Accidental Blogger

A man, a bird and a million dollar automobile

Actually, this is all about the automobile. Normally, given the same circumstances - on an interstate feeder road near a hurricane levee between Houston and Galveston, a car veers off into 3 feet of water and no one is hurt, the news would have only made it to the police blotter or perhaps garnered a few lines in the local news section of the city paper. Instead it was plastered on the front pages of Texas newspapers and has appeared in several news outlets and blogs all over the country. By curious coincidence, on last Wednesday, the day the accident took place, the brown pelican was deemed safely out of the endangered list by the Texas Audubon Society and the US Department of the Interior. See the full man-bird-car story here.

(A Bugatti Veyron EB and a brown pelican in flight)

 

Grave Concerns & Paw Prints (a Halloween Post)

To the English, a grave is like their second home (or castle). Dead Londoners do not want to share graves with the previously dead, even though London is running out of space for the dead. (Why has cremation not caught on as a perfectly private and hygienic option in the thoroughly modern British capital?)

LONDON | The city's largest cemetery is having a tough time convincing Londoners to share a grave with a stranger.

"A lot of people say, 'I'm not putting my dad in a secondhand grave,' " said Gary Burks, superintendent and registrar of the City of London Cemetery, final resting place of close to 1 million Londoners. "You have to deal with that mind-set."

The problem is a very British one. Many other European countries regularly reuse old graves after a couple of decades. Britain does not, as a result of Victorian hygiene obsession, piecemeal regulation and national tradition. For many, an Englishman's tomb, like his home, is his castle.

That view is also common in the United States, which like Britain tends to regard graves as eternal and not to be disturbed - although the United States has a lot more space, so the burial crisis is less acute.

In much of Britain, reusing old graves remains illegal, but the City of London cemetery is exploiting a legal loophole that allows graves in the capital with remaining space in them to be reclaimed after 75 years.

Mr. Burks points to a handsome marble obelisk carrying the details of the recently departed man buried underneath. The name of a Victorian Londoner interred in the same plot is inscribed on the other side. The monument has simply been turned around for its new user - whose family, Mr. Burks says, got a fancy stone monument for much less than the market price by agreeing to share.

On to animals. Not the scary vampires and spiders of Halloween but the cute cuddly ones frolicking in and around our homes. A report in the New Scientist rates household pets for the relative size of their carbon foot prints. Owning a mid to large size dog is apparently as eco-unfriendly as owning an SUV. Not surprisingly, the smaller and self cleaning average cat leaves a paw print that is slightly smaller than that of a Volkswagen Golf. Both are hazardous to wild life and can spread infections.

SHOULD owning a great dane make you as much of an eco-outcast as an SUV driver? Yes it should, say Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialise in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In their new book, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, they compare the ecological footprints of a menagerie of popular pets with those of various other lifestyle choices - and the critters do not fare well.

As well as guzzling resources, cats and dogs devastate wildlife populations, spread disease and add to pollution. It is time to take eco-stock of our pets.

To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.

It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year - far more for beef and lamb - and 13.4 square metres to generate a kilogram of cereals. So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares. For a big dog such as a German shepherd, the figure is 1.1 hectares.

Meanwhile, an SUV - the Vales used a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser in their comparison - driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser's eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

The Vales are not alone in reaching this conclusion. When New Scientistasked John Barrett at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, UK, to calculate eco-pawprints based on his own data, his figures tallied almost exactly. "Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat," he says.

Then there are all the other animals we own. Doing similar calculations for a variety of pets and their foods, the Vales found that cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares (slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf), hamsters come in at 0.014 hectares apiece (buy two, and you might as well have bought a plasma TV) and canaries half that. Even a goldfish requires 0.00034 hectares (3.4 square metres) of land to sustain it, giving it an ecological fin-print equal to two cellphones.

This kind of analysis appeals to David Mackay, a physicist at the University of Cambridge and the UK government's new energy adviser. He believes we should put as much thought into choosing a pet as we do into buying a car. "If a lifestyle choice uses more than 1 per cent of your energy footprint, then it is worthwhile reflecting on that choice and seeing what you can do about it," he says. "Pets definitely deserve attention: by my estimates, the energy footprint of a cat is about 2 per cent of the average British person's energy footprint - and it's bigger for most dogs."

 

Egypt's Folly - Health Measure Was Hogwash

Superstition ridden medieval Europe condemned cats as witchs' agents and slaughtered them. Nature's pay back for that brutal and dastardly act came in the form of the Black Plague when the rat population proliferated in the absence of a natural feline pest control. A similar but less deadly fate may be in store for Egypt whose president Hosni Mubarak, in a heartless, mindless and misguided moment of inspiration, ordered all pigs killed in order to protect the nation from swine flu. The streets of Cairo are now awash in stinking garbage. The pigs used to consume organic trash in large quantities and helped keep the city  partially clean. Now they are all gone due to the stupid step taken by ignorant, cowardly politicians and the rubbish is piling up. So, Egyptians are protected from swine flu (they wish!) but are sure to suffer from other more easy to spread infectious diseases that the putrid waste will help breed. And they had been warned of the consequences of the idiotic measure. The story in the New York Times.   

It's not our fault

Our forefathers were responsible for global warming. I don't know if this article belongs in Joe's friend's blog, NCBI ROFL.

The Longest Eclipse

The longest total solar eclipse of this century started in India on Wednesday morning and is sweeping eastward. The New York Times has a report by a blogger who is chasing the eclipse.

My previous post on total solar eclipse is here. As per Anna's suggestion (see comments), I have since then read Annie Dillard's essay, "Total Eclipse."  

 

Music. Smoking. Whales. Dodgy conceptions (D)

1. I imagine the average music listener has as much trouble teasing apart the different musical lines, instruments and voices in a symphony (say) as I do. Why isn't there a product category on the market where the different voices in a piece are all recorded individually? With a suitable software interface, you'd be able to hear just the first violin, or only the brass or only what the pianist is playing with his right hand, and so on. Or various toggle-able combinations of the elements. Plus of course, you could turn everything on and hear a serviceable, though hardly great, recording of the piece. The time I can imagine spending with such a CD is almost limitless; it'd be like having this for every piece I cared about. Surely the market can't be that small, and the production certainly isn't difficult. Why's no-one doing this?

2. I've often harbored a certain dim, masochistic sense that bans related to passive smoking have been less about health than about the general ickiness of the habit, the smell of the noxious weed and a certain puritanical desire to control and command. Indeed, I'd assumed the actual health risk from second hand smoke was minimal. I still assume those other factors are salient, but apparently this last isn't so. Orac at Scienceblogs has a very nice post up about secondhand smoking, that gets into the various studies performed, the mechanisms of consensus-generation and the politics in forming, disputing and proceeding from that consensus. Two takeaway numbers, in case you don't read the whole thing:
- "A person who smokes two packs a day smoker for 40-50 years will have approximately a 20% chance of dying of lung cancer."
- "In adults, numerous studies support the existence of approximately a 25% elevated risk of lung cancer from those exposed to secondhand smoke chronically."

3. This New York Times story is almost perfect for transporting a certain sort of mind into mystical ecstasies. It has all of:
- natural creatures who've suffered greatly under Man, yet absolve him of his sins
- cuddly, natural Disney creatures to boot, none of this scary, bloody competitive evolution stuff around.
- wise Natives who, with other ways of knowing, have penetrated to the core of Deep Truths White Man is only dimly coming to appreciate.
- concomitant dismissals of hard scientists, who've not truly achieved Wisdom for all their appropriation of cold, technical facts.
Actually, it's a pretty good piece for all the scorn I've heaped upon it. The stolid insistence that one not anthropomorphize the animal world is only going to be so useful, and unless one is a creationist other animals will necessarily be seen to exhibit many qualities we do in some form, including emotional ones.

4. This last I mention without further comment. Ms. Kathryn Jean Lopez finds this story amusing.

Estivate, Baby. Estivate.

Summer has arrived early in Houston this year. June, usually a much cooler month than July and August, is sizzling. Most years around this time, it feels more like late spring or early summer with temperatures in the mid to upper 80s. Instead, the thermometer has hovered around readings more reminiscent of broiling mid-summer for the past several weeks. After a long spell of near 100 degree temps, there is still no respite in sight in the coming days. We've also not seen any rain for the last one month, a rare occurance in the coastal city. 

I am no new comer to blazing summer heat, having grown up in North India during pre-air conditioning days. In those days ceiling fans and desert coolers provided some respite inside the home. Outside, we carried umbrellas and tried to stay in the shade. From April onwards until the refreshing monsoon showers broke the enervating spell in early July, folks adjusted their lifestyles to accommodate the unrelenting assaults of heat and dust. We learnt ways to survive the inferno with simple, common-sense coping methods  - frequent cold showers and change of sweat soaked clothes, avoiding the mid-day sun, wearing cotton, sleeping in the open air at night (on roof-tops and courtyards), drinking cold drinks made with yoghurt and roasted green mango and eating light, bland, torpor inducing foods. (see my last comment on this post) Air conditioning has improved things in India, at least for those who can afford it. But people still treat north Indian summers with prudence and resigned caution.

Houstonians too have their own ways to deal with the persistent summer heat. In principle, they are not very different from what we did in Delhi. The bottom line is that those who must put up with extreme heat, sometimes wish for a prolonged sleep of oblivion. Some surely wish they could escape the weather through estivation.  From Saturday's Houston Chronicle:   

Summer officially starts tomorrow, but in fact, the season oozed up weeks ahead of schedule, the way it always does in Houston. And just as predictably, it’ll refuse to leave in September, when the calendar says it’s fall’s turn. Summer here isn’t the fleeting visitor so beloved in more temperate climates. It’s the overbearing roommate you can’t evict, the unwanted house guest who decides to move in. It is the season that tries the Houstonian’s soul.

You know the drill. You leave a super-chilled building — an airport, the grocery store, your office — and walk into air warmer and more humid than your exhaled breath. You open your car door, stepping back to avoid the oven-like blast of heat. You swat a mosquito, then wipe your own blood from your hand.

Summer is the season of warnings: air-quality warnings, hurricane warnings, warnings to your kids that if they don’t do something besides play on-line games, their brains will melt and leak out through their ears. You’re warned to avoid the heat of midday, to exercise in the morning, to water your plants in the evening.

Use sunscreen! Stay hydrated! Never leave your dog in the car! In other places, it’s winter that kills. Here it’s summer.

To survive, we go to ground. “Estivate” is the word. A zoology term, it means “to pass the summer in a dormant or torpid state.” It’s the hot-weather version of hibernating.

In humans, estivation involves long naps, tall iced teas and shade. Icehouses, movie theaters, swimming pools, hammocks: They’re our versions of the cool, safe hole in the ground. No-brain TV shows, shallow summer movies, paperback thrillers, Popsicles, margaritas: Count them as aids to mental hibernation, necessary to lull your brain into a survival-enhancing state of rest.

Sooner or later, summer will end. We forget that it will, but it always does. The kids quit running through sprinklers and go back to school. The mosquitoes die. Hurricanes give way to northers.

On some crisp morning, months from now, we’ll no doubt return to our old productive selves: Full of projects, full of plans. But that bright day is a long way away. Right now, we’re in the teeth of summer, and we’re struggling to hang on. Wake us up when it’s over.

Go Green, Don't Eat... Lamb? (Joe)

Apparently lamb is a particularly bad (i.e. high-carbon) food because sheep burp a lot of methane. They're actually worse than cows.

On the other hand, lamb is delicious. And I can't stop laughing at the thought of choosing food based on how much methane it burps.

Recycling In The Sky : Let's Drink To That

I am sure everyone saw this item in the news yesterday on TV or on the web. There is really nothing chemically or nutritionally  yucky here. I guess one just has to get used to the idea.

At the international space station, it was one small sip for man and a giant gulp of recycled urine for mankind.

Astronauts aboard the space station celebrated a space first on Wednesday by drinking water that had been recycled from their urine, sweat and water that condenses from exhaled air. They said "cheers," clicked drinking bags and toasted NASA workers on the ground who were sipping their own version of recycled drinking water.

"The taste is great," American astronaut Michael Barratt said. Then as Russian Gennady Padalka tried to catch little bubbles of the clear water floating in front of him, Barratt called the taste "worth chasing."

He said the water came with labels that said: "drink this when real water is over 200 miles away."

The urine recycling system is needed for astronaut outposts on the moon and Mars. It also will save NASA money because it won't have to ship up as much water to the station by space shuttle or cargo rockets. It's also crucial as the space station is about to expand from three people living on board to six.

The recycling system had been brought up to the space station last November by space shuttle Endeavour, but it couldn't be used until samples were tested back on Earth and a stuck valve was fixed on Monday.

So when it came time to actually drink up, NASA made a big deal of it.

The three-man crew stood holding their drinks and congratulated engineers in two NASA centers that worked on the system.

"This is something that had been the stuff of science fiction," Barratt said before taking a sip.

NASA deputy space shuttle manager LeRoy Cain called it "a huge milestone."

In which Paul Krugman annoys (D)

I was going to write two posts about matters musical, but it'll wait. First, Krugman has an NYT column about global warming and China, where he says the Chinese need to cut back on emissions, and should face economic sanctions if they don't voluntarily do so fast enough:

As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. They will complain bitterly that this is protectionism, but so what? Globalization doesn’t do much good if the globe itself becomes unlivable.

It’s time to save the planet. And like it or not, China will have to do its part.

I don't think he gets nearly enough push-back in the comments section. A few thoughts:

0: Speaking for myself, a world 4-6 C warmer with all that entails, but with continued third world growth, is still preferable to that of today, with manageable temperatures but billions in absolute poverty. Both of those are awful options, and better can be done than each, but those two alternatives aren't equally awful.

1: The different costs of climate change aren't all uniformly distributed across the planet. The Chinese are more likely to pay attention to costs that impact them directly. Loss of land in Bangladesh/Bengal or more malaria in sub-Saharan Africa aren't such costs, for example.

2: The Chinese argument - that the emissions cost of their exports shouldn't be counted against them, because the benefits of the goods produced go to Westerners - seems fishy. It seems they can't really accept the money payment for those same exports while disclaiming any carbon cost. I'm not dismissing outright these more sophisticated transnational accounting schemes, at least not in theory. Maybe the rest of the world ought to subsidize American/Western/Japanese research efforts, particularly in medicine and high yielding crops. Western Europe could help pay for the US Army and China and India could compensate the rest of the world for imposing a large unproductive body burden upon it. Maybe. Meanwhile, it seems a bit self-serving to use such arguments only in this specific instance.

3: There is the problem of divvying up not just carbon consumption per-annum from but the extra atmospheric carbon already created. In practice I suspect the latter won't be accounted for. I do think deviations from per-capita-equity based carbon allocations will tend to be increasingly hard to enforce and police with time.

4: Any accounting of the cost of fighting climate change, must include the cost of forcing the Chinese (and other third-world economies) to accept lower growth rates, and by implication, lower life expectancy, lower levels of material comfort and the like.

5: There needs to be a conversation about optimal levels of environmental degradation. To be florid, we must have targets of x units of per-capita GDP growth per species extinction or acre of rainforest lost. Indeed, to say that there are economic tradeoffs, more so when dealing with poor countries, is to say that these levels aren't optimized at small values. IPPC says we'll experience 2 - 4 C of temperature rise this century if we do nothing. How much do we want to do, assuming magical solutions don't drop out of the sky?

6: The more stories like this we see, the more attractive geoengineering schemes (with their considerable power and risk) will seem. About time the public conversation moved beyond glib hubris-of-man to seriously consider the technical and geopolitical challenges.

Unconnected closing thought: The New Yorker is the anti-Playboy. One only ever reads it for the pictures.

Taking the measure of a storm

Less than a year ago, I recounted my experience of living through a hurricane both before and after the storm.  Although Ike was technically a Category 2 hurricane (falling 1 mph short of Cat 3), it has been repeatedly described as a monster storm and the devastation it wreaked on the cities of Galveston and Houston qualified it as the third most destructive hurricanes on record to have made landfall in the US. 

Although Ike packed Cat 2 strength winds, it was a huge storm that covered a broad area and gave rise to storm surges way higher than would be expected from a hurricane of that intensity. Considering that a storm relatively low on the currently used Saffir-Simpson Scale of measuring hurricane strengths based on wind velocity did so much damage, some meteorologists now wish to devise a new scale to predict the effects of hurricanes more accurately by taking into account additional factors. That scale, they say, should take into consideration not just the speed of the hurricane but also the size of the "real" storm surge which cannot be calculated accurately on the  current scale. According to Saffir-Simpson, a Cat 2 hurricane causes storm surges of 6 - 8 feet. Yet Ike gave rise to surges measuring up to 15 - 25ft. upon touching down in Galveston.  Storm surges, say hurricane experts, do more damage to life and property than wind speeds.  

AUSTIN — For this year’s tropics season, the National Hurricane Center won’t abandon the venerable Saffir-Simpson scale, which rates hurricanes on a familiar scale, from Category 1 to Category 5.

But the center’s director says any single index cannot begin to capture the local impact of a hurricane, a fact Hurricane Ike — only a Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale — made stark to residents of the upper Texas coast.

“If I could wave a wand and make it go away, I would,” said Bill Read, at the National Hurricane Conference in Austin on Friday. “It made sense in the era it was conceived, four decades ago, and now it’s ingrained in the culture.”

Attendees at the hurricane center have buzzed about the Saffir-Simpson scale’s inadequacies. KHOU-TV’s chief meteorologist Gene Norman said it needs to be modified to better account for surge. Greg Bostwick, a meteorologist at KFDM-TV in Beaumont, said his viewers couldn’t believe how “only” a Category 2 storm striking 90 miles away could flood one-third of Orange County.

Some hurricane scientists, such as Mark Powell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division, have been arguing in recent months to replace the Saffir-Simpson scale entirelySaffir-Simpson scale entirely. Powell said the scale is especially deceptive when it comes to storm surges, and when you review the data there’s simply no correlation between the category of a hurricane and the amount of land it inundates.

Developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by civil engineer Herbert Saffir and Robert Simpson, then-director of the National Hurricane Center, the Saffir-Simpson scale is simple and has gained wide public acceptance.

Spring Time in Texas Redux

It is April in Texas and my friend Linda has again sent out some spectacular pictures of wild flowers ablaze in the countryside.  This year, there are no surprises among the blooms as there was last year. Enjoy. (click to enlarge)

       

Turning the ocean into a thing that kills the ocean (Joe)

So apparently there's some other CO2 problem that doesn't get talked about as much as rising temperatures.

CO₂ forms carbonic acid when it dissolves in water, and the oceans are soaking up more and more of it. Recent studies show that the seas have absorbed about a third of all the fossil-fuel carbon released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and they will soak up far more over the next century. Yet until quite recently many people dismissed the idea that humanity could alter the acidity of the oceans, which cover 71 per cent of the planet's surface to an average depth of about 4 kilometres. The ocean's natural buffering capacity was assumed to be capable of preventing any changes in acidity even with a massive increase in CO₂ levels.

And it is - but only if the increase happens slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years. Over this timescale, the release of carbonates from rocks on land and from ocean sediments can neutralise the dissolved CO₂, just like dropping chalk in an acid. Levels of CO₂ are now rising so fast that they are overwhelming the ocean's buffering capacity.

In 2003 Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, and Michael Wickett at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both in California, calculated that the absorption of fossil CO₂ could make the oceans more acid over the next few centuries than they have been for 300 million years, with the possible exception of rare catastrophic events. It was in their Nature paper that the phrase "ocean acidification" appeared in the scientific literature for the first time.

The potential seriousness of the effect was underlined in 2005 by the work of James Zachos of the University of California at Santa Cruz and his colleagues, who studied one of these rare catastrophic events. They showed that the mass extinction of huge numbers of deep-sea creatures around 55 million years ago was caused by ocean acidification after the release of around 4500 gigatonnes of carbon (New Scientist, 18 June 2005, p 19). It took over 100,000 years for the oceans to return to their normal alkalinity.

Around the same time as the Zachos paper, the UK's Royal Society published the first comprehensive report on ocean acidification. It makes grim reading, concluding that ocean acidification is inevitable without drastic cuts in emissions. Marine ecosystems, especially coral reefs, are likely be badly affected, with fishing and tourist industries based around reefs losing billions of dollars each year. Yet the report also stressed that there is huge uncertainty about the effects on marine life.

"On the one hand the chemistry of ocean acidification is very certain," says James Orr of the Laboratory of Sciences of the Climate and Environment (CEA-CNRS) in France. "On the other hand the biological and ecological impacts are very complex. The consequences for ocean life are far harder to predict."

So what progress has been made since the report came out? How serious an issue is acidification given all the other threats to the oceans, from overfishing and pollution to warming waters and changes in currents?

The sea creatures most likely to be affected are those that make their shells or skeletons from calcium carbonate, including tiny plankton and massive corals. Their shells and skeletons do not dissolve only because the upper layers of the oceans are supersaturated with calcium carbonate

Acidification reduces carbonate ion concentrations, making it harder for organisms to build their shells or skeletons. When the water drops below the saturation point, these structures will start to dissolve.

Now, I'm no scientist. But I feel like the world's oceans being turned into giant vats of carbonic acid might have problematic side effects for human beings--even for those non-"tree huggers" who don't care about things like plankton and coral for their own sake.

The coastal ecology after Ike

In the last few weeks since Ike struck the coast of Texas, you have heard a lot about my thirteen days without electricity, entire neighborhoods without power and water and massive havoc wreaked on the infrastructure of Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula. All that pertains to man made edifices of modern living. Ike was a Cat 2 hurricane but with a huge span. Although it produced maximum wind gusts of around 110mph, it hovered over the region for a long time and the winds blew in a sustained manner for several hours. Its  prolonged presence over Texas  damaged not just buildings and electric poles but uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees, eroded beaches and mucked up bodies of fresh water. It will take mother nature a long time and several years of calm summer climate to repair the battered coastal terrain, making life very difficult for plants, marine life, birds and other animals who make their habitat in southeast Texas.

Thousands of migrating warblers pass through the Bolivar Peninsula about this time every year, making one last stop for food and water before their 600-mile flight over the Gulf of Mexico.

But the warblers and other migratory birds might not be able to find refuge for a while on the remote and particularly vulnerable place. Hurricane Ike stripped the birds' favorite mulberry trees, leaving little fuel for their long journey ahead — one of the sobering consequences of the storm.

Even without a major oil spill, Ike caused widespread environmental damage to Southeast Texas, ripping through the region's barrier islands, washing debris into Galveston Bay and the Gulf, and imperiling animals, fish and plants by pouring excessive amounts of saltwater into marshes.

"The extent of the damage won't be known for a while," said Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. "But it's possible that we've had 20 to 30 years of damage at once."

The upper Texas coast is already under stress because of development, rising seas and sinking land. The conditions have led to the rapid erosion of the shoreline, with as much as 10 feet washing away each year, by some estimates.

The dunes and marshes matter because they act as a speed bump, reducing the strength of wind and waves and robbing hurricanes of the warm water that fuels them. Without the buffer, storms can move ashore unimpeded and do more damage.

Amidst the damage and debris, weird things showed up after the storm. We saw surreal pictures on TV - of boats atop trees, terrified animals on roof and tree tops, cars cut into two with falling debris, refrigerators floating on water, hundreds of gallons of ice cream melting on a sidewalk before a convenience store, a seventy five story sky-scraper in downtown Houston with every window blown out on the east side. Last Saturday I heard about a truly unusual and whimsical piece of nature's "art."  A friend of mine who owns a beach house in Galveston dropped by after having inspected her partially damaged house the previous day. The house sits on seventeen feet high stilts, so the damage to the main living quarters was not extensive. But downstairs everything that was not nailed down got washed away without a trace leaving behind three feet of mud and silt. But one item, a crab bucket, remained. It was upside down and stuck fast to the dry concrete. When my friend's husband pulled it up, the bucket was full of water that had stood on dry ground for a week.  An upside down tower of water! What a neat idea for installation art!

The soaking hurricane has also left people with a dry sense of humor.  My friend joked that when she and her husband are old and debilitated, a quick and painless way to die will be to take a couple of deck chairs and a few martinis to the beach and wait for a hurricane to strike.

How costly is a storm?

Today is the sixth consecutive day that our house is without electricity. We are minimally functional with borrowed electricity from our neighbors through an extension cord. After six days, I am getting used to it and learning to improvise around the limited access to electricity - a situation which would otherwise have been a debilitating handicap. All of us can imagine the difficulty of leading a normal daily routine in which almost every household implement comes on with the flick of a switch or the push of a button.  But those who are really "plugged in"  will appreciate this article by a young and thoroughly wired person. No, the lament here is not for hot food, hot tea or coffee, not even light or air conditioning. Some people, (that also includes adults like my husband), feel most hampered by their electronic gadgetry going dark and silent.

My life, and maybe yours, is bathed in a blue-green electronic glow. When the flat-screen TV isn't on, the laptop is. The BlackBerry goes everywhere, and so does the iPod. My books are loaded onto an electronic reading device, a Kindle. I Twitter.

I check my friends' progress on Facebook. Many of the people I Twitter or have as Facebook friends I've never met, probably never will meet. But I follow them going to work, unable to sleep, angry in traffic, naming new babies. They're part of my life.

Unplug me and I die a little.

During Ike, the rules changed. Sure, some of us tried to plan ahead for electronic catastrophe, charging the cell phones, buying wrong-size batteries and trying to dig up that totally retro non-cordless phone, but sometimes even that wasn't good enough.

After the storm, cell phone service was at best spotty, at worst nonexistent.

Sure, there was battery life in the laptop good enough for a DVD or two, but who remembered that the wireless router was electric too? (Not me.) A camera wasn't much good with an uncharged battery. Cock your ear, and you could hear the collective keening of tweens whose Nintendo DS or PSP had run out of juice.

I noticed that the writer of the piece mentions some old-fashioned gizmos which came in awfully handy during our marooned hours right after Ike blew by. Most households these days have cordless or cell phones (many of the younger generation don't bother with land lines at all). The former doesn't work without electricity and the latter is useless when the cell towers are hit. Ike, like other big storms, damaged both. But our land phone line didn't go down during the rampage. I found a fifteen year old corded phone in a closet (the type you can't use while walking around the house) which proved to be the life line during the 24 hours after the storm and continues to be so in our lengthy "powerless" state. We also found an old shortwave radio in my son's room. It worked for a while on batteries but then broke down. My husband spent better part of last Saturday in the garage, sitting in the car listening to the radio and charging his lap top.

While the above article is lighthearted in an Erma Bombeck kind of way, the following one by Richard Parker, professor of journalism at UT Austin, takes a somber look at what a storm the size of Ike really costs a huge city like Houston, located so close to an ever warming body of water.

An excerpt:

What's in your water?(Sujatha)

Every few months, along with the water bill, I receive a little brochure from the water company that assures me that the level of coliform and fecal bacteria in the water that flows through the taps has been tested at well below required levels. Ditto for the amounts of lead and other heavy metals and nitrates. One important missing category, however, is the residues of pharmaceuticals which have been dumped or excreted into the water sources.
This article gives an indication of the effects of these pharmaceuticals making it into the water supply:

Pharmaceuticals have since been found in treated sewage effluents, surface waters, soil, and tap water, though at very low levels (parts per trillion, ppt). These levels are unable to induce acute effects in humans, i.e., they're far below the recommended prescription dose, but have been found to affect aquatic ecosystems. To date, most attention has been focused on hormone disruption in fish due to pharmaceutical estrogens present in the environment, and the rise of bacterial pathogens resistant to conventional antibiotic treatment due, in part, to their exposure to sub-lethal levels of antibiotics in their environment. Antibiotics and estrogens are only two of many pharmaceuticals suspected of persisting in the environment either due to their inability to naturally biodegrade or continued prevalence as a result of continuous release. Other studies have shown antidepressants to trigger premature spawning in shellfish while drugs designed to treat heart ailments block the ability of fish to repair damaged fins.   

Recent monitoring studies fail to address one question: Are the levels of pharmaceuticals in the environment significant? At first glance, one would say 'no' since levels found in the environment are six to seven orders of magnitude lower than therapeutic doses in spite of the fact up to 90 percent of an oral drug can be excreted in human waste. Low and consistent exposures wouldn't likely produce acute, notable effects but rather subtle impacts such as behavioral or reproductive effects that could very well go unnoticed. The good news is any threat to human health is probably not imminent but rather long-term.

So it's not merely the direct route from adulteration of food products such as melamine in pet food and now, Chinese infant formula and milk, or the long-term effect of Bisphenol A used in polycarbonate plastics that is associated with an increase in heart disease and diabetes, apart from phytoestrogenic effects.

Wonder chemicals and drugs are the double-edged sword of modern life. There is probably little we can do to reduce our exposure to these, no matter how hard we might try to avoid it by going 'green', switching to bottled water (bisphenol exposure, anyone?) or switching to organic/hormone free food only.

A Texas Sized Storm

Thanks Sujatha, for putting up the post about Ike - that was very accurate reporting.  Thanks also to everyone who had called or emailed to enquire after our safety - many of them fellow bloggers.

I have access to the computer today. So a quick update on Ike and Me. Most of you have seen the devastation on TV or read about it in the papers or on the Internet. The damage is vast and cost of recovery is going to be extravagant. Houston area city officials and Texas state authorities have to be congratulated on the methodical and timely preparation before Ike came barreling through here and the quick response in its destructive aftermath.

We are actually very much better off than many, particularly those who evacuated from the coastal  region.  In fact, most of our neighborhood is up and running, with electricity restored in homes. Our problem is that the transformer that feeds our house is blown due to a neighbors tree branch falling on the lines.  With only 4 homes affected by that, we are now at the back of the line for repairs - the utilities company must get to the big problems first. No saying when our electricity will come back.  So we are thinking of checking into a hotel and fortunately have found a Holiday Inn (most hotels in the Houston area are either damaged or booked solid with people whose homes are unlivable due to storm damage) close by which has a room available from Thursday onwards. Until then we must make do in our home which is otherwise unharmed. 

Meanwhile, we are surviving by using our neighbors' kitchens to boil water, fry an occasional omelette and by raiding their coffee pots. We can at least go out to eat now as restaurants are opening up one by one. Also, we have run an extension cord from our neighbor's house and can run a fan, the freezer and a few  other gadgets as necessary. The weather in Ike's wake has been marvelously cool.  Sleeping with the windows open has been not uncomfortable for the past two days. We also have hot and cold water in the faucets, so showering is not a problem. But this can't go on for more than a couple of days - "borrowing" our neighbor's electricity and the house covered with extension wires. So we must leave on Thursday for the hotel if the power is not back up on by then.

Ike was a monster storm. Its eye passed over our area.  I have never experienced anything like this before.  I am amazed that our house and all others around it are still standing relatively unscathed.

I will get back to blogging as soon as I am feeling a bit less distracted. Meanwhile readers must depend on the kindness of my co-bloggers.

Ike and Ruchira: Update (Sujatha)

I just spoke briefly with Ruchira a short while ago.While they are currently without power, there's no structural damage to the home and the water is still on. It may be a few days  before Ruchira gets back online, though.
She said that it was a very bad storm, the worst that she has ever been through. The power was restored relatively quickly to most of her neighborhood, except for her house and a couple of neighbors, who had downed trees near power lines that caused a blown transformer near them. She is not sure when the utility people will get to them, because other areas are currently higher priority. It could be a few days or even weeks depending on how bad the situation is in the worst affected areas. They may move to a hotel room if any become available, if the power isn't restored soon.

A Storm Named Ike

Those of you who have been paying attention to the news in the past couple of days must already know about Hurricane Ike which is poised to crash somewhere on the Texas coastline within the next twenty four hours or so. Ike is a huge storm that is expected to cut a wide swath and cause widespread damage. As of now, most computer models predict a landfall very close to Houston - near the Freeport - Galveston area. Depending on the punch it packs, Cat 2 or 3, the coastal areas will see huge storm surges, high winds, power outage and structural damage. Houston, the biggest city and the largest population center in the path of the storm will feel the effects of the storm and experience disruption of services. Tornadoes are likely to develop in places much further inland - as far as Austin and San Antonio.

Unlike the time of Rita in 2005 when we evacuated, my husband and I decided to stay put this time although Ike's impact is projected to be much more severe than that of Rita which eventually left Houston alone. As far as we can tell, it will be rough. However, after much thought, staying on seemed to be the easier decision than evacuating.  Most of our neighbors and friends too are staying back except the elderly couple next door who had some concerns with their health and mobility. They have moved in with their son in town for the duration of the storm.  Our county does not have an evacuation advisory. In fact, we have been asked to stay so that we don't clog the roads for others who must get out from the low lying coastal areas.

“We are still saying: Please shelter in place, or to use the Texas expression, hunker down,” said Judge Ed Emmett, the chief administrator for Harris County, which includes Houston. “For the vast majority of people who live in our area, stay where you are. The winds will blow and they’ll howl and we’ll get a lot of rain, but if you lose power and need to leave, you can do that later.”

We are surely going to see very hight winds and the break down of electric power and possibly water supply - for how long, we don't know. This morning, we took stock of our pantry and cupboards.  We have plenty of drinking water, bread, crackers, cookies, fruit, canned goods, candles, matches, batteries and flash lights. We also have a small charcoal grill and a short wave radio that can run on batteries. Also, our cars will be in the garage and their radios will be working. We plan to ride out the storm and keep in touch with our neighbors. If the power stays out for more than a couple of days after Ike, that is when we might leave town.

There was a devastating hurricane more than a hundred years ago that caused total havoc in the city of Galveston. That was before the time when the National Weather Service assigned names to storms. Although the hurricane of 1900 did not have an official name, it too earned a name beginning with the letter "i."  Isaac's Storm was named after the unfortunate meteorologist entrusted with the job of keeping an eye on the weather in Galveston that fateful September day.

Alaskan Akela (Sujatha)

Although the tabloid-style argument over the family shenanigans of the Palins has brought McCain's VP pick into sharp focus, there's another side to the much-vaunted abilities of Gov. Palin that you may not know of yet.

This is who McCain has nominated for VP:

"On March 27, the state House passed House Bill 256, Gov. Sarah Palin's bill, which allows for no science-based, same-day airborne hunting of wolves and bears and opens the doors to game-farming in Alaska. It also allows the lieutenant governor to remove Alaska's ballot measure to vote again on aerial hunting, thus taking Alaskans' right to vote away."

This is what Airborne hunting of wolves looks like: One of the saddest things I've seen, akin to the cow mistreatment videos that we blogged about earlier this year.

Hunting for food is one thing. Hunting wolves just for the thrill of the hunt, and that too by air, is another entirely, as is facilitating the horrendous practice.

A Stormy Political Climate

The barrage of political news of the last several days inevitably brings meteorological metaphors to mind.

On the concluding day of the well organized Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 28, Sen Barack Obama breezed through a powerful speech that party faithfuls believe was a breath of fresh air because it managed to disperse the high pressure system which had built up during the contentious primary season. 

The very next day on the third anniversary of hurricane Katrina, Sen John McCain stole Obama's thunder by announcing his choice of vice presidential running mate. The news that he had picked Sarah Palin (can we call her Praline? she's so sweet!), the little known governor of Alaska, sent a seismic tremor through the media and the blogosphere. Even Palin's mother-in-law is flummoxed.  The right wing pundits assure us that Palin is a spectacular choice to be just a heartbeat away from a 72 year old presidential candidate with a history of recurring cancer. They are confident that Palin's cross-over appeal extends to both evangelical Christians and Democratic women voters miffed over Hillary's loss. After all, among other things, Sarah Palin:

• is pretty - was the runner up in a beauty contest (hottie is their adjective of choice)
• has the sense to wear a skirt and high heels to a public event (unlike the leftist harridans of the pantsuit fame)
• is the mother of five who is fiercely pro-life (also anti-choice in the case of rape and incest)
• favors equal time for creationism and evolution in the class room (but not equal pay for equal work)
• is "deeply religious" [which in Republican speak can only mean Christian] and can also fish and hunt in the wilderness (unlike the effete urbanite Obama whose religious affiliations are dangerously murky and who once whined that some Americans cling to their guns and faith)
• has the necessary executive experience having governed a town [population 5470] and a state [population, 670,000] (by contrast, being elected US senator of a state with a population of over 12 million and getting the nod from more than 18 million voters in a hotly contested presidential primary against a formidable opponent is child's play)
• doesn't need foreign policy experience (Alaska being close to Russia, a hostile nation with nuclear capabilities, her hands-on experience comes from living in the shadows of constant peril)
• has an easy, friendly relationship with her husband whom she calls the "First Dude" (no terrorist fist jabs between the Palins)
• attended the University of Idaho and began her professional career as a sports caster (not an elitist lawyer who attended Columbia and Harvard)
• is a wholesome "hockey mom" who can probably beat Obama in basketball (Palin was known as the "barracuda" on the court as a high school player)
• fought corruption in her own party (she's been governor for barely two years and is already under investigation by the Alaska legislature for the firing of the state police chief for reasons which may amount to a personal grudge)

The GOP and the right wingers fully expected to roar into this week's Republican Convention in Minneapolis aided by the strong tailwind generated by McCain's splendid choice of vice-presidential running mate.  But mother nature decided to put a brake on the celebrations in the form of Gustav, the hurricane which has entered the US Gulf Coast and whose dance across the ocean is being watched nervously from Alabama to Texas.

It just so happens that Gustav has made its appearance just around the third anniversary of Katrina, the devastating storm that exposed the criminal incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration to the whole world. On August 29th, 2005, the day Katrina created havoc in Mobile, Biloxi and New Orleans, John McCain and George W. Bush were photographed sharing a cake on McCain's birthday in hot and dry Arizona. The McCain campaign is acutely aware of the Marie Antoinettish implications of that snap shot. Republicans want to avoid being seen once again partying on dry land while another storm rages across some of the same Katrina ravaged regions in the deep south. So the GOP has decided to curtail most activities on the first day of the Republican National Convention which begins on Monday, September 1. Bush and Cheney have also taken cover and canceled their appearances at the convention. Gustav has come at a convenient time for that dynamic duo. They were expected to get a chilly reception, not because they started an immoral war but because they did not "win" it as McCain promises to.  Anyway, the GOP festivities have been pared down by at least one day by the emergence of Gustav. That means that the volume of hot air from the podium too will be somewhat diminished. But still there will be plenty of blather about faith, family, patriotism and "real American" values as defined by fundamentalist right wingers and which often amounts to anti-woman, anti -gay and anti-immigrant hate speech. There will also be bombast about winning wars and defeating evil. We will be reassured that tax cuts are good for us and universal health care may be harmful. Most of all, the convention is meant to remind us that the Republicans have just the right ticket for America. But after the turbulence of the last seven years and eight months, unless Americans choose to be willfully ignorant, they should know that McCain-Palin will create a climate more dangerous than Gustav is likely to do.

Houston Recycles (Or Not)

I am a conscientious recycler. Every Tuesday evening I set an assortment of paper, aluminum, cardboard and plastic (but no glass) items out on the curb side, neatly bundled and arranged in the blue recycling bin for pick up the next day. The recycleables are duly collected by the waste management company of my county. What happens to that trash afterwards is not known to me. But at least I feel I have done my part as an earth friendly consumer. Judging by the number of recycling bins I see throughout our neighborhood on Wednesday mornings, it appears that most of my neighbors also sort and recycle their household trash.  But "real" Houstonians (I live in the suburbs) apparently are resistant to the idea of recycling - the reluctance  has been attributed to their "independent streak." However, some of those who may wish to conform with the rest of the country in this regard, can't do so because the city of Houston hasn't equipped all its residents with recycling bins. ( link: Dean)

HOUSTON — While most large American cities have started ambitious recycling programs that have sharply reduced the amount of trash bound for landfills, Houston has not.

The city’s shimmering skyline may wear the label of the world’s energy capital, but deep in Houston’s Dumpsters lies a less glamorous superlative: It is the worst recycler among the United States’ 30 largest cities.

Houston recycles just 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study this year by Waste News, a trade magazine. By comparison, San Francisco and New York recycle 69 percent and 34 percent of their waste respectively. Moreover, 25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as 10 years to get recycling bins from the city.

Environmental advocates are pleading for municipal intervention. And some small improvements — an organic waste program, for one — are expected soon.

But city officials say real progress will be hard to come by. Landfill costs here are cheap. The city’s sprawling, no-zoning layout makes collection expensive, and there is little public support for the kind of effort it takes to sort glass, paper and plastics. And there appears to be even less for placing fees on excess trash.

“We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” said Mayor Bill White, who favors expanding the city’s recycling efforts. “Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated. But Houstonians can change, and change fast.”

Hurricane Season

My blogging frequency is going to be slow for the next couple of weeks.  In the coming days I plan to recycle some old posts and resort to links mostly.  Here is an email I wrote to friends and family in September 2005 during the turbulent hurricane season when Katrina and Rita created havoc across the US gulf coast.

"Just letting all who enquired know that we, our house, neighborhood and the city of Houston are all fine this Sunday afternoon.

We left Houston on Friday morning for Austin—3 hours drive time-- after most people had already evacuated or tried to and given up. You must have seen the horrendous grid locks on the highways out of Houston on Wednesday and Thursday when most people left. We returned on Saturday afternoon -- resulting in a 26 hour evacuation which in the end, was not at all necessary. We had originally planned on leaving Houston on Thursday morning and my car was packed with water and other necessary items for the purpose. But after we saw what was happening on the roads, we decided against leaving home.

By Thursday afternoon, I was against evacuating once I found out that most of my immediate neighbors were going to stay put and Rita was changing directions, going eastward. But Sudhir, who had not been paying attention to the storm because he had an NIH grant to submit, looked up from his computer late Thursday afternoon, assessed the danger--which actually was diminishing-- and decided early Friday morning that we must evacuate ! Miraculously, we even found a room for us and our cat Ali at the Marriott in Austin on Friday morning although on Thursday we had been told that not a single hotel room was available anywhere in Texas. They advised us to book hotels in New Mexico, Oklahoma or Colorado!

But Rita gave Houston a pass. At the Austin hotel where nearly 80% of the guests were Houstonians, we ended up exchanging evacuation stories rather than storm tales. Sudhir and I were the only ones who had left on Friday and avoided all traffic woes. Most had taken 12 - 13 hours to travel the 165 miles between the two cities. One family had left a coastal area just south of Houston on Wednesday and arrived in Austin 31 hours later !

Next morning when it was clear that Houston had dodged the bullet, the mayor and the governor asked people not to rush back and create the same nightmare that occurred on the way out. Knowing that people who had faced the horrible traffic on Wednesday and Thursday will be more cautious, Sudhir immediately threw our bags into the car, checked out and we took off from Austin before most people could make up their minds. As a result, we made our way back to Houston also without pain in a little over 4 hours. Essentially, what we got out of our non-essential evacuation was a Friday evening on the music filled streets of Austin and an excellent dinner on 6th Street.

Some of the lessons that Rita and Katrina have taught us are:

1. As of today, we have no good way in place to evacuate large, heavily populated areas without causing massive confusion and chaos.

2. People in storm prone areas should have a family evacuation plan very much in advance of the landfall.

3. Sometimes it is better to use your own judgement than to listen to the "experts".

4. The Americans' general hostility (especially in places like Texas) to public transportation proves to be a liability in times like these when large numbers of people need to move in a short time. The "my car - my family" mode of evacuation is not effective at all.

5. A storm from the sea comes in with some warning - fire, tornadoes, earthquakes and terrorist attacks don't. In the any of the latter events, a big city anywhere is quite helpless.

Thanks to all for your emails and phone calls. The Gulf of Mexico is warm enough to brew tea this year and the hurricane season is just over 50% over. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Ruchira"

Japanese "Bottom Line" on Energy Conservation

In one of my previous posts on Japan, I had mentioned the Japanese zeal for cleanliness, conservation and recycling. In the same post I also made a passing reference to Japanese toilets. Yes, bathrooms in Japan are well appointed. In most hotels where I have stayed the toilets featured warmed seats and water jets designed for washing.  Some even had separate jets aimed at male and female anatomy for accurate and thorough ablution. I had also described toilets outfitted with background "natural" sounds and music that automatically come on when the bathroom is occupied. I know all this from my experience in Japanese hotels. What I did not know is that more and more homes in Japan also boast such precision guided, ultra-comfy, multifunctional, energy guzzling and musical (Ave Maria is a favorite) toilets.

TOKYO -- When it comes to saving energy, the Japanese have much to teach the United States and other rich countries, whose leaders descend on Japan next month for a Group of Eight summit.

Energy consumption per person here is about half that in the United States, and the growth of greenhouse gas emissions is slower than anywhere in the industrialized world.

There is a hiccup, though, in this world-beating record. It happens inside the Japanese home, where energy use is surging. And nothing embodies the surge quite like the toilet -- a plumbing fixture that has been reengineered here as an ultracomfy energy hog.

Japanese toilets can warm and wash one's bottom, whisk away odors with built-in fans and play water noises that drown out potty sounds. They play relaxation music, too. "Ave Maria" is a favorite....

At the G-8 meeting next month, Japan will be pushing the United States and other member countries to accept mandatory limits on emissions of the gases, which cause global warming.

Since the oil shock of 1973, no industrialized country has been more effective in squeezing more affluence out of less imported energy than Japan, experts say. Relative to its economy, Japan consumes only a third as much oil as it did 35 years ago.....

No such shotgun marriage, however, has taken place in the Japanese home, where energy consumption has jumped by 213 percent since the 1973 oil shock. Government figures have shown that household power use has risen at almost exactly the same rate as personal spending. (Despite the rise, per capita residential emissions of greenhouse gases in Japan are only 41 percent of those in the United States.)

"Consumers won't sacrifice comfort for the sake of energy conservation," said Yasuhiro Tanaka, chief of the energy efficiency division at the agency for natural resources and energy. "Consumers won't follow that path because we are richer."

Since the government cannot stop affluent consumers from buying flat-screen televisions and super toilets, it has chosen to squeeze manufacturers, requiring them to meet increasingly strict energy targets.

Local Wars, Global Consequences

Based on computer modeling studies, University of Colorado scientists predict that a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan will not only cause havoc in the vicinity of the Indian subcontinent; it will also have far reaching effects on human (and animal) health and the environment worldwide.

A limited nuclear weapons exchange between Pakistan and India using their current arsenals could create a near-global ozone hole, triggering human health problems and wreaking environmental havoc for at least a decade, according to a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The computer-modeling study showed a nuclear war between the two countries involving 50 Hiroshima-sized nuclear devices on each side would cause massive urban fires and loft as much as 5 million metric tons of soot about 50 miles into the stratosphere, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Michael Mills, chief study author. The soot would absorb enough solar radiation to heat surrounding gases, setting in motion a series of chemical reactions that would break down the stratospheric ozone layer protecting Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation, said Mills.

"We would see a dramatic drop in ozone levels that would persist for many years," said Mills of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "At mid- latitudes the ozone decrease would be up to 40 percent, which could have huge effects on human health and on terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems."

A paper on the subject, titled "Massive Global Ozone Loss Predicted Following A Regional Nuclear Conflict," appeared the week of April 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors on the study include CU-Boulder Professor Brian Toon, UCLA Professor Richard Turco and National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists Douglas Kinnison and Rolando Garcia.

More here.