But I didn’t, and I wonder why …

Well, I did eventually cut my grass, but not till latter May. And it’s no wonder why — I’m slow to mow to start with, and the very rainy spring in the land south of Lake Erie this year often left the yard too soggy to mow.¹ But the lack of mowing had a benefit — a nice showing of wildflowers, with honeybees working them. And it saved some time and gasoline. So, I imagine I’ll let that yard grow again next year — especially since I found some advice on meadow care that suits me: “Mow once a year in early spring before new growth begins.”² That’s it. So that’s the plan.

Here are some pictures of the yard in bloom, 14 May 2011:

Golden Ragwort

Wild Blue Phlox

Ajuga, in Two Shades

Honeybee

What is the white flower among the grass?

Sources

(1) ‘Temperature and Precipitation Maps March – May 2011’ – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – National Climatic Data Center

(2) ‘Lawn Alternatives’ – Organic Gardening
Page 2: U.S. region-by-region advice

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Nikola Tesla was a visionary inventor who devoted his life to making an abundant, clean energy supply for humanity. Among his inventions toward that end were alternating current (AC) power transmission, the AC motor, and the bladeless turbine.¹ He also invented radio, neon & fluorescent lighting, x-ray imaging, robotics, wireless remote control, wireless energy transmission and more. And in 1900, he described his World-System of wireless communications, which has a notable likeness to the Internet.²

Invention, and capacity for work, ran in Tesla’s family. He writes:³

My mother descended from … a line of inventors. … [She] was an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. … She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home were the product of her hands. …

Tesla gladly worked much:

… I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy.  I never paid such a price.  On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts. 

… and slept little:⁴

I sleep about one and one-half hours a night. I think that is enough for any man. … There are so many things to do I do not want to spend time sleeping needlessly.  In my family all were poor sleepers.  Time spent in sleep is lost time, we always felt.

Tesla had a photographic memory, which, in his childhood, gave him trouble:³

… In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those I imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. … Sometimes it would even remain fixt in space tho I pushed my hand thru it.

Tesla learned to control his unbidden photographic visions by concentration and imagination:

Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my [mental] journeys—see new places, cities and countries—live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations. 

He later used his skill at concentration and his photographic memory for inventing. He tells how he invented the AC motor, which his professor told him was impossible:⁵

… I started by first picturing in my mind a direct-current machine, running it and following the changing flow of the currents in the armature. Then I would imagine an alternator and investigate the progresses taking place in a similar manner. Next I would visualize systems comprising motors and generators and operate them in various ways.

The images I saw were to me perfectly real and tangible. All my remaining term in Gratz was passed in intense but fruitless efforts of this kind, and I almost came to the conclusion that the problem was insolvable. …

In 1880 I went to Prague, Bohemia, …. It was in that city that I made a decided advance, which consisted in detaching the commutator from the machine and studying the phenomena in this new aspect, but still without result. …

After taking a job in Budapest, Tesla suffered a “complete breakdown of the nerves”:

What I experienced during the period of that illness surpasses all belief.  …

… In Budapest I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece.  A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear.  A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body.  The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable.  The ground under my feet trembled continuously. …

But, after he regained his health, he felt he would succeed:

In attacking the problem again, I almost regretted that the struggle was soon to end. I had so much energy to spare. ,,, Back in the deep recesses of the brain was the solution, but I could net yet give it outward expression.

A flash of inspiration gave him the answer:

One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the City Park and reciting poetry. … The sun was just setting and reminded me of the glorious passage [from Goethe’s Faust]:

Sie ruckt und weicht, der Tag ist uberlebt,
Dort eilt sie hin und fordert neues Leben.
Oh, dass kein Flugel mich vom Boden hebt
Ihr nach und immer nach zu streben!

[The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!]¹¹

As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightening and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand, the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, “See my motor here; watch me reverse it.” … A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally, I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence..

A year or so passed before Tesla got a chance to build the motor:⁶

… I finally had the satisfaction of seeing the rotation effected by alternating currents of different phase, and without sliding contacts or commutator, as I had conceived a year before. It was an exquisite pleasure but not to compare with the delirium of joy following the first revelation.

Constantly working, and finding a cause for every effect, Tesla came to feel that he was an automaton, and to believe that true of every being:³

… I became aware, to my surprise, that every thought I conceived was suggested by an external impression.  Not only this but all my actions were prompted in a similar way.  In the course of time it became perfectly evident to me that I was merely an automaton endowed with power of movement, responding to the stimuli of the sense organs and thinking and acting accordingly. …

This led Tesla to invent a robot. Though it was remotely controlled, Tesla foresaw a robot that could, on its own, think and react:

… The practical result of this was the art of telautomatics which has been so far carried out only in an imperfect manner.  Its latent possibilities will, however, be eventually shown.  I have been since years planning self-controlled automata and believe that mechanisms can be produced which will act as if possest of reason, to a limited degree, and will create a revolution in many commercial and industrial departments.

Tesla strove for human progress, and pictured it in mechanical terms:⁷

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.  We may definitely say that it is a movement even if we do not fully understand its nature.  Movement implies a body which is being moved and a force which propels it against resistance.  Man, in the large, is a mass urged on by a force.  Hence the general laws governing movement in the realm of mechanics are applicable to humanity.

There are three ways by which the energy which determines human progress can be increased: First, we may increase the mass.  This, in the case of humanity, would mean the improvement of living conditions, health, eugenics, etc.  Second, we may reduce the frictional forces which impede progress, such as ignorance, insanity, and religious fanaticism. Third, we may multiply the energy of the human mass by enchaining the forces of the universe, like those of the sun, the ocean, the winds and tides.

The first method increases food and well-being.  The second tends to bring peace.  The third enhances our ability to work and to achieve. There can be no progress that is not constantly directed toward increasing well-being, peace, and achievement.  Here the mechanistic conception of life is one with the teachings of Buddha and the Sermon on the Mount.

Tesla aimed at the third way of human progress: multiplying the energy supply “by enchaining the forces of the universe” — but without burning fuel:⁸

[W]hatever our resources:of primary energy may be in the future, we must, to be rational, obtain it without consumption of any material. Long ago I came to this conclusion, and to arrive at this result only two ways … appeared possible—either to turn to use the energy of the sun stored in the ambient medium, or to transmit, through the medium, the sun’s energy to distant places from some locality where it was obtainable without consumption of material.

Tesla particularly worked on wireless energy transmission, with the idea of beaming energy across the world. He built a tower on Long Island for the purpose, but was not successful before his funding ran out:²

A plant was built on Long Island with a tower 187 feet high, having a spherical terminal about 68 feet in diameter.  These dimensions were adequate for the transmission of virtually any amount of energy.  Originally only from 200 to 300 K.W. were provided but I intended to employ later several thousand horsepower.  The transmitter was to emit a wave complex of special characteristics and I had devised a unique method of telephonic control of any amount of energy.

Tesla warned against an energy supply that would be centrally controlled:⁹

‘If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point on the globe, this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy, which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force.

At the turn of the 20th century, Tesla gave a rundown of energy sources and their prospects for the 1900’s. Tesla saw coal, oil and gas as wasteful and limited:⁸

[T]o burn coal, however efficiently … would be ,,, a phase in the evolution toward something much more perfect.  After all, in generating electricity in this manner, we should be destroying material, and this would be a barbarous process.  We ought to be able to obtain the energy we need without consumption of material. … The man who should stop this senseless waste would be a great benefactor of humanity, though the solution he would offer could not be a permanent one, since it would ultimately lead to the exhaustion of the store of material. 

Tesla saw water power as the best:

Evidently all electrical energy obtained from a waterfall … is a net gain to mankind, which is all the more effective as it is secured with little expenditure of human effort …

… and favored use of wind:

… [S]ince time immemorial man has had at his disposal a fairly good machine which has enabled him to utilize the energy of the ambient medium.  This machine is the windmill.  Contrary to popular belief, the power obtainable from wind is very considerable.  …

Tesla saw promise in solar …

A far better way, however, to obtain power would be to avail ourselves of the sun’s rays, which beat the earth incessantly and supply energy at a maximum rate of over four million horsepower per square mile.  … [A]n inexhaustible source of power would be opened up by the discovery of some efficient method of utilizing the energy of the rays. 

… and geothermal:

Another way of getting motive power from the medium without consuming any material would be to utilize the heat contained in the earth, the water, or the air for driving an engine.  It is a well-known fact that the interior portions of the globe are very hot, the temperature rising, as observations show, with the approach to the center at the rate of approximately 1 degree C. for every hundred feet of depth.  The difficulties of sinking shafts and placing boilers at depths of, say, twelve thousand feet, corresponding to an increase in temperature of about 120 degrees C., are not insuperable, and we could certainly avail ourselves in this way of the internal heat of the globe. 

Tesla saw the central task of energy development to be the invention of a way to get more use out of wind, solar and geothermal:

The windmill, the solar engine, the engine driven by terrestrial heat, had their limitations in the amount of power obtainable.  Some new way had to be discovered which would enable us to get more energy.  There was enough heat-energy in the medium, but only a small part of it was available for the operation of an engine in the ways then known.  Besides, the energy was obtainable only at a very slow rate.  Clearly, then, the problem was to discover some new method which would make it possible both to utilize more of the heat-energy of the medium and also to draw it away from the same at a more rapid rate.

Tesla did not live to see a clean primary energy source for humanity — and, as of yet, neither have we. But Tesla kept pushing toward it. In 1931, at the age of 75, he wrote:¹⁰

It was clear to me many years ago that a new and better source of power had to be discovered to meet the ever increasing demands of mankind.  In a lecture delivered before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at Columbia University May 20, 1891, I said: “We are whirling through endless space with inconceivable speed, all around us everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere is energy.  There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly.  Then, with the light obtained from the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from the store forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides.”

I have thought and worked with this object in view unremittingly and am glad to say that I have sufficient theoretical and experimental evidence to fill me with hope, not to say confidence, that my efforts of years will be rewarded and that we shall have at our disposal a new source of power, superior even to the hydro-electric, which may be obtained by means of simple apparatus everywhere and in almost constant and unlimited amount.

Further Info

‘Nikola Tesla’s Renewable Energy Vision’ By Lisa Pease, Consortiumnews.com, July 10, 2010

Sources

¹ ‘Tesla – Life and Legacy’ – PBS

² ‘My Inventions – The Magnifying Transmitter’ – Nikola Tesla

This [magnifying transmitter] invention was one of a number comprised in my “World-System” of wireless transmission which I undertook to commercialize on my return to New York in 1900.  As to the immediate purposes of my enterprise, they were clearly outlined in a technical statement of that period from which I quote:

“The ‘World-System’ has resulted from a combination of several original discoveries made by the inventor in the course of long continued research and experimentation.  It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the inter-connection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment.  By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Globe.  An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant.  These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientific advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line-wire.  One far-reaching result of this is that any device capable of being operated thru one or more wires (at a distance obviously restricted) can likewise be actuated, without artificial conductors and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to which there are no limits other than those imposed by the physical dimensions of the Globe.  Thus, not only will entirely new fields for commercial exploitation be opened up by this ideal method of transmission but the old ones vastly extended. 

The ‘World-System’ is based on the application of the following important inventions and discoveries:

1. The ‘Tesla Transformer.’ This apparatus is in the production of electrical vibrations as revolutionary as gunpowder was in warfare.  Currents many times stronger than any ever generated in the usual ways, and sparks over one hundred feet long, have been produced by the inventor with an instrument of this kind.

2. The ‘Magnifying Transmitter.’ This is Tesla’s best invention, a peculiar transformer specially adapted to excite the Earth, which is in the transmission of electrical energy what the telescope is in astronomical observation.  By the use of this marvelous device he has already set up electrical movements of greater intensity than those of lightning and passed a current, sufficient to light more than two hundred incandescent lamps, around the Globe.

3. The ‘Tesla Wireless System.’ This system comprises a number of improvements and is the only means known for transmitting economically electrical energy to a distance without wires.  Careful tests and measurements in connection with an experimental station of great activity, erected by the inventor in Colorado, have demonstrated that power in any desired amount can be conveyed, clear across the Globe if necessary, with a loss not exceeding a few per cent.

4. The ‘Art of Individualization.’ This invention of Tesla’s is to primitive ‘tuning’ what refined language is to unarticulated expression.  It makes possible the transmission of signals or messages absolutely secret and exclusive both in the active and passive aspect, that is, non-interfering as well as non-interferable.  Each signal is like an individual of unmistakable identity and there is virtually no limit to the number of stations or instruments which can be simultaneously operated without the slightest mutual disturbance.

5. ‘The Terrestrial Stationary Waves.’ This wonderful discovery, popularly explained, means that the Earth is responsive to electrical vibrations of definite pitch just as a tuning fork to certain waves of sound.  These particular electrical vibrations, capable of powerfully exciting the Globe, lend themselves to innumerable uses of great importance commercially and in many other respects.

The first ‘World-System’ power plant can be put in operation in nine months.  With this power plant it will be practicable to attain electrical activities up to ten million horsepower and it is designed to serve for as many technical achievements as are possible without due expense.  Among these the following may be mentioned:

(1) The inter-connection of the existing telegraph exchanges or offices all over the world;

(2) The establishment of a secret and non-interferable government telegraph service;

(3) The inter-connection of all the present telephone exchanges or offices on the Globe;

(4) The universal distribution of general news, by telegraph or telephone, in connection with the Press;

(5) The establishment of such a ‘World-System’ of intelligence transmission for exclusive private use;

(6) The inter-connection and operation of all stock tickers of the world;

(7) The establishment of a ‘World-System’ of musical distribution, etc.;

(8) The universal registration of time by cheap clocks indicating the hour with astronomical precision and requiring no attention whatever;

(9) The world transmission of typed or handwritten characters, letters, checks, etc.;

(10) The establishment of a universal marine service enabling the navigators of all ships to steer perfectly without compass, to determine the exact location, hour and speed, to prevent collisions and disasters, etc.;

(11) The inauguration of a system of world-printing on land and sea;

(12) The world reproduction of photographic pictures and all kinds of drawings or records.”

³ ‘My Inventions – My Early Life’ – Nikola Tesla

⁴ ‘DR. TESLA VISIONS THE END OF AIRCRAFT IN WAR’ By Helen Welshimer

⁵ ‘My Inventions – My Later Endeavors’ – Nikola Tesla

⁶ ‘My Inventions – The Discovery of the Tesla Coil and Transformer’ – Nikola Tesla

⁷ ‘A MACHINE TO END WAR’ by Nikola Tesla as told to George Sylvester Viereck, Liberty , February 1937

⁸ ‘THE PROBLEM OF INCREASING HUMAN ENERGY – WITH SPECIAL REFERENCES TO THE HARNESSING OF THE SUN’S ENERGY’ by Nikola Tesla, Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900

⁹ ‘My Inventions – The Art of Telautomatics’ – Nikola Tesla

¹⁰ ‘OUR FUTURE MOTIVE POWER’ by Nikola Tesla, Everyday Science and Mechanics, December 1931

¹¹ ‘Tesla’s Early Years’ – PBS

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

For comparison, here is a look back at other warm periods:⁹⁶

• The Medieval Warm Period (900-1400 A.D.) brought more warmth to northern Europe and some other regions of the Northern Hemisphere, but did not much raise average world-wide temperature. The highest average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during this period were about those of the mid-20th century.

• The Mid-Holocene Epcoh (6000 years ago) marked the peak warmth of the current natural inter-glacial period. Since then, the Earth should be gradually and naturally cooling towards the next ice age in 50,000 years or so. But today’s warming climate change has halted that trend for a while, and may even — with continued fossil fuel burning — cancel the next ice age.⁹⁷⁹⁸

• The Eemian Stage (120,000 years ago) was the prior inter-glacial period. Regular wobbles in the Earth’s orbit cause the coming and going of the Earth’s ice ages on about a 100,000 year cycle. The orbital wobbles affect the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet. When the solar radiation on the continents strengthens, it triggers the inter-glacial warming. After hundreds of years of warming, CO2, having maybe been flushed from the deep ocean, rises in the atmosphere, which amplifies the warming, driving the glaciers back towards the poles.⁹⁹

• The Pliocene Epoch (5.3 – 2.6 million years ago) was the last warm period before the glacial cycles started. Northern Hemisphere ice sheets had not yet formed, as high atmospheric CO2, the Earth’s orbital state, and constant El Nino winds and ocean currents likely kept them at bay.¹⁰⁰

• The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55 million years ago) was a big warming climate change (5 – 8°C over a few thousand years) from an already-warm climate. Somehow, a huge amount of greenhouse gas got up into the atmosphere, as clathrates in the ocean may have melted to free trapped methane, or a massive volcano may have heated up vast swaths of coal.¹⁰¹

• During the Mid-Cretaceous Age (120 to 90 million years ago) the Earth was very different. Rolling back 100 million years of continental drift, we find the continents clumped together, giving very different ocean currents and climatic rhythms. CO2 levels were at least twice today’s, and it was so warm that the tropical breadfruit tree likely grew in Greenland (55°N).

Each warm period has its own story, but today’s is not yet finished. The effects of today’s climate change could put heavy stress on human and other life that has gotten used to the more-or-less regular climate since the last ice age.¹⁰² As more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the outlook for future life becomes more dire. Now, it is up to the human species to muster its social sense and clever wit, and stop the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere that it started.

Sources

⁹⁰ IPCC FAQ 6.2: Is the Current Climate Change Unusual Compared to Earlier Changes in Earth’s History?

⁹¹ IPCC FAQ 6.1: What Caused the Ice Ages and Other Important Climate Changes Before the Industrial Era?

… There are three fundamental ways the Earth’s radiation balance can change, thereby causing a climate change: (1) changing the incoming solar radiation (e.g., by changes in the Earth’s orbit or in the Sun itself), (2) changing the fraction of solar radiation that is reflected (this fraction is called the albedo – it can be changed, for example, by changes in cloud cover, small particles called aerosols or land cover), and (3) altering the longwave energy radiated back to space (e.g., by changes in greenhouse gas concentrations). In addition, local climate also depends on how heat is distributed by winds and ocean currents. All of these factors have played a role in past climate changes.

⁹² IPCC FAQ 2.1: How do Human Activities Contribute to Climate Change and How do They Compare with Natural Influences?

FAQ 2.1, Figure 2. Summary of the principal components of the radiative forcing of climate change. All these radiative forcings result from one or more factors that affect climate and are associated with human activities or natural processes as discussed in the text. The values represent the forcings in 2005 relative to the start of the industrial era (about 1750). Human activities cause significant changes in long-lived gases, ozone, water vapour, surface albedo, aerosols and contrails. The only increase in natural forcing of any significance between 1750 and 2005 occurred in solar irradiance. Positive forcings lead to warming of climate and negative forcings lead to a cooling. The thin black line attached to each coloured bar represents the range of uncertainty for the respective value. (Figure adapted from Figure 2.20 of this report.)

⁹³ IPCC FAQ 8.1: How Reliable Are the Models Used to Make Projections of Future Climate Change?

There is considerable confidence that climate models provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental scales and above. This confidence comes from the foundation of the models in accepted physical principles and from their ability to reproduce observed features of current climate and past climate changes. Confidence in model estimates is higher for some climate variables (e.g., temperature) than for others (e.g., precipitation). Over several decades of development, models have consistently provided a robust and unambiguous picture of significant climate warming in response to increasing greenhouse gases.

⁹⁴ ‘Bush on “The Fundamental Debate”’ – RealClimate.org, 2006-03-31

Data show that carbon dioxide levels are rising, they are now 30% higher than at any time during at least the past 650,000 years, and likely even the past several million years. This rise is caused entirely by human activities. This is also demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt by data – for a start, we know how much CO2 we have emitted, and the observed rise is equal to 57% of this (the rest has been taken up by ocean and biosphere). That carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping longwave radiation, is also a measured fact and well-established physics since the 19th Century. …

What about a “natural” explanation for the observed global warming? There is none. Indicators and measurements of solar activity show no increasing trend over the past 60 years. The orbital cycles, which cause the ice ages, would currently tend towards cooling, if anything. There is no remotely feasible alternative explanation for the observed warming published in the scientific literature.

⁹⁵ IPCC FAQ 9.2: Can the Warming of the 20th Century be Explained by Natural Variability?

… Human activities over the last 100 years, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, have caused a rapid increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Before the industrial age, these gases had remained at near stable concentrations for thousands of years.

⁹⁶ ‘Paleoclimatic Data Before 2000 Years Ago’ – National Climate Data Center

⁹⁷ ‘The global cooling myth’ – RealClimate.org, 2005-01-14

Interpretations of future changes in the Earth’s orbit have changed somewhat. It now seems likely (Loutre and Berger, Climatic Change, 46: (1-2) 61-90 2000) that the current interglacial, based purely on natural forcing, would last for an exceptionally long time: perhaps 50,000 years.

⁹⁸ ‘The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate, David Archer Publisher’s description:

In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world’s leading climatologists, predicts that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide we may eventually cancel the next ice age and raise the oceans by 50 meters.

Archer shows how just a few centuries of fossil-fuel use will cause not only a climate storm that will last a few hundred years, but dramatic climate changes that will last thousands. Carbon dioxide emitted today will be a problem for millennia. For the first time, humans have become major players in shaping the long-term climate. In fact, a planetwide thaw driven by humans has already begun. But despite the seriousness of the situation, Archer argues that it is still not too late to avert dangerous climate change–if humans can find a way to cooperate as never before.

⁹⁹ ‘What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?’ – RealClimate.org, 2004-12-03

From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a “feedback”, much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

¹⁰⁰ ‘Rolling up the circus tent: Dispatch #7’ – RealClimate, 2007-12-19

The Pliocene was the latest warm time in the Northern Hemisphere before the great glaciations of the Pleistocene closed in. To some extent, as we increase the atmosphere’s CO2 content, we are traveling backward in time so far as climate is concerned. Hence the Pliocene, which ended about two million years ago, has attracted a lot of attention as an analog climate for what may lie ahead. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the challenge of understanding Pliocene climate provides another test of the operation of model physics in a warm climate. …

… There was also a modelling talk by M. Vizcaino, evaluating several factors proposed to have accounted for Pliocene warmth. The ones that seem to contribute the most to conditions unfavorable for Northern Hemisphere glaciation are elevated CO2, the orbital configuration, and a permanent El Nino.

¹⁰¹ ‘Climate myths: It’s been far warmer in the past, what’s the big deal?’ – by David L Chandler, New Scientist, 16 May 2007

The warmest [“hothouse Earth” period] was probably the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which peaked about 55 million years ago. Global temperatures during this event may have warmed by 5°C to 8°C within a few thousand years, with the Arctic Ocean reaching a subtropical 23°C. Mass extinctions resulted.

The warming … was caused by the release of massive amounts of methane or CO2. It was thought to have come from the thawing of methane clathrates in deep ocean sediments, but the latest theory is that it was caused by a massive volcanic eruption that heated up coal deposits. In other words, the PETM is an example of catastrophic global warming triggered by the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

¹⁰² ‘Climate myths: It’s too cold where I live – warming will be great’ by Michael Le Page, New Scientist, 16 May 2007

As global temperature climbs to 3°C above present levels – which is likely to happen before the end of this century if greenhouse emissions continue unabated – the consequences will become increasingly severe. More than a third of species face extinction. Agricultural yields will start to fall in many parts of the world. Millions of people will be at risk from coastal flooding. Heatwaves, droughts, floods and wildfires will take an ever greater toll.

There are two factors should borne in mind when thinking about the impacts. Firstly, even countries that escape the worst of the direct effects will feel the economic effects of what happens elsewhere. There may be social and political problems too, as migration increases and water becomes increasingly scarce in some regions.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

155 million years ago, algae bloomed in a shallow sea, poisoning thousands of creatures.⁷¹ The belemnite came to feed on the dead creatures, and met the same fate. It sank into a sea floor rich in phosphorus, which within days — before the body could rot — mineralized in and around the body parts and saved the belemnite’s image.⁷² Somehow along the way, the ink sac came loose from the body, and the somewhat acidic water reacted with the melanin in the ink to make it solidify, and hold its full spatial shape inside the forming rock.⁷³⁷⁴ As the earth churned through the ages, the area of sea floor became the Oxford Clay in the south of Great Britain. In the 1840’s, railroad builders cut into the clay and came across the rich fossil bed. Many fine fossils were taken to London, where they were shattered by bombing in World War II.⁷² Through the years, with overgrowth and flooding, the location of the fossil bed became lost to scientists and the public — until Dr. Wilby’s crew went looking for it. They drilled here and there around Christian Malford, until they pulled up a core sample with a fossil.⁷⁰ Over ten days, they gathered many fossils, and cracked open one rock to find the belemnite’s ink sac.⁷⁵ The scientists took a piece of the solidified ink and mixed it with an ammonia solution to liquefy it for the “ultimate self-portrait”.

Nearly all animal fossils are rock impressions of the slower-to-rot hard body parts, like bone and shell, and there are only a few fossil beds in the world with impressions of soft body parts. And it is rarer still to find fossil original material — like cephalapod ink — from an organism. “It’s absolutely incredible to find something like this,” said Dr. Wilby — and the story made quite a stir. But such a story also made a stir in the nineteenth century, as was noted in 1884 in The standard natural history:⁷³

The ink is not readily decomposed; on the contrary it is occasionally found fossil in the rocks along with the remains of the animal which produced it. So well has it been preserved that in one celebrated instance a naturalist drew the portrait of a fossil squid with the sepia derived from its fossil, but not fossilized ink-bag.

the fossil ink sac — BNPS

Fossil belemnite with fish in grasp. — Palaeo News Files

Artist’s conception of belemnites on the prowl — BNPS

Wilby’s crew strikes paydirt in an ammonite fossil. — British Geological Survey

Sources

⁷⁰ ‘After 150m years as a fossil, Belemnotheutis antiquus takes up its pen’ — The Times, 2009-08-19

⁷¹ ‘The Fossil Treasure Hunt’ – British Geological Survey

⁷² ‘Calamari killing field – fossils found in sea that covered middle England’ By Paul Eccleston, Paleonews, 2008-08-21

⁷³ ‘Fossil squid ink story has whiskers’ by Ray Girvan, JSBlog, 2009-08-25

⁷⁴ ‘155million years old and still inky: The perfectly preserved squid fossil amazing scientists’ – by David Derbyshire, Daily Mail, 2009-08-19

⁷⁵ ‘Scientists draw squid using its 150 million-year-old fossilised ink’ By Murray Wardrop, The Telegraph, 19 Aug 2009

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

A microbial fuel cell taps into the energy that soil microbes generate when they break down organic matter. Literally, this is energy from dirt: no special microbes or conditions are needed other than enough moisture for the bugs to do their work.

Essentially all you do is dig a hole, layer an anode, some soil, sand and a cathode — and connect the anode and cathode to a circuit board to charge a battery that can power an LED (light emitting diode) light, run a radio or charge a mobile phone.

In Africa, 74% of the population is off the electric grid. Lebônê‘s website describes the problem:x³

… Imagine a village at night in which students are walking to distant highways to study under streetlights, where small merchants are investing half of their resources to pay for kerosene lighting to run their operations, and where emergency health workers, if operating at all, are trying to stitch up wounds and perform surgeries by candlelight. …

A Lebônê MFC electric unit can replace a kerosene lamp for $10 and a cubic meter of dirt. Units can be easily linked to multiply energy output. The underground system works through day and night, in wind and calm, is rugged, simple, lasts for years, and can be made in the region where it is used. This month, Lebônê won a $200,000 World Bank grant in the Lighting Africa competition held in Accra, Ghana. Lebônê will use that money as it begins field studies in the foothills of Kilimanjaro in July. It plans a large-scale product rollout in Tanzania for 2009.

Video from floor of Accra conference; Interview with Hugo Van Vuuren starts at 1:00

Sources

¹ Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences press release – May 14, 2008

² ‘Literally, This Is Energy From Dirt’ – Interview with Lebônê founder Hugo Van Vuuren, IPS News Agency

³ Lebônê – The Problem

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

On Saturday the 8th the ore boat Charles S. Price shoved off at Ashtabula, Ohio, into Lake Erie with a load of coal and without its first assistant engineer. Milton Smith had chosen to skip the last voyage of the 1913 season — and any early November gale that might arise — and had taken the train home to his wife and children in Port Huron, Michigan. After midnight on Sunday morning, as the Price steamed up the St. Clair River and past Smith’s house into Lake Huron, a gale was blowing in from the northwest. That afternoon sailors on the downbound (south-going) H.A. Hawgood saw the Price fighting its way upbound as it passed. The Hawgood had been heading into the storm north of Saginaw Bay, when it turned around to seek safety at the St. Clair River and let the gale blow itself out. But, instead of blowing out, the gale became the White Hurricane. By dark the snow “got so thick we couldn’t see the smokestack”, reported the Hawgood‘s captain. “The seas went right over the pilothouse.” Later, the Hawgood ran up on a beach at the southern end of the lake, and its crew survived. Likely the Price also turned and headed back toward the foot of Lake Huron, where it would have had to turn again to avoid running aground. On that final turn, the Price may have gotten caught sideways in a deep trough between the waves, and rolled. Its upturned hull floated for several days, and the papers speculated on the identity of “the mystery ship”, until a diver went down to read its name. On Tuesday the 11th, after the storm had quieted, seven bodies of sailors from the Price washed ashore in Ontario near Port Franks. On Thursday, a week and a day after leaving the Price, Milton Smith boarded the train in Sarnia, and headed for the makeshift morgue to identify the bodies of his shipmates.

Another ore boat upbound on Lake Huron that Sunday, when the White Hurricane raged, was the George C. Crawford. The boat fought the waves to north of Point Aux Barques with winds “blowing great guns”, according to Captain Walter C Iler. Waves rushed over the deck and boilerhouse through a broken skylight into the engine room, smashed the ship’s galley and drenched the crew’s sleeping rooms. So, like the captains of the Hawgood and the Price, Captain Iler decided to turn his boat around to seek calmer waters. While heading back down, Iler could make out the passing upbound ore boat Argus through the snow and waves. He later recalled what he saw just after the boat passed by. “The Argus seemed to crumple like an eggshell,” he said. “Then, she was gone.” Bearing that horrible image, the crew of the Crawford had to tend their boat as it ran fast with the wind and the mountainous waves towards the foot of Lake Huron. “It snowed for a solid twenty-six hours,” Iler later recalled. “We hadn’t seen a thing, but were guided by the sounding machine. It gave us excellent service.” Not being able to see to find the St. Clair River, Iler decided to turn around before running out of lake and ripping into the shoals. But the boat got stuck in a trough and could not climb out, so the captain ordered the anchors thrown. The anchors grabbed and the ship came around, but soon the anchor chains snapped, and once again the storm pushed the Crawford towards the shore. Around 2 A.M. Monday a lull in the wind allowed the boat to turn, and it once again battled upbound on its original course towards the Soo Locks. On Tuesday the battered boat reached the St. Marys River that leads to the Soo. In the calm, the crew wielded steam hoses to melt the thick ice off the deck, and found something stunning. Hundreds of rivets were missing, and cracks ran across several of the inch-thick steel deck plates. The crew might have pictured then how their own boat could have crumpled like the Argus. Records show that the Crawford did not finish its last voyage of 1913, but turned back to Toledo for repair. And in the spring of 1914 it set out again.

The Detroit News, November 13, 1913

the upturned bow of the 504 ft (154 m) Charles S. Price

Source: ‘White Hurricane: A Great Lakes November Gale and America’s Deadliest Maritime Disaster’ by David G. Brown, 2002, International Marine / McGraw-Hill

After the press of westward settlement, and the U.S. Army, drove out the Indians, the government fashioned a road through the Great Black Swamp to the land of milk and honey beyond. “A bank of muck and mud twenty feet wide and about three feet high was build mostly by Ox Power,” wrote a dweller, C. H. Opperman, of the Maumee and Western Reserve Road (now US 20)x⁵⁷. “Nearly all … who took the swamp route regretted their unwise decision, for many of them had ox teams to draw their high-wheeled covered wagons. Often the Oxen would sink to their bellys and the wheels to the hubbs and in many cases made only a mile or two of progress in a day.” So 31 inns rose to stand along the 31 miles of road and aid the slow moving pioneers⁵⁸. Some men would claim a mud hole and charge money to pull wagons out of it. One traveling pioneer spent his life savings of $100 on getting pulled out of mud holes. So he stopped and staked out his own mud hole, and made his money back before he carried on.

After settlers claimed the land around the Great Black Swamp, later settlers turned their sights inside it. “No night was too dark or precinct too sacred for [the mosquitoes] to get in their work,” wrote J. R. Tracy of living on the 80 acres his father bought on a sand ridge in the heart of the Great Black Swamp (where Bowling Green now stands)x⁵⁹. “Many a meal was eaten with a smudge under the table and many a would be sleeper owed what rest he secured to the smoke that overspread his bed and compelled his bloodthirsty assailants to retire.” The mosquitoes also brought malaria to swamp dwellers. Tracy described his bout with it: “If there is anything in this world that will stay by a fellow when it has found him it is the ague. My! How it will snuggle up to him, and hug him, and squeeze him, and shake him, and freeze him, and then bake him and fry him, until it would seem every drop of moisture is out of him …” After receding, the fever would sometimes return with double strength in a day or two: “And so the round went on, week by week, month by month, sometimes year by year (Brother Isaac was held two years, didn’t go to school or do a day’s work in that time).” Another swamp settler, Robert Fenton, also lived the hardship of malaria, as well as slow travel, dangerous animals, and the lack of a local mill to grind the grain⁶⁰. But he looked back on it like this: “We were happy, since we all were on about a common level and the exigencies of the situation made us alert, active and energetic. We had to be up and doing and we rather seemed to enjoy it.”

In 1840 the Great Black Swamp stood at its last years of full glory. From then on more settlers came in and cut down trees, and some dug ditches to drain water off their land – often on to their neighbor’s⁶¹. After a big outbreak of the waterborne disease cholera, the Ohio government in 1859 gave counties the power to seize land for more effective ditching. When farmers found that surface ditching left their land still too soggy, some tried underground drains of loose stone, or of pairs of planks nailed into a “V” and laid open end down. These underground drains did not work nearly as well as clay tile, but it was too costly to bring clay tile in. Then in the 1860’s, after someone discovered the bed of clay under the topsoil, many drainage tile factories arose. The factories’ kilns were fed by the swamp’s clay and fired by the swamp’s trees. And by 1900 the kilns’ product had drained and dried the Great Black Swamp. In its place lay fine farmland, with crops growing on a 10,000 year-old compost heap.

The Great Black Swamp (Maumee Valley Historical Society)

The Everglades (USGS)
The Everglades historic boundary is marked here by the yellow line. It includes the area of sheet water flow from Lake Okeechobee to the sea, and excludes some adjacent wetlands.

Black Swamp Conservation and Restoration Area
A 110 acre tract in Wood County, Ohio

Sources

⁵⁰ ‘Lost Ohio’ by Randy McNutt, 2006, Kent State University Press, P.114

⁵¹ ‘Wetlands – Did you know?’ – Ohio EPA

The Great Black Swamp was Ohio’s largest wetland. The swamp was once 120 miles long and about 40 miles wide. In 1859, the “ditch law” was passed to allow the installation of pipes to drain the swamp for agriculture and development. Today, only five percent remains in scattered areas throughout northwestern Ohio.

⁵² ‘Background of the Entire Everglades/Florida Bay Ecosystem’ – South Florida Water Management District

The present Everglades has been subdivided by the construction of canals, levees, roads and other facilities and has resulted in the loss of connections between the central Everglades and adjacent transitional wetlands. …

… the historical Everglades that once extended over an area approximately 40 miles wide by 100 miles long, from the south shore of Lake Okeechobee to the mangrove estuaries of Florida Bay.

⁵³ ‘The Great Black Swamp’ by Jim Mollenkopf

For thousands of years much of northwest Ohio lay covered by a vast, luxuriant swamp. According to early observers parts of it were watery meadows, veritable seas of living, moving green that would undulate beautifully in a summer breeze. Other parts of it were majestic and untouched forests, cathedralesque stands of oak, sycamore and hickory trees that soared skyward and blocked out the sun. Still other parts of it were thick, impenetrable brush and wild growth. Its thousands of square miles spread over all or parts of 12 counties stretching east to west from Sandusky, Ohio to near Fort Wayne, Indiana and north to south from the Maumee River valley to near Findlay, Ohio.

⁵⁴ ‘THE HISTORY OF LAKE ERIE’ by Michael C. Hansen

Fertile clays deposited on the lake bottom during high-water stages and the wetland areas that remained when lake levels dropped form one of the richest agricultural regions of the state. The beaches which formed along the shorelines of these higher lake stages are preserved as ridges elevated above the nearly flat former lake beds. …

…

The sandy beach deposits rising above the nearly flat lake plains, especially in the region called the Black Swamp, in northwestern Ohio, captured the attention of Native Americans and European explorers and settlers because the ridges provided dry passage through the swamps formed on the former lake beds.

⁵⁵ ‘Frontier Fauna – Ohio’s Wild Heritage’ – OHIO STATE PARKS MAGAZINE, FALL/WINTER 2005/2006

As Ohio’s frontier days came to a close, the impenetrable woods of the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio became a last refuge for elk, wolves and lynx. …

⁵⁶ ‘The Great Black Swamp II’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 2000 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, P.37

… For the Indian, “the Maumee River was a delightful homne and a secure retreat,” one unknown early writer recorded. “Its banks were studded with their villages, its rich bottomlands covered with their corn, while their light canoes glided over a beautiful current which was at once a convenient highway and an exhaustless reservoir of food. Forest, stream and prarie produced, spontaneously, and in superabundance, game fish, fruits, nuts, – all things necessary to supply their simple wants.”

⁵⁷ Ibid, P.114

⁵⁸ ‘The Great Black Swamp’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 1999 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, P.41

⁵⁹ ‘The Great Black Swamp II’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 2000 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, pp.49-52

⁶⁰ ‘The Great Black Swamp’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 1999 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, pp.24-25

⁶¹ ‘The Great Black Swamp II’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 2000 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, pp.59-62

“The Great Desert is frequented by roving bands of Indians who have no fixed places of residence but roam from place to place in quest of game.” – Geographical, Statistical and Historical Map of Arkansas Territory by Major Stephen H. Long, Topographical Engineers from the Carey and Lea’s Atlas of 1822 / full map 3184×2703 pixels

The Ogallala Aquifer holds as much water, but spreads over an area seven times the size of Lake Huron. – BLUE: Unconsolidated sand and gravel aquifers at or near the land surface. – YELLOW: Semiconsolidated sand and gravel aquifers. – GRAY: Sand and gravel aquifers of alluvial and glacial origin are north of the line of continental glaciation. Source: USGS

Circles formed by center pivot irrigation in Kearny County, KS. Source: Kansas Geological Survey

Sunflower crop in North Dakota. Source: USDA

Sunflowers ready to harvest in eastern Colorado. Source: Denver Post / Andy Cross

Sources

³⁰ ‘Report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee, August 27, 1936’ [newdeal.feri.org/hopkins/hop27.htm] See maps of ground cover, rainfall and wind speed.

³¹ ‘Ogallala Aquifer’ – Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer] “Much of the plains region is semi-arid with steady winds that hasten evaporation of surface water and precipitation.”

³² ‘American buffalo, (Bison bison)’ – U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service “Because the great herds were nearly gone before any organized attempts were made to survey populations, we may never know just how many buffalo once roamed North America, although estimates range from 30 to 75 million. “The moving multitude…darkened the whole plains,” wrote Lewis and Clark, who encountered a herd at South Dakota’s White River in 1806.”

³³ ‘Geographical, Statistical and Historical Map of Arkansas Territory by Major Stephen H. Long, Topographical Engineers from the Carey and Lea’s Atlas of 1822’ – The University of Tulsa

“… It is essentially the map documenting Major Stephen H. Long’s 1819-1820 expedition. …”

The Long map became a “master map,” to be built upon and added to by a generation of cartographers …

…

The delineation of the area as a desert, unsuitable for sustainable agriculture such as was known to Long, a man from New Hampshire, illustrates how the expectations Americans had for the West were turned upside-down when confronted with its realities. The western Plains were not the farmer’s garden or paradise as imagined by Thomas Jefferson; the area was exceedingly arid with unbroken grasslands compared to the wet, green and timbered east.

³⁴ ‘High noon at the Ogallala aquifer’ by Jacques Leslie, Salon.com
“One of the largest underground repositories of water in the world, the Ogallala stretches from Texas to South Dakota and once held more water than Lake Huron. That was a century ago, before the advent of cheap electric pumps gave farmers the power to lift water hundreds of feet”

³⁵ ‘The Good Earth’ by David McConnell [www.mhhe.com/earthsci/geology/mcconnell/demo/hpaq.htm]

… Approximately 170,000 wells draw water from the aquifer that has brought prosperity to an area described by Major Stephen Long in 1819 as “almost wholly unfit for cultivation and . . . uninhabited by people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.” The aquifer covers an area of 480,000 square kilometers, making it the largest area of irrigation-sustained cropland in the world.

…

… the aquifer contains “fossil” water, the product of a wetter ancient climate associated with the end of the last ice age. There is no sufficient contemporary source for water to recharge the whole aquifer although substantial recharge does occur in some areas from streams (e.g. Platte River, Nebraska) and from irrigation projects supplied with surface waters.

³⁶ ‘Aquifer’ – Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer#Misconception]

A common misconception is that groundwater exists in underground rivers (e.g. caves where water flows freely underground). This is only sometimes true in eroded limestone areas known as karst topography which make up only a small percentage of Earth’s area. More usual is that the pore spaces of rocks in the subsurface are simply saturated with water — like a kitchen sponge — which can be pumped out …

The beach provides a model to help visualize an actual aquifer. If a hole is dug into the sand, very wet or saturated sand will be located at a shallow depth. This hole is a crude well, the wet sand represents an aquifer, and the level to which the water rises in this hole represents the water table.

³⁷ ‘GROUND WATER ATLAS of the UNITED STATES’ – United States Geological Survey [capp.water.usgs.gov/gwa/ch_d/D-text2.html]

… the velocity of water that moves through the aquifer is estimated to average about 1 foot per day.” [At that rate, to go 400 miles, as does the Arkansas River through Kansas, would take 5786 years.]

…

The potential yield of wells is greater than 750 gallons per minute in most of Nebraska and large parts of Kansas. A well capable of producing 750 gallons per minute can irrigate 125 acres and effectively supply one center-pivot irrigation system.

³⁸ ‘GROUND WATER FOR HOUSEHOLD WATER SUPPLY IN RURAL AMERICA: PRIVATE WELLS OR PUBLIC SYSTEMS?’ – Andrew W. Stone, American Ground Water Trust, Concord, NH 03301, USA [www.agwt.org/Education_Papers/RuralWaterInUSA.pdf] “The evolution of drilling technology in the late 1870s was important for opening up much of the Midwest and High Plains, especially in those areas where few rivers were perennial. … Once drilling machines, and wind powered pumps became economically available, settlement patterns were changed by the almost ubiquitous availability of ground water for domestic water use.”

³⁹ ‘Mining Water’ by Richard Cowen, University of California, Davis [www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/~GEL115/115CH18miningwater.html]

Cheap deep drilling for water wells became available only in the 1930s, and powerful submerged electric pumps were invented just as the government provided Federally subsidized installation of electric power on farms all across the Plains. As the United States came out of the Depression years into a highly stimulated wartime economy, farmers were encouraged by cheap loans and strong crop prices to maximize production. Deep drilling and irrigation with Ogallala water became economic options for the first time, but the generally wet years of the 1940s did not require much additional water for irrigation. Some innovative farmers were rewarded for their enterprise by bumper crops, but for many others the natural rainfall gave a good return.

Ogallala water allowed the agricultural transformation of the High Plains in the 1950s. Renewed drought led to major well drilling, especially on the Texas High Plains. With the technology now well established, the water pumped and the acreage irrigated increased dramatically. …

⁴⁰ ‘Hugh Hammond Bennett Stopped Further Dust Bowls’ – TheParagraph.com [theparagraph.com/2007/01/hugh-hammond-bennett-stopped-further-dust-bowls]

⁴¹ ‘The High Plains’ – Bureau of Land Management Environmental Education

… Approximately 90 percent of the water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer is used for irrigation. Precipitation and surface streams replenish the aquifer, but surface streams in the arid High Plains are sparse and many are ephemeral, wet only at certain times of the year. Because of the heavy demand for water and the slow replenishment rate, the average water level of the aquifer declined nearly 3 m between 1940 and 1980, then another 30 cm in the 1980s. Better water management and new technologies have helped to slow this depletion. However, greater efforts will be needed to ensure that the water levels in the aquifer stabilize.

⁴² ‘Kansas Ground Water’ – Kansas Geological Survey

In terms of measured declines in the water table, a 10-foot (3-m) decline has been common across much of western Kansas. The much greater declines – in some cases the water table is now 200 feet (60 m) below its level prior to irrigation – are mostly centered in southwestern and west-central Kansas, where irrigation development has been greatest and the amount of water in the aquifer [in Kansas] has been greatest.

⁴³ ‘Farmers’ tower of power’ By Jeremy P. Meyer, Denver Post, 10/02/2006

For three decades, farmer Dennis Coryell has seen the amount of water that can be pumped from his field’s well drop from 1,200 gallons a minute to 600 gallons a minute.

…

“Sunflowers just take less water, less overall input,” he said. “They are a real hardy crop. They produce well under arid conditions.”

A native to Colorado’s Eastern Plains, sunflowers need about 30 percent less water than corn and 50 percent less than hay, said Ron Meyer, a CSU Cooperative Extension agronomist.

“It’s probably the fastest-growing crop in Colorado,” Meyer said. “A couple of years ago, we had 80,000 acres. Last year, we had 215,000 acres.”

⁴⁴ ‘High Plains Sunflower Production Handbook’ – Colorado State University – Kansas State University – University of Nebraska – University / USDA–ARS—Central Great Plains Research Station, Akron, Colorado – pdf

Sunflower has an extensive root system that is capable of using large amounts of available soil water from deep in the soil profile. In a detailed study of sunflower root development and soil water use in Kansas, researchers found 87 to 96 percent of observed roots in the sampled soil profile were above 65 inches, although some roots were found as deep as 106 inches.

For ages before, tough grasses had held the soil and fed the buffalo that, in turn, fed the Indians⁶⁹. But Americans whacked down that food chain: the Army vanquished the Comanches, Texans killed the last millions of the southern plains buffalo, and farmers plowed up the grass. The farmers were urged to move to the region by cattle ranch investors and the federal government. Unlike buffalo, cattle did not fare well on the southern High Plains, with its wind-whipped winters and harsh summer heat⁷⁰. So around 1900, when the market price of cattle dropped, owners divided the huge ranches into small sections to sell to farmers. Marketeers lured farmers with claims such as “rain follows the plow”, saying that the very act of farming would bring rain in that arid land⁷¹. The federal government wanted to populate the region. It gave farmers free train rides to No Man’s Land, and stated that the soil “is the one resource that cannot be … used up⁷²x⁷³.” Cowboys also had something to tell the sodbusters: “the best side is up, don’t plow it under⁷⁴.” Farmers used tractors and the disc plow to turn under the grass of 33 million acres, and many did well selling wheat, until the grain market crashed, not long after the stock market crash of 1929⁷⁵. About the same time a dry phase started in the Great Plains, and in 1930 the first dust storm of the period kicked up in western Kansas. The storm – black and rolling and crackling – was a curiosity. The weather bureau wrote it up and filed it away⁷⁶.

“I didn’t know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence,” said Hugh Hammond Bennett of the government’s claim that the soil cannot be used up. Bennett knew the country’s soil. He grew up farming in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains using contour plowing and terracing, studied land use in college, went to work as a scientist for the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and took soil surveys in every state in the country⁷⁷. In his field work he discovered sheet erosion, where each heavy rain takes a thin layer of uncovered soil. Few policy makers cared about soil erosion, but more took notice in 1928 when Bennett published a USDA report, “Soil Erosion: A National Menace”, which helped him get funding for a national soil erosion study⁷⁸. In 1933, the energetic, problem-tackling New Deal administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) came in, and Bennett became head of the new Soil Erosion Service. With over 150 Civilian Conservation Corps camps at his command, Bennett set up many large demonstration projects for erosion control, planting trees and cover crops, and building control structures. But Bennett wanted a permanent soil conservation agency, and, a few days after Black Sunday, he went to Capitol Hill to try to sell a Senate committee on creating one. Bennett knew that a dust storm was coming up the Ohio River Valley bound for D.C., so he stretched out his testimony. “Chapter by chapter, he annotated each dismal page with facts and figures from a reconnaissance he had just completed,” wrote a Bennett biographer, William Brink. “Out of one corner of his eye, he noted the polite stifling of a yawn, but Hugh Bennett continued deliberatively. … Presently one of the senators remarked—off the record—‘It is getting dark. Perhaps a rainstorm is brewing.’ Another ventured, ‘Maybe it’s dust.’ ‘I think you are correct,’ Bennett agreed. ‘Senator, it does look like dust.’ The group gathered at a window. The dust storm for which Hugh Bennett had been waiting rolled in like a vast steel-town pall, thick and repulsive. The skies took on a copper color. The sun went into hiding. The air became heavy with grit.” Before the month ended, FDR signed the Soil Conservation Act, creating the Soil Conservation Service. Bennett, as head of the new agency, created Soil Conservation Districts where the farmers in an area contract to use soil holding methods, and get federal guidance, equipment, seeds, supplies and labor for doing so⁷⁹. These Soil Conservation Districts kept another dust bowl from forming during similar droughts in later decades⁸⁰. The government also helped by turning parts of the Dust Bowl area back to its natural state, and today the Forest Service plans to bring buffalo back to the southern plains in these national grasslands⁸¹x⁸².

Black Sunday

Above 3 maps from Report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee, August 27, 1936

Reseeded prairie, Baca County, Colorado (from series compiled by R.E. Rosiere, Tarleton State University, Texas)

Sources

⁶¹ ‘Ford County Dust Bowl Oral History Project – Interview: Clayton Hall’ July 29, 1998

⁶² ‘Ford County Dust Bowl Oral History Project – Interview: Arthur W. Leonard’ June 23, 1998

⁶³ ‘The Worst Hard Time’ by Timothy Egan © 2006 P.8

⁶⁴ Ibid pp.198-199

⁶⁵ Ibid drifts P.158; mud drops P.264; death pp.5-6,173

… Dr. John H. Blue of Guymon, Oklahoma, said he treated fifty-six patients for dust pneumonia … He was blunt. The doctor had looked inside an otherwise healthy young farm hand, a man in his early twenties, and told him what he saw. “You are filled with dirt,” the doctor said. The young man died within a day. – P.173

⁶⁶ Ibid pp.180,195,236

⁶⁷ Ibid P.223

One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been “essentially destroyed” and could not be farmed again, Bennet said. Think about the size, Bennet said: an area stretching five hundred miles north to south and three hundred miles east to west was drifting and dusted; two thirds of the total area of the Great Plains had been damaged by severe wind erosion – an environmental disaster bigger than anything in American history.

⁶⁸ Ibid pp.150-2

⁶⁹ Ibid pp.16-17

⁷⁰ Ibid P.22

⁷¹ Ibid pp.24-5

⁷² Ibid P.37

⁷³ ‘Hugh Hammond Bennett: the Father of Soil Conservation’ by Maurice G. Cook, Emeritus Professor of Soil Science, North Carolina State University

Also in 1909, as a measure of the Bureau’s view of the perishability of soils, whether by erosion, by chemical or physical degradation, or by these factors in combination, the Bureau of Soils published its Bulletin 55. In this Bulletin, Professor Milton Whitney, Chief of the Bureau of Soils, argued that the soil was of inexhaustible and permanent fertility: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the Nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” At a later time, Bennett reacted to Whitneys statement: “I didn’t know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence.” While Whitney no longer censored discussions of erosion out of Bennett’s reports, he apparently intended to “cool” Bennett down by sending him on surveys and projects in Alaska and Cuba, and in South and Central America.

⁷⁴ ‘The Worst Hard Time’ by Timothy Egan © 2006 P.25

⁷⁵ Ibid 33 million acres P.101; tractor & plow P.47; did well selling wheat pp.42-43; market crash pp.101-102

⁷⁶ Ibid P.88

⁷⁷ ‘Hugh Hammond Bennett: the Father of Soil Conservation’ by Maurice G. Cook, Emeritus Professor of Soil Science, North Carolina State University

⁷⁸ Ibid

Soon after the publication of this circular, Bennett finally saw some federal funding approved for erosion research. This came about through his connection to A. B. Conner, Director of the Texas Experiment Station. According to a prearranged plan, Conner was to discuss erosion with Congressman Buchanan of Texas. When the congressman maintained, as they expected he would, that federal money was to be spent for defense, Conner would bring up the large expenditure for battleships, and then argue that protecting the soil that supports the citizenship protects the nation. This devious arrangement worked and, as a result, Bennett was soon asked to testify before Buchanan’s subcommittee. An amendment was attached to the 1929 appropriation for the Department of Agriculture authorizing $160,000 over four years for soil erosion research. This money was to be used by the USDA “to investigate the causes of soil erosion and the possibility of increasing the absorption of rainfall by the soil in the United States.”

⁷⁹ ‘Small Farms, Externalities, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s Gary D. Libecap University of Arizona National Bureau of Economic Research and Zeynep K. Hansen Washington University, St. Louis July 26, 2002 – PDF file

The government response was the organization of Soil Conservation Districts to coordinate erosion control efforts and to subsidize investments. Since the federal government did not have authority to regulate private land use via local government units, state legislation was required. 18 states enacted some variant of the law by June 1937 and all had by 1947. Once state legislation was enacted, farmers in a region could form a Soil Conservation District upon petition and favorable vote. In the Great Plains states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and North and South Dakota there were 39 districts by 1938 covering 18,248,000 acres and 568 covering 318,316,000 acres by 1950.39 Within the districts, individual farmers entered into contracts with the SCS to cooperate in reducing soil erosion for five years. The SCS would provide equipment, seeds, fencing, and personnel for erosion control. Erosion control ordinances imposing land use regulations on all farmers could be adopted upon a favorable vote of a majority of the farmers in a district. Under the statute, the district supervisors could occupy parts of farms and begin erosion control with the costs plus 5 percent levied by court order against the farmer. Further, farmers who did not comply were ineligible for SCS assistance.

⁸⁰ Ibid – PDF file

The Dust Bowl was one of the most severe environmental crises in North America in the 20th Century. Severe drought and damaging wind erosion hit in the Great Plains in 1930 and lasted through 1940. Sustained strong winds blew away an average of 480 tons per acre of topsoil. Although there were similarly severe droughts in the Great Plains earlier in the 19th century and later in the 1950s and 1970s, there were no comparable levels of wind erosion.7 Excessive cultivation in the 1930s is the standard explanation for the Dust Bowl. The issue to be explained is why cultivation was more extensive and use of erosion control techniques more limited in the 1930s than later in the twentieth century.

…

Beginning in 1937, the federal government promoted local soil conservation statutes and districts within each state to subsidize and often force adoption of erosion controls. These included use of strip cropping, certain types of
fallow, terracing, and the planting of trees for windbreaks or shelterbelts. Soil Conservation Districts were established throughout the Great Plains so that by December 1956, there were 827 Soil Conservation Districts in the Great Plains states. The Soil Conservation Districts generally encompassed entire counties or more, and hence, were much larger than individual farms and better able to internalize the externalities associated with soil erosion control and to coordinate anti-erosion efforts among the farmers in their districts. Further, by the 1950s, gradual consolidation increased farm size. As a result, by the 1950s use of wind erosion control techniques was much more prevalent in the Great Plains than in the 1930s.

⁸¹ ‘The Worst Hard Time’ by Timothy Egan © 2006 P.309

⁸² ‘The National Grasslands Story’ – USDA Forest Service

… we saw a set of polar bear tracks ambling off to the west. They were older tracks judging by how drifted they were; however, with all this open water around us one must be near. We have placed our camp on orange alert as a result of the sighting. …

… The day started nice enough, the wind had shifted, cooling things a bit and firming up the snow. But like so many of the other ‘good’ conditions we experienced, it didn’t last.

The light soon went flat and we were once again stumbling blindly forward. It started to snow too, and hard. We wondered if another blizzard was on its way, but it just kept falling at the same steady rate all day. The new snow stuck thickly to the bottom of our skis, made them heavy with no glide. Stopping to scrape the snow and ice off only helped for a few minutes. We switched to snowshoes.

When we put on our MSR snowshoes, it’s like putting a truck into four-wheel drive. We are able to pull the sled-canoes up and around ice that would be impossible with skis. On the down side, our travel slows and we expend extra energy lifting (instead of sliding with skis) each step. Still, without snowshoes, we would still be on the ice post-holing our way to madness or worse.

The only really good part of today was that we were able to laugh about it once it was over. For over six hours, we snowshoed. The sled-canoes seemed like a pallet of bricks and stopped dead at even the slightest pause in forward momentum. The ice was worse – small pans, pressured together in random ways, lots of open water leads filled with compressed snow and some brash ice. We had to veer so much east and west that at times, we thought we might be going in circles.

It’s hard to convey the feelings we have during a day like today. Several times we were near temper tantrum level when a sled-canoe got stuck or a piece of ice disintegrated underneath us. There’s intense fear when facing a tenuous brash ice crossing or relief like when three car-sized chunks of ice heeled over just after (not while) we had hopped across them. Frustration and despair as we scout the route and see more bad ice. Physical exhaustion as we try to pace our efforts. Hunger. Desire to stop and quit. Drive to keep moving forward.

When we finally reached a big flat piece of ice with 15 minutes left in the travel day, we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It is equally hard to describe our emotions now that today is nearly complete. Before today we had hoped for good ice to the Pole, now we expect bad.

Sources

¹ ‘Project Thin Ice’ – Greenpeace

² ‘Last Day in Grand Marais’ – Explorers’ Blog, April 27, 2006

³ ‘Not Easy’ – Explorers’ Blog, June 15, 2006