Why Did Dinosaurs Get So Big? And Pterosaurs Were Such Amazing Fliers?

Pterosaurs were so incredibly good at flying, that some exceeded by a factor of ten or twenty times the maximum mass a bird can fly with (according to the laws of engineering and aerodynamics). How did pterosaurs do this? By using a number of tricks birds never found, starting with a powerful jumping four legged take off (birds lift off with only two legs).

The heaviest mammal ever, Paraceratherium, a sort of horn-less rhinoceros, was no more than 20 tons (he lived in a warmer climate than now, 20 million years ago). The heaviest dinosaurs known so far are the Titanosaurs who lived towards the end of the age of dinosaurs, and reached up to 70 metric tonnes.

 

Ten times more massive than the largest present elephants, five times more massive than the largest mammoths, more than three times more massive than the largest land mammal, ever. Notice the elephant cooling system… Titanosaurs like the one above were rendered possible probably through mesothermia, that is less generation of heat in their cells, or so I suggest. That enabled dinosaurs and pterosaurs to specialize in some advanced ways, in particular giant mass, but left them vulnerable to ecological system collapse, or severe cooling.

The answer for the achievements of these extinct giants is fascinating: it has probably to do with MESOTHERMIA: temperatures in between cold blooded and warm blooded animals. Animals who were neither cold blooded, nor warm blooded got two advantages: they could become more massive (hence less susceptible to infections and various attacks of the environment), and they were more economical: a cold blooded animal needs 30 times less fuel (food) than a warm blooded one (Lavoisier, in the 18C, discovered that animal metabolism was a slow combustion). A parallel essay will develop the more philosophical side.

Endotherm, so-called warm-blooded animals maintain a constant body temperature independent of the external temperatures. Endotherms include birds and mammals; however, some insects, fish, and reptiles can also be endothermic where or when needed, by flexing muscles: a brooding Burmese python on his nest generates heat through muscle contractions. The swim muscle of a tuna reaches mammal-like temperatures, because muscle works better around 37 Celsius. Even some plants and flowers can reach equivalent temperatures in sensitive areas… Because the chemistry is much more active at 37C than at 15 C (the latter is the biosphere average temperature).

If heat loss exceeds heat generation, metabolism increases to make up for the loss or the animal shivers to raise its body temperature: a butterfly which wants to take off in cold weather will move its wings ever more to progressively generate heat which makes the fly muscle efficient enough for taking off. 

If heat generation exceeds the heat loss, mechanisms such as panting or perspiring increase heat loss. Unlike ectotherms, endotherms can be active and survive at quite low external temperatures, but because they must produce heat continuously, they require high quantities of “fuel” (i.e., food).

However, heat loss to the environment can be decreased by the possession of larger body sizes that increase thermal inertia. This happens because surface increases like the square of linear dimension, and mass as the cube. This strategy is illustrated by leatherback turtles, Dermochelys coriacea, whose gigantic body size associated with relatively high rates of muscle metabolism allows for the maintenance of body temperature much warmer than the cold waters used for foraging.

Reciprocally, though, large animals are threatened with overheating: elephants have huge, heavily vascularized flapping ears to help cool down. 

So too big makes too much heat… Except if, to start with, one’s cells have less heat generating capability… The definition of mesotherm animals: as for dinosaurs (certainly) and pterosaurs (probably)... Paradoxically, that mesothermy was made possible by the warm climate of the Jurassic.

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Mid-Cretaceous surface water temperatures were about 30 °C (86 °F) at the Equator year-round, but at the poles they were 14 °C (57 °F) in winter and 17 °C (63 °F) in summer. A temperature of 17 °C was possible for the ocean bottom during the Albian Age, but it may have declined to 10 °C (50 °F) by the Maastrichtian. These temperatures have been calculated from oxygen isotope measurements of the calcitic remains of marine organisms. The end of the Cretaceous was coolest, yet still much warmer than Earth is today.

This entire subject is full of unknowns: how do endotherms generate heat? Mitochondria is a big part of the answer. Eyes and brains of swordfishes, which enjoy mammal like temperatures are full of mitochondria. A team at the University of Paris 7 (one of three alma mater of mine), using new technology, published in 2017 the discovery that mitochondria would reach colossal temperatures, 50 C (this huge surprise has been sort of confirmed since).

What is clear is that the most massive animal who ever lived, our contemporary, the Blue Whale (up to 160 tons, and nearly hunted to extinction), swims in the cool ocean… So the Blue Rorqual is able to dissipate heat in said ocean (Blue Whales swim so fast, they were long out of reach to hunters). 

A way to get rid of dinosaurs and their cousins was then just to lower the temperature of the climate. And sure enough, the climate got cooler, for many million years, towards the end of dinosaurs and after. To compensate, dinosaurs could get even bigger. Is it why Titanosaurs lived at the end of the Cretaceous? Reciprocally, if the climate cooled, or if there was a burst of nuclear winter, mammals and birds, both warm blooded with high metabolism even in colder temps, could survive and eat dinosaur eggs (as I argued; mammal species surviving the extinction Cretaceous-Paleocene were… omnivorous)…

Mesothermia may have enabled dinosaurs, pterosaurs and their cousins to spare themselves the cost and waste of endothermia… and thus have the evolutionary room to specialize in other ways… Maybe even bigger brains (at this point in paleontology, claims have been made of high intelligence for some dinosaurs, including T Rx). 

All this evolutionary specialization, not to say evolutionary hubris, came to a crashing halt 66 million years ago. Brain size seem to have taken more than ten million years to recover…

So here we are, jacks of all trades, and masters of some we are busy inventing. 

Evolutionary speaking we look good, but for that little detail:

PUTIN DELENDUS EST!

Patrice Ayme

Snake Psychoanalysis

Yesterday I launched myself in one of these completely insane plans I use for resetting my values just right, that is most humanly. I went half running, half walking up a low angle mountain, to reach a ridge above the grand canyon of the Mokelumne river. Then the plan was to go east towards another mountain along said ridge, and then down a three mile trail (which I had inaugurated before it was a trail, long ago).

At some point the trail I was on veered full west, but I was going north, where the ridge was. Tired and impatient, I decided to aim at the ridge, cross country. Of these sorts of decisions, the best wildlife encounters are made. Once I met an entire bear family, observing the fact that the pseudo-scientific lore that the bear dad was not staying with bear mom was blatantly false. It became even more interesting when the cubs decided to enquire about the strange ape, and mom barked out orders to all concerned. I was not proud for all too long. That was five miles from the closest trail, another stroke of genius.

So, in my latest ill-conceived plan, I was going up a south facing volcanic slope with a few giant cedar trees, with red fibrous fuzzy bark some probably more than a millennium old, three meters across at the base. There was significant underbrush, in full sun. The ground was black volcanic material. Just the sort of terrain snakes like. Not too cold in winter and the understory, thick in places, provides shade from too much sun. I had my guard down, because I was at 8,000 feet, and I was more worried about the direction of my undertaking, cross country. Suddenly I became aware of a sound, the sound of scales brushing scales, my automatic system said, while motion was detected. This is the sort of interesting situations when part of the brain goes into very slow time. The advantage of slow time is that there is plenty of time for automatized part of the brain for taking decisions. The rest of the brain is like a spectator at the movies, disconnected from all irrelevant sensory information. I had become a optical information processing machine. Brain automatisms focused left less than 4 feet away, trying to comprehend the origin of motion.

A full stop to forward body motion had been ordered. Meanwhile the first analysis came back completely blank: never seen anything like that. Seemed big. Then meta alert systems screamed snake, probably from the fact that motion going one way and the opposite had been detected, while automatic visual analysis made another pass, trying to understand the strange happenings, now in the context of (pacific) snakes. I had no encounter with venomous snake recently, so that’s why i was not panicking.

It was a fascinating flow of occurrences in a potentially disastrous context. In the new snake context my neurology had embraced, this tangle of uniformly grey curves seemed to be an enormous specimen of California Boa (which are found at this altitude, even perched in trees, as I saw at least once; they are olive grey and uniform in color, as I was observing; other snakes have patterns and colors).

So, perfectly cool, because boas, however enormous, are cool, I looked better, and came back with a strikingly black picture, oriented away from me, way out of the dynamically entangling snake’s body: it was long and straight and looked exactly like a fer de lance, the tip of a lance, the last foot and a half of a lance, with an impressive triangular head. I knew what it was, but still couldn’t believe it. RATTLESNAKE! Weirdly, because I was so out of the context of “rattlesnake”, having just been into boas, I didn’t get the adrenalin rush.

Huge Olive grey rattlesnake, Black, Bear Mountain August 2020, 8,000 feet. Picture is fuzzy, but one can see clearly part of the gigantic rattle. I could have taken better pictures, but I didn’t want the situation to degenerate, which could have disastrous consequences for all concerned. Lucky stars shouldn’t be taunted. The snake had sheltered in place, firmly indicated that his black life mattered, and further disturbing of the peace was ill-advised…

I went around the bush at the bottom of the big tree. The snake, a potential escape route blocked, had stopped and SHELTERED IN PLACE, at the foot of the large tree trunk, hidden by a bush.

After getting the camera out, I pondered the alternatives, which were numerous. First I had to thank my lucky star. This had been very close: my face was easily within striking distance of the long creature. Had it decided to attack, and inject venom, instead of retreating, I would have died, just there. And venomous snakes know they are dangerous, and can be extremely aggressive. Some individual snakes are prudent as snakes are supposed to be, and here was apparently one. It was not its fault if it didn’t feel me come, the soil was volcanic sand, so vibrations don’t go far…  And it was trying to go away, its head was as away from me as it was trying to find a place to hide.

Second, I could make tests on animal intelligence. Snakes are one of preferred objects of study. Although I didn’t meet a viper recently, I have met plenty over the years, and I fear them intensely. Although the snake did not initially seem aggressive, I take myself for god, in the matter of snakes, and I practice snake psychoanalysis, according to the highest ethical principles. I don’t kill non venomous snakes. 

Venomous snakes are another matter. Even if they don’t kill you, they can maim you for life. There are two types of venomous snakes, according to me: good guys and bad guys. In Europe, vipers are protected. Still, bad guys die under my jurisdiction. A bad snake is an attacking snake. Now, once in Senegal I saw a Black Mamba. It fled, faster than I could run. One Black Mamba rearing a meter high, will stop a buffalo herd. Lions will not. At that time I was just a child, and not into reptilian psychoanalysis. What did that snake knew which i didn’t?

Another time, in the Grisons, the Swiss Alps, still a child, but an older, more combative sort of child, I was charged, on a trail I was ascending, by a viper. I had no idea why the hissing creature charged down, nor did I have time to ponder the situation. The stone flew instinctively and the viper died instantaneously… In the past, the Alps were full of vipers. Because idiotic humans had killed all the birds who prey on them. Now the birds are back, and the vipers have become very rare. 

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I am not going to tell all my snakes stories here, that would take a book. A memorable one was in Verdon, a deep gorge in France where climbing is practiced. We were 300 meters up, and my partner above had stopped. Suddenly he screamed: VIPER! I looked up and saw a strange sight: a snake, flying in the air!  The viper was undulating in such a way it had achieved some form of lift. Very recent studies have shown that, indeed, just as all snakes can swim, some can fly. They flatten their bodies and become flying bodies. My partner had got to the end of the rope, where the belay was. It was a very narrow ledge, barely the width of a hand, he had to stop and the venomous legless one threatened him, before deciding to take flight. How it found itself on that mini ledge, at the bottom of a chimney with very smooth walls which I led next, was extremely baffling.

It reminded me of my grandfather mantling on a ledge, also at the end of his rope, and finding a viper on the same ledge. Or my spouse, following the pitch I had just led, on a huge 2,000 feet high rock climb in Ailefroide, confronted by a three foot long black viper. 

That Bear Mountain rattlesnake was dark grey, exactly the color of the ground in the area, and of the treebark it was lodged along. No patterns. I had never seen the description of such a snake, and I believe it’s a new subspecies. The closest black rattlesnake is an endangered species in Arizona, 1,000 kilometers away. But it was a rattlesnake alright, it was brandishing above itself an impressive six inches (15 cm) rattle, purple and white.

To ascertain the character of the astonishing creature, I delicately threw its way, light pieces of bark. It hissed mightily after each impact in its vicinity, but did not rattle. Nor did it charge out. Its message was clearly: I will defend myself, but I am not going to attack. It was definitely a good guy, and I stopped bothering it. We had met by happenstance. It could have killed me, but it let me live, and the least I could do, was to do the same. I also suspect it’s a new subspecies, or at least certainly a special breed. 

That Black Life mattered and was allowed to proceed.

But I will have to remind myself never to go across that particular stretch, and in the three cross country episodes which followed the preceding in the next two hours, I was much more careful in aiming for open ground. 

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For “animal lovers”, let me explain a bit more: my main relaxation is to go through wild areas, for example mountain ranges. OK, the word “relaxation” may seem strange, as much of the usually unused part of the brain have to be on high alert… But the rest of the brain can relax. In the sea, in Africa, I used to swim with harpoon and a huge serrated combat knife on the leg. Being so equipped is reassuring when next to the greatest white shark you have ever seen (another story). In the wild ranges, when I feel in danger, I carry stones. Once I was charged by a Black Bear, in Yosemite Back Country, and I threw a hefty stone at him. Usually, when confronted by aggressive bears, I throw stones at trees, and that’s enough to make them go away: bears know and fear stones, if you are master of stones, you are master of something they fear, and they flee. But that particular bear had attacked a whole caravan of backcountry hikers earlier, and made a good meal from their backpacks. And I was carrying chickens (for a BBQ with family and friends, ten miles from the road). Chicken dinner made Mr. Bear nuts with desire, and he charged. Until he met with my stone. Thereafter he fled for his life. Three weeks later, rangers tracked it down, and killed it. It had grievously injured a grandmother. 

Good wild animals, even snakes, generally respect humans. Bad ones… well, except if extremely endangered species, they should die. This is implicitly the policy set in place in California. Authorities kill bad bears, bad coyotes, and bad mountain lions. Only thus can these dangerous animals be allowed to live in proximity to humans, because only good animals fostering good animal culture are allowed to live.

The case of rattlesnakes is striking. Although there is no such a thing as rattlesnake culture, there are definitively varying rattlesnake mentalities. Most are pacific, but some are not. Twice I met rattlers barring my way. Once it was on a fireroad, but the snake was seven feet long, or so. The other time, the night was coming, and the path was very narrow, and Mr. Snake, blocking my way, was determined to fight. The first snake had to be hit by stones twice before it made way, the second kept on fighting until it was dead. That was clearly a dangerous snake, and it could have killed somebody. In the Berkeley hills, once, in the 1970s, a single rattlesnake killed two young men. Like me, they had been on a slope… And there the hospital is a few miles away…       

What does this all mean? Once I met a gentleman with his pet gopher snake around his neck, a full six feet long. He had found it once in his garden while small. What is striking is that, if you meet a gopher in the wild, it will flee at great speed. Cornered it will try to bite, and make pungy excrements. But there this ex-wild snake was perfectly tame. my five year old daughter played with it. Gopher snake’s brains are peanut sized. Still, high performance. Why? Because they are Quantum Computers. They are all we are, just on much reduced scale: consciousness, and even conscientiousness,  a picture of what the world should be. That large rattler I met survived all sorts of predators, probably by being conscientious about not being over aggressive and over confident. Earlier, I had seen two large Golden Eagles hunting. If they had seen that snake in the open, it was dead. But, for decades, they didn’t see that snake in the open, or then if they did see it, it sheltered in place in such a way that eagles would be discouraged in attacking… which was certainly the case I witnessed.

Survival of the fittest. Meanwhile I am going to think twice before going cross country with underbrush, two hours from road and cell coverage…

Patrice Ayme   

 

Climate Change and International Transport

We need a hydrogen economy. However, on day one of his presidency, Obama ripped out all financing for hydrogen, including for hydrogen fuel cell research… It became clear later that the boy was advised by the frucking frackers: recently, thanks to Obama (not Trump!), the USA produced 30% more petroleum, 13.3 million barrels a day, than the country which produced the most aside from the USA (Saudi Arabia at its peak)

US fuel cells had enabled the US to go to the Moon (and provided fireworks for Apollo 13). I doubt Barry the Boy knew this (he is best at knowing very little besides how to feed people with what they want to hear).

Here professor Ian Miller, a chemist and physicist of renown, points out that shipping is an ecological disaster (one cruise ship in Marseilles, idling in port, pollutes as much as two million cars at speed limit). And the solution? Hydrogen (or Ammonia, roughly the same, but more civilized)…

Making “green” hydrogen is a must. Just use PV solar panels for energy (or even wind, which I like less). Storing it as ammonia is a no brainer for safe storage and transportation. Actually, last I checked there was such a giant project in North-West Australia to send “green” energy to Japan… Probably to calm the likes of yours truly about Japan’s much more real plan to replace its nuclear industry with Australian coal. So Japan and Australia get financed by states and countries which go clean… while they go fish whales and pollute North America, killing American frogs, smothering the planet… While pretending to go green by killing non-killing nuclear energy.

All boats could use sails, as supplementary power, either as rotors, or the turbosail invented by Cousteau and associates, or even computer controlled kites. Those have not been developed because of the subsidies and tax-free status given to shipping (although full scale prototypes have shown they work.. up to 25% reduction of energy). One can expect considerable reduction in energy demand (also achievable by reducing speeds).

[2018 Viking “Grace”, a 2800 passengers, 500 cars ferry between Finland and Sweden. the single rotor sail on top is supposed to diminish carbon emission by 900 tons a year; the ship is otherwise fueled by natural gas, CH4, which as close to hydrogen as it gets in a naturally occuring fuel… Thus less polluting…]

In any case, just like the fracking Obama, great fracker-in-chief, the Paris accord was self-satisfying hogwash (consider Japan, Germany and their coal reintroduction)… Paradoxically energy guzzling Texas led by rabid “Red” governor Perry (now Trump energy sec.), did way better in going green (lots of wind)… The problem with Paris is that countries are supposed to self-improve, at a pace of their own choosing. The virus is doing better to reduce CO2 production, quicker.

Maybe all we can hope for is to balance one catastrophe by another?

PA

ianmillerblog

You probably feel that in terms of pollution and transport, shipping is one of the good guys. Think again. According to theEconomist(March 11, 2017) the emissions of nitrogen and sulphur oxides from 15 of the world’s largest ships match those from all the cars on the planet. If the shipping industry were a country, it would rank as the sixth largest carbon dioxide emitter. Apparently 90%of trade is seaborne, and in 2018, 90,000 ships burn two billion barrels of the dirtiest fuel oil, and contribute 2 – 3% of the world’s total greenhouse emissions. And shipping is excluded from the Paris agreement on climate change. (Exactly how they wangled that is unclear.) The International Maritime Organization wants to cut emissions by 50% by 2050, but prior to COVID-19, economic growth led to predictions of a six-fold increase by then!

Part of the problem is the fuel: heavy bunker…

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450 Million Dead Possible? Something To Take Seriously, Right Away.

COVID 19 Is A BIG ONE. We are under attack by the worst infectious disease since 1918!

Today I will endorse my hat of panicker-in-chief. I will attract attention on a point not mentioned in the media: the potential global lethality of SARS 2/COVID19. The question of the potential global lethality of the Coronavirus is ignored. We hear whining all over about not endangering economic activity, so France and the US have not gone in panic mode yet (what the French call stage3 epidemic). 

Anyway, here are the scary numbers, as of March 8, 2020:

ACTIVE CASES, Currently Infected Patients: 43,975

37,998 (86%) in Mild Condition

5,977 (14%) Serious or Critical

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CLOSED CASES, Cases which had an outcome: 66,110

62,280 (94%) Recovered / Discharged

3,830 (6%) Deaths

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Another unexpected exponential strikes!

At first sight this seems to indicate a lethality of 6% [1]. However that maybe an overestimate: lethality has been above  5% in Wuhan, in the first three months of the epidemic there, according to Chinese medical authorities. That high rate is due to the effect of surprise and the medical system being overwhelmed: 2,000 medical personnel got infected. In the rest of China, the death rate has been much lower: a number of treatments are tried and perhaps working. Just providing mechanical oxygen saves half of the patient who would otherwise die. China is now able to try to cure patients by giving them antibodies in serum of recovered patients.

Now it’s cold in China in winter, people gather in warm places. So it remains to be seen whether the virus will spread as effectively in tropical areas. If it does, this means that an expected slowdown after cold winter months will not happen.

During the famous Black Plague of 1348 CE, around half of Europe died… But no nobles: armed with cats, civettes, and knowledge about transmission, European nobles kept the plague bacillus, and its vectors, fleas from rats, at bay. The economic impact and the impact of civilization was, weirdly, neglectable, or even positive: salaries went up. technology accelerated.

We have in some ways a similar situation. First, humanity has no immunity against Corona viruses… except for the few who got SARS 1, MERS, Ebola, and now SARS2 and recovered. This is different from the Flu A, B, C, etc… The Flu is always around, and people can keep, partly a life long immunity. Those exposed to the Avian (?) Flu of  1918 (so-called Spanish Flu which seems to have started in Kansas military camps…) kept a life long immunity against Avian Flus, sort of. Enough to prevent a repeat of 1918, when at least twenty million died.

Because nearly nobody has immunity against SARS 2 aka COVID 19, one may reasonably expect, in the worst case, a worldwide infection. That would be a bit more than 400 million dead.

I am not saying that this will happen. I am saying political leaders worldwide should assume that the death of many millions will happen… If they don’t take extreme measures to augment distanciation between individuals… as the People Republic of China succeed to do. But the case of China is special: a very powerful Communist Party and very advanced science and technology.

I have condemned China for having made the situation worse with its closed society, by keeping the infection secret too long. However now that the catastrophe is upon us, China was able to turn the catastrophe around as very few countries could… Singapore was able to. Singapore is an independent Chinese country, saw its first case January 23. Six weeks later it is barely above 100.

Italy, belatedly copied China sort of, with a country-wide ban on unnecessary travel (under the threat of jail). It remains to see if it works. Other most advanced countries have been too slow: France on 8 march banned gathering of more than 1,000 people: France and all of Europe should have followed Switzerland, which did it a week earlier. Clearly all gatherings should be banned, worldwide, except if absolutely necessary.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1994, recommended basically no air travel and “absolutely no cruise ships“… on Fox News, March 8…

Sometimes, panic is the wisest course. This is one of these times. 

With maximum, aggressive distanciation, a few millions will probably die. Without, several dozen millions dead are guaranteed [2].

As far as the biosphere is concerned, humanity was the ultimate disease. SARS 2-COVID 19 is a first counterattack. As far as humanity is concerned, an interesting twist is that the older people (above 80) get affected around 100 times more than those below 40. Hence an occasion for the young to kill the old. This time. Next time may be different. So are we in this this together? A litmus test is in sight[3].

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Lower estimates of lethality have been obtained through the optimistic, yet erroneous computations where the number of death is divided by the total number of cases… Then getting something like 3.5%. Stupid. A smarter approach is to claim that 2/3 of the cases go undetected: that would give a lethality rate of 2%. To get the rate down to 1%, one would have to assume that the Chinese detected only one case out of six…

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[2] HIV killed 35 millions… But over decades.

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[3] One has to change the economy, fiscally and investment-wise: one needs to shrink the billionaire class and augment the carbon free economy and the science based economy. In 2009, Obama just reflated the plutocracy and its banks, and their monopoly powers, say on Intellectual Property; doing nothing, in other words.. Now the viruses have come to roost: the Coronaviruses. SARS, MERS, Ebola, have been warning for more than 20 years… and precious little was done.

Australian Thunderstorm Or GMO Asthma?

Comic Relief From Plutocratic Media: People Are Allegedly Poisoned By Thunderstorm. Instead, We Suggest Man-Made Poisons Are Mostly At Fault:

I read to my lawyer the Thunderstorm Asthma story, out of Melbourne Australia. When told that there were several millions hectares of pasture and agriculture just where the thunderstorm came from, my lawyer sneered: “this is a bogus story. They are hiding the fact it is all about GMOs, insecticides and herbicides. I was stunned by my lawyer’s perspicacity.

Here is the story, from the New York Times:

‘Thunderstorm Asthma’ Kills 8 in Australia, NOV. 29, 2016

SYDNEY, Australia — When David McGann left his office in Melbourne just after 5 p.m. to cycle home, a stifling heat had settled across the city, and the temperature was peaking at 95 degrees.

A hot, gusty northerly wind picked up. Rain clouds had gathered across the skyline, but there was little relief. “It was the hottest day of the season,” said Mr. McGann, 35, who manages accounts at a law practice. “By the time I got home and had a swim, my chest had started to tighten.”

[When] Mr. McGann’s partner… returned, he was on the couch, sitting quietly, struggling for breath. The inhaler he found after rummaging through drawers was five years past its expiration date.

Mr. McGann was one of thousands of people in Melbourne having an attack of thunderstorm asthma. They flooded the city’s emergency rooms, swamped ambulance call lines and joined lines around pharmacies during six hours on Nov. 21. All were struggling for breath. About 8,500 people went to hospitals. Eight have died, and one remains in intensive care more than a week after a thunderstorm surged across Melbourne, carrying pollen that strong winds and rain broke into tiny fragments.

Perennial ryegrass seeds were swept up in whorls of wind and carried from four million hectares of pasturelands (about 9.9 million acres) that lie to Melbourne’s north and west. If broken into fragments, they are so fine that they can be inhaled.” 

Actually what also lie north and west of Melbourne are giant fields of canola. Consider the following propaganda picture (later I will show the truth, namely technicians going through said fields in chemical hazard suits):

These Fields Are Poisoned With Herbicides and Pesticides At Such A Level, That Plants Have to Be Genetically Modified To Survive The Added Poisons. Question: Have These Children Been Genetically Modified By The Gates Of Hell, So That They Can Survive, Too?

Here is the New York Times again:

“So many people became ill so quickly that some of the state’s crisis medical teams were stretched beyond their limits. Firefighters and police officers stepped in where paramedics were overloaded. Triage centers at 10 hospitals struggled with admissions across Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, with a population of 4.4 million in the greater metropolitan area and suburbs.”

And then the New York Times plunged into the mysteries of how ryegrass kernels could get deep in the lungs. At this point, we are getting into disinformation. Full information would observe not only that the cases have augmented:

“An earlier episode, in November 1989, sent 277 people to hospitals, and 47 were admitted…

Grass pollen is usually too large to enter the small airways of the lungs…
Emergency services were surprised by the number of so-called silent patients. “They appear O.K., but their airways are so obstructed that they are concentrating, really focusing, on staying upright and just breathing,” Dr. Baker said.

Mr. McGann did not end up in the hospital. But by the time he found a pharmacy open late, he was beginning to panic. “Every breath I took made the next breath harder,” he said, adding that he had no family history of asthma. “I just didn’t realize it could have the effect it had.”

Grass pollen is the primary source of allergies in southern Australia, and tracking the data allowed scientists to forecast high levels of grass seeds in the atmosphere on Nov. 21. Still, Ms. Hennessy said, the government was taken by surprise.”

Surprise, indeed, this did not happen before, by two orders of magnitude. How come so much more severity?

My lawyer’s theory is different.  It evolved from my own observations and theories of why asthma and allergies, let alone weird cancers, have been augmenting spectacularly. There are around 150,000 artificial, man-made chemical products in use. By medical drug standards, they are untested (in earlier essays, I mentioned 80,000, which is the number brandished in the USA; however, French specialists talk about 150,000 untested chemicals.).

Canola (or rapeseed), Brassica napus, is an oilseed crop which is cultivated for its high quality edible oil used in many foods (eg. margarines and cooking oil) and seed meal (the fibrous material left after the oil pressing process), which has a high protein content. That makes it highly desirable as a stock feed.

In 2010-11, the Australian state of Victoria, where Melbourne is located,  produced 476 thousand tonnes of canola with a gross value of $293 million.

Control of weeds, particularly weeds from the Brassicaceae family (broadleaf), through herbicide application during the canola-growing season, significantly improves the quantity of the grain produced. Weeds compete for space, nutrients and sunlight. (African countries have dismissed that the quality of GMO seed is higher, in contradistinction with US propaganda; quite the opposite, they say)

Two genetically modified (GM) canola varieties have been developed in Australia, Roundup Ready® (by Monsanto Australia Ltd) and InVigor® (by Bayer CropSciences Pty Ltd). For maximum effect, each GM variety has been developed to be tolerant to and hence used with, a specific herbicide. The result is the mass poisoning of the planet, horizon to horizon.

Our Workers Are Protected With Hazard Suits. Your Children Can Get Asthma, Cancer, Attention Deficit Disorder, We Will Sell You Drugs, To Alleviate Their Pain, With Obamacare, Or Its Ilk.

The same poisoning trick is used for insecticides. To boot, the poison resistance spreads, demanding even higher doses of poison to be used in the grand outdoors..

In other words, massive quantities of poisons are put in the soil, and from there, are kicked up, in the air.

Exposed to this life destroying poisons, the body reacts by shutting down all pores. Asthma.

Some will say that we have no proof of what we advance. True. But what is a proof? Logicians themselves are not too sure (Kurt Gödel famous showed that there are always unproven truths, in any theory which allows one to count with integers). What we have here is the beginning of a proof: mass asthma in the State of Victoria started coincidentally with mass poisoning of the State of Victoria. Thunderstorms did not start yesterday, nor did ryegrass. Two new factors surging simultaneously: if one has more intelligence than journalists in Main Stream Media, one will suspect that they are correlated, and maybe, even causally related. The burden rests on the side of those who dismiss the plausible causation. Especially considering what is at stake.

But Obama just gave the Gates the “Medal of Freedom”. The Gates have been immense promoters of GMOs and Monsanto (from which they got employees, and in which they are invested, so they can become ever richer). Through their “Foundation”, which ostensibly cares about health (health or death, that is the question).

Some countries have started to outlaw Monsanto. Their leaders were not paid enough, and, or, they speak French (as in Burkina Faso).

Gates of hell.

Patrice Ayme’

No Beasts, No Cry

The Kenyan government burned 100 tons of seized elephant ivory. Meanwhile in France, the environment minister outlawed the trade of any ivory object younger than 1947.

We hear from animal activists everywhere that animals should not be hurt anymore. Then they hop on a plane, and produce lots of biosphere killing CO2. How do we teach those fools that biocide is a greater crime than the suffering of a particular organism?

So let’s push the logic of the whiners to extremes. Say that, on January 1, 2017, the trade or exploitation of all and any animal part is forbidden. How much good would that do?

Africans, For Some Reason, Prefer To Enjoy Life Rather Than To Feed The Beasts. Because Villagers In Niger Were Gulped Down At An Unsustainable Rate, The Army, Well Trained By Hunting Jihadists, Was Called In.

What will happen? OK, a few hundreds of millions of people would die relatively soon from malnutrition. But let’s neglect this inconvenient truth. Anti-speciesists tell us that humans are no more worthy than insects.

What would happen to the animals? Well, they would have no more economic utility. They would also present some inconvenience: forget swimming in rivers full of giant lampreys, crocodiles, or seas full of sharks and sea-going crocodiles.

Africans kill wild beasts, because wild beasts are dangerous. I have seen villagers kill venomous snakes. Even In India, land of the beasts, villagers can get tired, when a single leopard kills more than 200 people. Such attacks still happen. Elephants too can be dangerous. Videos are out there, where an elephant will attack and gore, and throw in the air, and then again and again, and finally tramples… a calf.

Still, right now, national parks are reasonably safe. I have come across large ferocious beasts in my life such as various bears (several of them threatening), lions, leopards, boars, etc. They all fled in the end, except for a charging cow which nearly got me, and a wild horse which kicked me (don’t ask).

But ferocious beasts dominate their natural ferocity and inclination to destruction, mostly because large ferocious animals are wise, clever, and completely aware of the power and cruelty of Homo. And were taught that way by their parents and fellow ferocious beasts.

If one removed that psychological factor, things would change. Ferocious beasts would start to see Homo as dinner, or an irritation.

Respecting other animals, and conceding the planet to them would make our lives very uncomfortable. Vegetarians from India may object. However, last I checked there were only a few thousands tigers there, and less than 300 (Indian) lions. 300,000 years ago, lions were the most frequent large animal (because they ate anything, from rabbits to elephants: the European and American lions were significantly larger than present African lions).

It has been suggested that Homo was prevented to penetrate the Americas, for millions of years, by Arctodus Simus, the Short Faced bear, a huge, nightmarish carnivore. Arctodus was extremely carnivorous, extremely fast (70 km/h). Only advanced weapons, 12,000 years ago, were able to master the beast… into extinction.

So are we willing to have ferocious animals around, just to look at them, and fear, and flee, for our lives, which, should we turn pacific, would become short and brutish?

I think not.

To preserve the animal kingdom, it has to manage, and even economically exploited. I am for the reintroduction of (genetically re-engineered) lions, rhinoceroses and mammoths in Europe, grizzlies in California, jaguars in Arizona (there is at least one, eating immigrants, probably). However, the animals will have to be managed. So they have to pay for their own maintenance.

One can persuade Africans to tolerate elephants, if they bring enough cash to tolerate all the problems they do, and will, cause.

On the coast of New England, in some places, thousands of seals bask in the sun. Sharks, great white sharks, will follow. Then what? Will the secret service swim around the president if he dared to stop golfing, and took a dip in the sea?

That animals had formidable rights, long neglected, was a music to the Nazis’ ears. It is actually hilariously terrifying to read the 1933 law on animal protection signed by Adolf Hitler, November 24, 1933.

That animals need more rights is fine. However anti-speciesism is a delicate concept: a mosquito is not as sentient as a parrot. Nor is a sheep as sentient as a wolf. (And certainly a Nazi should not be viewed as being as sentient as those children it is sending to the oven!)

The Nazis (deliberately) pursued their inhuman agenda by hiding it with their loud obsession for animal welfare. Some variants of present day anti-speciesism often embraces, or even go further, than the Nazis did.

I am, of course, a human supremacist. I entertain no illusion on the goodness of animals as somehow superior to that of Homo.

Once I was on narrow mountain path, on the very steep flank of a mile high mountain, in a French national park. There were sheep around. The sort that shepherds release for summer. Big, fluffy, white wholesome wooly live sheep skins. The largest of them all, it seems, a stupendously enormous beast was spying on me with its beady eyes on the path. I stopped, wondering what could such a stupid beast think about. We looked at each other, the super predator, and the . Finally the living comforter appeared to have taken a decision, and I marvelled at the fact it could take one. It aimed straight, and tried to push the super predator off trail. I did not quite fall.

Animals, in the wild, are very smart. Homo can outsmart them, but it takes some concentration. Animals, out there, eat and kill each other, for many reasons. Once I was in a Senegalese national park, on top of a cliff. In the broad river, below, 200 crocodiles were basking in the sun. An hyppotrague (an antelope like bovid, large, powerful and ferocious), to escape an enormous lioness, charged across the Gambia where it was narrow. The lioness followed: damn the crocodiles! Both prey and predator took a calculated risk, because they knew how to take decisions, in seconds, and fiercely. (Yes, I swam in that river.)

The call of the wild is not the call of madness. It is the call of the mind, embracing the universe.

All what the call of harming no animal brings, is the disappearance of species. Many species survived only because they were useful. Even cattle, if not used, tends to disappear: see the case of the formidable Aurochs, and present day Gaur.

If an industry of cutting systematically the horns of rhinoceroses, and selling them, for cash, had been set-up, long ago, no rhinoceros species would have disappeared. And no harm would have been made to the rhinos (they like humans to scratch their backs, if they have determined them to be friendly).

The extermination of species is a higher form of immorality than the persecution of individual animals. To see this, one has to go at the root of morality, which is sustainability: a behavior is moral, if it is sustainable. Biocide, killing the biosphere, is as unsustainable as it can get. Homo has evolved into, and with, and managed, the biosphere, for millions of years. To declare that we will not manage the animals anymore is a dereliction, not just of duty, but of evolution itself.

The day wool and leg of lamb will not be needed at all, sheep will disappear. Philosophers will not be charged by sheep in the wild anymore. Much mental stimulation will be lost.

If we want to honor and love the animals and their species, the wealth of the biosphere our species evolved in, we have to accept all they can offer to us. Yes, including ivory. Grow up.

No beasts, no cry. Yes, there is suffering, so what? The day crying will be lost, much soul will be gone.

Patrice Ayme’

Proof ANTARCTICA Is BREAKING UP

OUTSMARTING NASA (or is NASA, and other climate “scientists” being deliberately dumb?):

Abstract: Found below is the proof that Antarctica Is Already Breaking Up. Using a recent NASA study is crucial. Interestingly NASA drew the opposite conclusion from its own data. Had NASA been more ASTUTE, its data would have let it to the conclusion below. Amazingly, it did not. It’s all about the water level not changing in a glass with melting ice, and contrasting it with what happens when one starts with ice only!

***

I was reading the description of the damage from Sea Level Rise (SLR) in “Learning From Dogs”:“Interconnections Two”. Therein are found reference to “scientific” papers. The big question is what does “scientific” mean? “Science” means what’s known. The problem is that today’s scientists are afraid of the biggest questions, because the answers attached to them are very ugly, something intolerable in the age of beauty, celebrity, and philanthropy (aka plutocracy).

Antarctica Stripped Of Ice. In Some Places, Ice Rests On The Ground 2,500 Meters Below Sea Level (a mile and a half).

[NASA picture. The greyish area is now covered by kilometers of ice. The ice presses down with enormous weight, so its bottom is kilometers below sea level.]

Up to 2015, no reputable scientist would have dared to consider that the polar ice sheets could melt before several millennia. Such a contemplation was way too dangerous for their careers and livelihood. Thus the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) excluded considering the gigantic masses of ice covering Greenland and Antarctica for its computations of Sea Level Rise. This is rather curious as the main factor in SLR is the melting of ice. This how the IPCC got to a roughly ONLY one meter of SLR by 2100 CE.

However, there is an obvious way to melt maybe half of the ice sheets instantaneously on a geological time scale: four degree centigrade (38 F) water is the densest, and can melt the threshold, the stoop holding them tight. Once that’s done, the water can flow down on the other side, a mile down or more.

Scientists have to be careful, because they need to be funded. In the plutocratic USA, funding varies from year to year, like carrots do for donkeys from day-to-day. The authorities funding “scientists” ultimately depend upon the fossil fuel lobby and related plutocratic lobbies which fund both politicians and private (“elite”) universities. So scientists cannot dare to roll out a half-baked theory, before we get fully baked ourselves. (But don’t worry, plutocrats want to roast us ASAP.)

Dr. Hansen, who used to work for NASA as chief climate scientist, published last Spring (2015) what he viewed as his “most important paper ever” arguing that ice sheet melting could rise sea level within a century or two by several meters. I am not that sanguine, I think it will happen much faster, and I can prove that it already started.

Indeed there is an obvious theory, full of brand new science, which demonstrates that the break-up of Antarctica ice sheets has already started: on October 30 2015, NASA published studies showing that Antarctica is actually gathering snow… And not losing it.

“NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses:

According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed   to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.”

This is expected as the warmer it gets, the more the air carries water, the more it snows (until it turns to rain!) “We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.”  Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”

To deduce the “net gain”, NASA, also using satellite data, watching changes of altitude carefully computed how much the volume change:

“Scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. In locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks.

But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

NOW THE BIG QUESTION:

So, if Antarctica is gathering ever more snow, as NASA showed, and as Sea Level Rise is accelerating, what is going on?

Officially, no one knows.

But I do know what is going on, because I think, and, as I am not funded by fossil fuel plutocracy, and I am strongly motivated as I consider anthropomorphic climate change the greatest problem humanity ever faced.

As all other factors have been considered, and as Sherlock Holmes would observe, all is left is what we cannot see: the ice sheets are already breaking up, from below. As I described in several essays, there is evidence that the Totten glacier, the plug holding the giant Aurora Basin in Antarctica, has melted on hundreds of kilometers, much below its apparently placid surface.

How come NASA did not see it? Because, if one puts ice in a glass containing water, and keep the temperature high enough to melt all the ice, the water level will NOT change. (This can be viewed as a consequence of Archimedes Principle).

So far, so good. However, the ice sheets are not floating: they rest on the ground, until the famous “grounding line”. So one cannot apply Archimedes Principle to start with. although one has to apply it, once the ice shield has become an ice SHELF, and floats, because it melted.

The very fact NASA saw nothing, no change of elevation, means a loss of mass from the ice sheets. This is due to the fact that ice occupies more volume than water. Relative to water, ice has only .91 of the density: this is why ice floats on water (Archimedes Principle).

So the ice sheets are breaking down, MELTING FROM BELOW, and they don’t go down, because more water is coming in.

Contemplate an ice cube in a glass: contemplate the top surface of the ice cube. That is what NASA’s satellites look at. If an ice cube melts in the glass, its top surface goes down until it completely disappears, level with the water surface. This loss of altitude is what NASA did not see, and thus it claims there is no melting. However, in the case of an ice sheet, to start with, the ice is resting on the ground, and there is NO water.

As the melting proceeds, water appears below. If the top level of the cube does not come down, it is that more water has been brought in.

How would we know this is happening? Well, if the global Sea Level is rising. Not only that, but SLR is accelerating (by 30% in the last three years).

If I find time, I will draw a little cartoon of the situation, but that’s not easy on a smartphone (I don’t own a tablet…)

Antarctica is breaking up. It’s happening from below, sight unseen. It requires a bit of logic to understand it, as we saw. When the unexplained Sea Level Rise will become blatantly catastrophic, and the climate in public opinion will be safe enough to parrot the reasoning above, said reasoning will be made by all scientists. Of artful parroting, and “hiding one’s sources” a successful scientific career is made… said no less an authority than Albert Einstein. However, that’s not as bad as hiding the main source of accelerating Sea Level Rise, as all climate scientists are presently doing, led by NASA.

A “scientist” is someone who knows. When “scientists” don’t want to know, lest they don’t get a paycheck, are they still “scientists”?

More generally, thinkers, those who think creatively, tend not to get a paycheck, because really new ideas are unsettling to all ideas. Those have most of the money generally have no interest to unsettle the established order upon which their fortunes rest. And it is the more so, the richer the richest individuals are. This is why a state owned by just one family, like Saudi Arabia, is so “conservative”. So, do we want to think, or do we accept to drown? That is the question.

In its own press release, linked above, NASA scientists declared:

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

Well, it’s coming from Antarctica. It’s your logic which is faulty.

Patrice Ayme’

New Climate Lie: Magical CO2 Stop Possible

I went to a concert depicting climate change, past and future. Trust Californians to be innovative. The climate change had driven the composition of the music.

Several of the musicians sat behind computers, three sat behind real instruments, one some sort of electric piano, the other two a bass guitar, and a violin. On the planetarium screen, one could see the Earth, and then, starting in the Eighteenth Century, three graphs: CO2 Parts Per Million, Land-sea Temperature Rise, and the Earth Watts per square meters imbalance.

The, laudable, general idea is to put to music the drama of our destruction of the biosphere, and thus to make it more real to skeptics Americans. The USA is the general quarters of those who deny that burning fossil fuels is adverse to the health of the biosphere. The average American is deeply conservative, and does not perceive “climate change” as an urgent anxiety. However, the average American knows he, or she is supposed to feign interest, while going to buy its next truck.

To Stay Below 2C, CO2 Emissions Have To Stop Now. We Are On The Red Trajectory: Total Disaster

Tempo depended upon the CO2 concentration, pitch upon the Earth global temperature, distortion upon the energy balance on land in watts per square meter. The numbers used were past and anticipated. After 2015, the graphs became two: one was red, the bad case scenario, the other was blue, and represented the good scenario.

As I looked at the blue graphs, the optimistic graphs, I got displeased: the blue CO2 emissions, the blue temperature, and the blue power imbalance, had a very sharp angle, just in 2016. First a sharp angle is mathematically impossible: as it is now, the curves of CO2, and temperature are smooth curves going up (on the appropriate time scale). It would require infinite acceleration, infinite force. Even if one stopped magically any human generated greenhouse gases emissions next week, the CO2 concentration would still be above 400 ppm (it is 404 ppm now). And it would stay this way for centuries. So temperature would still rise.

The point is this: at 400ppm of CO2 (and nearly 500 ppm with the other man-made greenhouse gases) the atmosphere is being forced: more energy piles up in the lower atmosphere, and the temperature will rise, until the losses to outer space get progressively in balance with the forcing.  If we stopped the CO2 emissions, magically, which is completely impossible, the CO2 would stay at 400ppm, the forcing would go on, and the temperature would still grow.

The composer, who was on stage, had been advised by a senior climate scientist, a respectable gentleman with white hair, surrounded by a court, who got really shocked when I came boldly to him, and told him his blue graph was mathematically impossible.

I told the distinguished mandarin that one cannot fit a rising, smooth exponential with a sharp angle bending down and a line. Just fitting the curves in the most natural, smooth and optimistic way gives a minimum temperature rise of four degrees Celsius. (There is a standard mathematical way to do this, dating back to Newton.)

The silvered hair, tall and dignified senior climate scientist, told me, with consumed gravitas, that this was not the forum to address such concerns, and, anyway, he disagreed. I was expecting this sort of answer, and this is why I was fast and brutal, as composer and scientists, organizers, impresarios and plutocrats and the adoring public were thick about. As it turns out, it is the head of a new very important government laboratory.

The Culprit: Distinguished Gentleman Bill Collins From Berkeley Was Seen Preaching to the Public That The Climate Catastrophe Can Stop On A Dime. Perfect Say The Fossil Fuel Plutocrats: We Will Stop On A Dime Whenever We Want. And this is a mass murderous lie.

This is a bit as if a high level official in the anti-Nazi struggle claimed not to worry too much about Nazism, because we can stop it any time we want (the climate crisis will probably ending killing many times the 100 millions dead victims the Axis made…)

When all wisdom can give is shock, shock wisdom shall give. The alternative being respectful  silence… for infamy. Is there, indeed, a greater infamy than the disintegration of the biosphere  in the name of American coal and SUVs?

So what’s the game of these American scientists? Very simple: there were plutocrats in the audience, it was a fund-raiser. I was the only one to raise a ruckus, naturally. Everybody else was very admiring, in love. What did they admire so much?

That graph, that blue graph. The message of the (impossible) blue graph was that the effect of greenhouse gases can be instantaneously stop, should America will it. You can imagine Uncle Sam’s poster: “Earth, you shall stop acting funny, if the US wills it!” So, in the end, this was all a celebration of American righteousness: we are right to do what we are doing, because we can stop it anytime. (That’s how drug addicts feel, said Rolling Stone Keith Richards, in a self-reflective mood : they go on and on, because they think they can stop, if they want, anytime. I never do.)

The truth is much more sinister. The supremacy of the USA does not just come from owning an entire temperate continent (after destroying the Natives). It also comes from oil, coal and gas. The USA has plenty of them, cheap and available. As Obama says all the time: “God willed it” (OK, he says: “God bless the USA”).

The ongoing supremacy of the USA rests on oil, coal, and gas. This is why the Supreme Coal of the US, I mean, the Supreme Court of the US, just decided that burning coal was just, and so was bad air (and thus Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency crackdown on coal pollution was unjust, and should cease).

American plutocrats are always one step ahead of the propaganda game. After spending decades claiming the Earth was not warming, now they are pretending, thanks to this impossible blue graph, that we stop the deleterious effects on the biosphere on a dime, should the USA want it.

And the scientists are playing along… because they want the money. And the influence. And the plutocrats in the audience. And the American population confusedly feel that the USA is better off with cheap gas.

As I explained, the Moral Imperative is to think correctly, and the first imperative of scientists should be to teach what is impossible. It’s impossible to stop the nefarious effects on the biosphere on a dime. There is huge inertia in the world climate and geophysics. Right now, climate change is happening at a rate 100,000 times the rate of the preceding great extinctions (they probably had to do with huge, sustained volcanism, direct from the core).

In the best scenario of business as usual, most of energy from fossil fuels, we are on 4 degree Centigrade global warming scenario. And that means the poles will melt entirely. That will make the present Middle East disarray feel as if it had been a walk in a pleasant park.

Patrice Ayme’

“State Doping” And Corruption Generalized

Corruption is a mood. When it becomes obvious at the top, for all to see, it spreads through all of society. Corruption is not just about money, or bartering of power, tit 4 tat, but also about habituating oneself 2 violate reason, emotion, decency

The historian Gibbon viewed Rome under the Antonine emperors as the eternal city’s greatest century. So doing, Gibbon made the same mistake as all Roman thinkers we know of, made at the time. Rome, in truth, was a fascist military regime drunk with corruption. Gibbon lived in a similar, yet newer and improved, regime in Great Britain. Said improvements enabled Britain to established a spectacular empire. Because of the similarities with the plutocracy he flourished in, Gibbon could only sing the praises of Second Century Rome. If he had not sung them, nobody would know the book he wrote.

Only a few people chosen by the fate of force took all the decisions in imperial, fascist Rome. Thus, unsurprisingly, those decisions were dumb. When Rome had been a Republic, many took the decisions, after huge debates. Thus they were excellent and Rome conquered the world.

Red: Up To 5 Celsius Above Average. Cold Around Antarctica Caused By Sweet Melting Glacier Water Coming To Surface

Nowadays, if we look at the bright side of things, we are not in such a bad position: the debates on the Internet may save us. Our clueless, corrupt and greedy leaders will not. Yet, if we look at the bad side, the situation is much worse. Rome declined because she was deranged, mentally sick, senile, the property of a few, physically sick, polluted, out of resources, out of her wits, out of time, riddled with corruption. Yet, these maladies were confined to Rome. The Barbarians, taught and inspired by Rome, were doing better all the time. Now the entire planet is threatened with a heart attack.

The planet’s biosphere is teetering on the verge of NONLINEARITY.  Forget homeostasis. The weekly sea surface temperature reading, taken within the Niño 3.4 region near the equator, has risen to 2.8°C above average (that’s a rise of more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit). This ties the highest weekly departure of 2.8°C recorded in late November 1997 during the record-setting 1997-98 El Niño. Peaks five degrees Celsius above, and more, are observed (see graph above).

Radiative forcing augmented by 36% since 1990. Moreover, CO2, CH4, N2O, all mighty greenhouse gases are beating records in 2015. The rising sea catastrophe is already upon us.

In Senegal, the rivers Sine and Saloum mix, and form a delta. But the Atlantic ocean has been rising. So salt water rises occasionally higher than ever, invades, killing the African rice which feeds people, and even attacks the concrete, hence (extremely modest) houses collapse.

Meanwhile unknown chemistry  creates pollution fifty times above the UN limit in Chinese cities (China has correctly reacted by becoming the world’s first producer of solar energy)..

Since the year 2000, every year but one, was warmer than the preceding one. The World Bank, not an institution known for revolutionary tendencies, came with a report predicting an augmentation of temperature during summer, in the Mediterranean, of NINE (9) Degree Celsius, by 2100.

Why was the greenhouse problem not fixed yet? From a general mood of corruption.

It was exposed in cyclism: because the USA is the largest market, a crook, Lance Amstrong was allowed to finish first seven Tour De France, although many knew of this drug enterprise.

Soccer, of course, is pervaded by corruption. Corruption can be indirectly detected: in biking, French cyclists basically got no victory even on a single stage, for more than two decades, in the Tour de France. In France, drug controls have been very tough, for decades. Thus French athletes are at a disadvantage, because they are not doping (or, more exactly, not doping enough).

Now it turns out that the obvious has been revealed:  world athleticism is pervaded with corruption. The world athletic federation says that the London Olympics were “sabotaged” by doping. It points the finger at Russia, culprit of “State Doping”. How convenient.

Well, that was obvious all along. There are nearly 200 countries, but only a few get most medals, and Russia is a prime offender. The federation proposed to exclude Russia from the next Olympic games. That’s obvious, and should be enforced. Russia is a corrupt state. But then what of states such as Great Britain, the USA and Jamaica? Did you look at their medal counts in London?

Either those astounding countries are made out of super humans, or made out of super corruption: just like Russia’s their results in international competitions are just unbelievable, without systematic doping. The Federation did not say. Its acts are louder than words. The Federation just put Interpol and the… French Republic in charge of ferreting out this case of worldwide corruption in sports.

Patrice Ayme’

We Are All Martians

The Life Giving Nuclear Reactor within Earth protects us with the magnetic field it energizes. The idea is that, otherwise, the atmosphere would be torn away, as it was in Mars. Or, if not the atmosphere, at least the hydrogen (and thus the water), as happened for Venus.

At least, such was my philosophy of the rocky planets’ atmosphere (exposed in prior essays). “Philosophy” can be educated guesses based on lots of physics and mathematics, intuitively understood. Philosophy can stand just at the edge of science. But then it’s good to have a scientific confirmation. Here it is. NASA’s MAVEN (= Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) in orbit for years, has measured that Mars loses around 100 grams of atmosphere per second, due to impact from the Solar Wind (protons going at 400 kilometers per second).

That’s not good. Still, back of the envelope computations show Mars should still have a thick atmosphere. Instead, its density is only 1% of Earth, and few of Earth’s most primitive lifeforms are hardy enough to survive in Mars CO2 atmosphere (even neglecting UV and low temperatures).

Once the atmosphere was going, the water followed, and so did the considerable greenhouse water vapor brought. Water vapor (H2O) is more greenhousy than CO2, meaning the relationship CO2-H2O is nonlinear: higher CO2 on Earth means higher H2O, hence even higher greenhouse than the simple rise of CO2 would naively bring).

Earth Has A Powerful Nuclear Powered Magnetic Shield. Mars’ Shield Was Too Weak. The Solar Wind Tore the Martian Atmosphere Away MCE By MCE.

So, if 100 grams per second was not enough to strip the atmosphere why did it escape Mars as much as it did?

The Sun is an hectic thermonuclear engine shaken by internal explosions. Occasionally a Mass Coronal Ejection (MCE) occurs. Then an alarming eruption of inordinate magnitude, violently flings material off the sun, in a particular eruption. The last one to hit the Earth was in the Nineteenth Century, and it caused severe disruption to the then nascent electrodynamic industry. More severe ones went here and there in the meantime (sparing Earth for now).

However, one hit Mars, and MAVEN was there to measure what happened. What happened? The MCE driven Solar Wind smacked into Mars with great force, and robbed the planet of five kilograms of atmosphere per second.

So what philosophy to extract from this?

1. Thank our nuclear reactor at the core, which maintains an iron ocean, hundreds of kilometers deep, below our feet.
2. Life is fragile: it can get started easily, but  can get killed easily.
3. With at least two planets where life started, in the Solar System, life, basic life, probably started all over the galaxy.
4. Earth’s life has a very high probability to be of Martian origin.

Why the last point? Because Mars cooled down at least four time faster than Earth. The very latest news show that life started on Earth within 500 million years of our planet’s formation. At that point, Earth became cool enough to sustain life (in spite of the formation of the Moon, which, whether from an impact or from my own nuclear eruption theory, was characterized by great heat, and worldwide fusion of the crust). By then Mars had been cool enough for four hundred million years, at least, to allow life (I get that working backwards from the geological date of life start on Earth, and the factor 4, from the surface ratios).

How did life bearing material go from Mars to Earth? Martian meteorites are found on Earth: an object crashes on Mars and debris flung into space (Mars has lower gravity than Earth). Some documented trips took no more than 15 million years, and temperatures within would have preserved life. More than four billion years ago, the bombardment was extremely intense, and Martian meteorites may have penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere continually. And it would just take one meteorite.

A baby was dying in London, from leukemia. All usual treatments were tried, and failed. The doctors proposed to try an approach so far only experimented only on mice. Collaborating quickly with the French company, CELLECTIS Paris, designer cells made to attack specifically Layla’s cancer were engineered. The treatment was an astounding success, so far. To make war against all diseases is not just fair, it is the war which has to be waged, paying our respects to Mars. In particular, I am certain that, when the choice is between death and trying a treatment which seems to have worked on mice, one should chose the latter. If nothing else, it brings hope, and the certainty one is contributing to:

1. Fighting back (the most human thing to do, facing evil).
2. Science
3. Treatment to all of humanity (other babies, etc.), another most human behavior to engage in: giving one’s life for others.

So kudos to the doctors in London (and the British government for allowing experimentation, plus the two parents for having encouraged it).

Our species celebrates Mars as a god, because war is one of our oldest instincts. Anglo-Saxon media generally scrupulously avoided to mention that this was FRENCH technology (from a French start-up, of all things!). Not mentioning France is part of the war of Anglo-Saxon plutocracy against France. We are all Martians, in more ways than one. And yes, we need to cultivate the better angels of that Martian side of us.

Patrice Ayme’