thanks to a competitive spirit, that when we compare our own garden to someone else’s, we are likely to notice only the flaws in our own, and only the advantages in theirs. Self-deprecation aside, we have met very few “proud” gardeners; they are generally sincere in their worries about problems of which they may be the only persons alive with even the slightest awareness. Yet, taken as a whole, there will inevitably be people in the community whose tomatoes are ripe when no one else can even get blooms, or who have pole beans so verdant they make they make the ivy covered outfield fence at Wrigley Field seem naked, or who in the midst of a valley-wide squash borer invasion, can grow pumpkins to make Linus and Snoopy blush.

Our hope is that people continue talking to each other, and listening to their plants – and the animals who live in, on, and around those plants – and continue adjusting as everything in that cluster of different entities continues changing.

Our own conversations with the admirers of the eucalyptus tree were short; they were, however, representative of at least part of who we like to think of ourselves as being. We are often out in the garden (though not as often as we’d like), and we often have time to stop and chat with those who are passing by. Our human neighbors know us, and some of them even approve of us. We hope we can say the same of our non-human neighbors.

It is the time of year when the planting calendar approach to gardening has most folk in the Brazos Valley scrambling to put in peas, and spinach, and broccoli, and cabbage and the like… and we will undoubtedly be doing some of that ourselves. Fava beans in particular are one of our favorites, as they overwinter well, and if planted now can conceivably become a forest of 4-5 foot tall heavy food producers (in addition to providing plenty of winter forage for our bees).

But the thing about which we want to be most aware is not anything marked on a calendar. We want to keep our eyes peeled for that next weird discount-bin type find – what is the next unexpected gem going to be? You can’t plan for it… you can only be patient and open to it.

Here’s hoping you find your own unexpected treasure this fall.

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!