No one knew quite how old it was because it had lost its heartwood, but Michael Lear, a tree expert with the National Trust, visited Pontfadog in 1996 and wrote to Josie Williams: "Using Forestry Commission techniques, the youngest it can be is 1,181 years, the oldest 1,628 years. "I cannot find a record of an oak tree of any of the 500 species internationally which has a greater girth anywhere in the world."

Yet, for all its local renown, the Pontfadog oak was barely known outside the small Ceiriog valley and the community of ancient tree experts. It was mentioned by George Borrow on his journey across Wales in 1862 but, like most other ancient trees in Britain, it was never fenced off or protected, and no one was ever asked to pay to see it – although Huw Williams's grandmother used to put out a collection box for the local Cheshire home, sometimes raising £5 a year. "It was just our tree, part of the landscape. We were very proud of it," said one woman from the valley the next day. Last week, some of Britain's specialists on ancient trees gathered at Pontfadog for a post mortem.

"It was the national tree of Wales and one of the oldest oaks in Europe. I'm desperately trying to find people who can help in propagating from the tree by either grafting or micro-propagation in order to maintain its genotype. Kew Gardens have said they are interested," said Simpson.

In fact, the tree could have been saved for many more years. Last year a group from the Ancient Tree Forum visited Pontfadog and, seeing it was vulnerable to a big wind, put together a list of actions costing £5,700 that they thought might have protected it. Despite a petition of 6,000 signatures to the Welsh assembly, no money could be found.

Wonder if tree lovers in this country could call on a group such as the Ancient Tree Forum to save a great old tree, if they feared one was in trouble somewhere in this land.  

Clare O'Connor writes for Forbes:  

"Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food."

What can you say about this software but -- that's cool. (Well, we could add that the Koch industries take in $98 billion a year, according to Forbes.) 

[Fascinating post by Andrew Freedman with great videos from Mel Shapiro and team.]

In the vernacular, Shapiro remarked to an interviewer at the US funded research station NCAR:

Then, a few hours before landfall, Sandy began a sharp curve toward the west, moving toward the heart of the approaching midlatitude trough of low pressure. In Shapiro’s view, this marked an apparent warm seclusion trying to take place on top of the storm’s fast-decaying warm core.

I asked Shapiro how often he’s seen a storm like Sandy. He replied, “Never.”

Gives an idea: Shapiro's motion graphics are far more compelling (if a little cumbersome to load). Final image, which graphs Sandy's "vorticity," is perhaps the most compelling of all.

As Climate Central reported on May 3, there is no single, agreed-upon answer to when CO2 concentrations were last at this level, as studies show a wide date range from between 800,000 to 15 million years ago. The most direct evidence comes from tiny bubbles of ancient air that act as time capsules, sealing ancient air in the vast ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. By drilling for ice cores and analyzing the air bubbles, scientists have found that, at no point during at least the past 800,000 years have atmospheric CO2 levels been as high as they are now.

A 2011 study in the journal Paleoceanography found that atmospheric CO2 levels may have been comparable to today’s as recently as sometime between 2 and 4.6 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, which saw the arrival of Homo habilis, a possible ancestor of modern homo sapiens, and when herds of giant, elephant-like Mastadons roamed North America. Modern human civilization didn’t arrive on the scene until the Holocene Epoch, which began 12,000 years ago.

Best reporting on this may come from National Geographic, fittingly. Can we leave aside the politics and the science for a moment? Just a moment. Put ourselves in this moment, approx 3 million years ago. Ask what it felt like outside:

What was Earth like then? In Africa, grasslands were replacing forests and our ancestors were climbing down from the trees. (See related: "The Evolutionary Road.") On Ellesmere, there were no longer alligators and cypress trees, but there were beavers and larch trees and horses and giant camels—and not much ice. The planet was three to four degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 19th century, before man-made global warming began.

If anything, those numbers understate how different the Pliocene climate was. The tropical sea surface was about as warm as it is now, says Alexey Fedorov of Yale University, but the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles—which drives the jet streams in the mid-latitudes—was much smaller. The east-west gradient across the Pacific Ocean—which drives the El Niño-La Niña oscillation—was almost nonexistent. In effect, the ocean was locked in a permanent El Niño. Global weather patterns would have been completely different in the Pliocene.

Above we see an imagined day from an unimaginably vast plain of time. But looking at that illustration, and seeing but one of those creatures still around, the condor, on a day like today, when the afternoon temp reached 102 in Upper Ojai, a day after 106 in Ojai, twenty degrees over the average temperature, and one can't help but think of what the experts say, the sheer variability of the climate. 

The changes we've experienced, the big storms, the heat waves, the Santa Anas, have been so little as compared to what could be. 

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Extensively quotes from a speech of true outrage and conviction on climate conservation, seventeen minutes long, delivered on the Senate floor by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Includes this: 

There is only one leg on which climate change denial stands: Money.

Speaking of which...author Jon Moonallem writes in Slate and tells the story of "A Tranquilized Polar Bear Rising Thru an Autumn Sky":

The town of Churchill, Manitoba is a shivering little settlement on the edge of Hudson Bay that, every fall, gets overrun with about 900 polar bears and 10,000 polar bear tourists. Polar bears routinely wander into town—they especially love hanging out by the elementary school. When they do, folks call 675-BEAR and a squad of bear patrol officers tries to herd the animals back onto the tundra, firing off pyrotechnics and noise-makers. Bears that won’t budge are tranquilized and transferred to a Quonset hut near the airport, a facility sometimes referred to as the “Polar Bear Jail.” Each bear serves a month sentence—enough to dissuade it (hopefully) from entering town again—then it’s drugged again, packed in a net, and airlifted under a helicopter to a safer area north of town while crowds of tourists gather to watch. It’s a breathtaking thing to see: a polar bear lifting off the ground and flying away.

"We're seeing fires burning like we usually see in late summer, at the height of the fire season, and it's only May," said Tom Kruschke.

It's a good example of the complexity of climate change, or a goof on my part, but in either case raises the question -- what is going on with these winds? When I talked to Hall, he suggested that we may see fewer Santa Anas in September and October, and more later in the year. (Though he certainly didn't mention May!) He told KQED's Climate Watch in 2011:

“When you have a changing climate, the land surface is warming up a lot more rapidly than the ocean, and that tends to weaken this mechanism,” Hall told me. That could mean fewer of these seaward blasts, at least during the winter months, as a kind of consolation.

“In trying to understand how fire will behave in the future, we have to look at the effect of precipitation on the fuel loads and we have to be looking at the effect of Santa Anas on fire behavior,” said Hall. “So I think there are some really interesting questions to look at.”

Hall pointed out to me to another of Santa Ana virtues: Offshore winds tend to blow grit and dust into the ocean, adding nutrients, and cleaning the air. Change need not be disaster, in other words.

Another example of this was mentioned in the Los Angeles Times this morning. Despite consuming 28,000 acres of vegetation and forcing the evacuation of 5000 people, this fire hasn't hurt any person, and hasn't destroyed a single house. Given the scale of the blaze, that's darn impressive.

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The flâneur [city walker/wanderer] is by definition endowed with enormous leisure, someone who can take off a morning or afternoon for undirected ambling, since a specific goal or a close rationing of tme is antithetical to the true spirit of the flâneur. An excess of the work ethic (or a driving desire to see everything and meet everyone of recognized value) inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition to "wed the crowd." 

Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flâneurs. They're good at following books outlining tours of Montparnasse or at visiting scenic spots outside Paris...but they're always driven by the urge towards self-improvement.

A couple of assumptions are embedded in this concept: that the wandering should take place in the city (as described in Walter Benjamin's epochal Arcades project) and that the drifter, if you will, shall be alone. But is either necessarily the case? Perhaps for Benjamin, an urban philosopher.

It's interesting to posit the counter-example of Jack Kerouac, who certainly made a life and great work out of his wandering, but does have that "driven" aspect that White describes, and even made a bit of sport of his inability to wander idly in his great and underappreciated Dharma Bums. 

A pic of Kerouac typing from the Orange County Regional History Center.

He wrote in that book:

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” 

Visited with Alice briefly to rave about her great cookbook The Art of Simple Food, from which I have learned so much. (It's also a fav of Michael Pollan's.) She said a new edition will be out this fall. 

...make no mistake, he could be menacing, a word that came to be associated with Jones for much of his life. To sugarcoat his worst impulses is to ignore the truth: When Jones was drunk, coked up or otherwise out of his mind, he turned bad. In "I Lived to Tell It All," Jones' astonishingly honest 1996 autobiography, he tells of being drunk on his tour bus and shooting five bullets from a .38 near a teetotaling manager who wouldn't join him in finishing a bottle of vodka.

Jones once drove a lawn mower to a liquor store after his wife hid his car keys, and then sang about it in a ditty called "Honky Tonk Song": "I saw those blue lights flashing over my left shoulder / He walked right up and said 'Get off that riding mower.'" Jones was one of a kind — in both the best and worst use of the term.

The same could be said of Paul Westerberg and the Replacements. Westerberg was just as witty, and just as wild, if not more so. From Aquarium Drunkard: 

"Toward the end of their touring behind Pleased to Meet Me, the Replacements gigged in Portland, Oregon with the Young Fresh Fellows opening. And in the history of notorious Replacements shows, this one ranks high. Though it’s difficult to nail down the exact story behind the fabled night, the following anecdotes show up repeatedly: the ‘Mats pelting the Young Fresh Fellows with various objects during their set; the band breaking into a room (the show was held at the now-defunct Pine Street Theatre) purloining costumes (of which they then wore ontstage); the band being far too drunk to play effectively; clothes being taken off and thrown into the audience — and the audience, in some cases, returning the favor. This last part is my personal favorite as apparently Tommy Stinson remembered, after throwing his clothes into the crowd, that he had left ten dollars in his pocket. After raging at the crowd to throw his pants back, he instead rifled through the clothes thrown on stage, located twenty dollars in a pocket, and danced around the stage in victory. Another account just reported that they stumbled through a set of less than 45 minutes, played a cover of Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69″ and then split. Either way, a typical ‘Mats show."

Is it possible that the desire to tell a story is part of a desire to be dramatic? To be a diva, an acter-out, a drama queen? And that genre is less important than that desire to live in drama? 

Regardless, you have to love the Replacements for writing a song about the city they dissed -- and at the end apologizing for their antics. "Portland, I'm sorry." To apologize to an entire city! Reckless charm. 

Like the lyrics:

Shared a cigarette for breakfast
Shared an airplane ride for lunch
Sitting in between a ghost
And a walking bowl of punch
Can you play a little hunch?

Predicting a delay on landing
Well I predict we'll have a drink
Lost my money on the first hand
Got burned on a big fat king

And your ears are gonna ring
And your eyes just wanna close
Nothing changing I suppose

A fav Mats' song...check it out.

Dr. Jeff Masters gives it a name -- "weather whiplash" -- and explains how it happens: 

I'm often asked about the seemingly contradictory predictions from climate models that the world will see both worse floods and worse droughts due to global warming. Well, we have seen a classic example in the Midwest U.S. over the past two years of just how this kind of weather whiplash is possible. A warmer atmosphere is capable of bringing heavier downpours, since warmer air can hold more water vapor. We saw an example of this on Thursday morning, when an upper air balloon sounding over Lincoln, Illinois revealed near-record amounts of moisture for this time of year. The precipitable water--how much rain could fall if one condensed all the water vapor in a column above the ground into rain--was 1.62", just barely short of the Illinois April record for precipitable water of 1.64" set on April 20, 2000 (upper air records go back to 1948.) Thursday's powerful low pressure system was able to lift that copious moisture, cool it, and condense it into record rains. So how can you have worse droughts with more moisture in the air? Well, you still need a low pressure system to come along and wring that moisture out of the air to get rain. When natural fluctuations in jet stream patterns take storms away from a region, creating a drought, the extra water vapor in the air won't do you any good. There will be no mechanism to lift the moisture, condense it, and generate drought-busting rains. The drought that ensues will be more intense, since temperatures will be hotter and the soil will dry out more.

The new normal in the coming decades is going to be more and more extreme flood-drought-flood cycles like we are seeing now in the Midwest, and this sort of weather whiplash is going to be an increasingly severe pain in the neck for society. We'd better prepare for it, by building a more flood-resistant infrastructure and developing more drought-resistant grains, for example. And if we continue to allow heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide continue to build up in the atmosphere at the current near-record pace, no amount of adaptation can prevent increasingly more violent cases of weather whiplash from being a serious threat to the global economy and the well-being of billions of people.

It's hard to comprehend the scale of the threat, as is so often the case with climate change. Here's a NASA image, from the Precipitation Measurement Mission, to try to help:

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Might a reader want an example? Here's the first paragraph:

Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o'clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders, drawing out the first sweat, and he put on a pair of heavy sunglasses to protect his eyes. The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out acros the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaded surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield. By noon, less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn.

On SFSite, Victoria Strauss discusses the book insightfully:

The Drowned World posits (presciently, as it turns out) that the world has been overwhelmed by a catastrophic greenhouse effect. It differs from our own impending disaster in that it's natural rather than man-made. In Ballard's scenario, violent solar storms have depleted the outer layers of Earth's ionosphere; as these vanish, temperature and solar radiation begin to climb, melting the polar ice-caps. This enormous outflow of water carries with it tons of topsoil, damming up the oceans and entirely changing the contours of the continents, drowning some parts of the world and landlocking others. At the same time, the increased radiation produces freak mutations in Earth's flora and fauna, initiating a new biological era reminiscent of the Triassic period, in which reptiles and giant tropical plants were the dominant forms of life.

Strauss gives us a sense of how the book develops, which is more about a compelling idea than a plot. At one point, dreams overtake the narrative:

...some of the expedition members begun having strange dreams, of a primeval swamp dominated by a huge burning sun that pulses to the rhythm of their own heartbeat. 

These dreams, it turns out, aren't random occurences or signs of stress, but the first warming of a much deeper process. Human beings, responding to stimuli embedded in their genetic makeup billions of years earlier, are beginning to devolve. The dreams aren't dreams at all, but memories...

And the book offers much, much more.

The writing blends the surreal and the futuristic. The characters surprise us with their actions; for example, not wanting to leave the flooded city, though life there is unsustainable. The book flies by. But even if the book werenot brilliantly written, it almost wouldn't matter. Ballard's idea alone would be enough to carry us into the future, and to the end. 

Evidence?

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book,Warner Brothers just optioned the rights for producer David Heyman, best known for his production of the Harry Potter series. 

Newspaper reporters can add CareerCast.com to the list of sources telling them to flee journalism.

The group took 200 jobs and ranked them in order from most to least desirable, based on factors such as environment, income, outcome and stress. Add all that together and newspaper reporter rings in at a dismal 200 out of 200 – the worst job on CareerCast’s list, below lumberjack, janitor, garbage collector and bus driver.

“We look at a wide range of criteria, as analytical as we can be,” said Tony Lee, CareerCast’s publisher. “There are some subjective pieces but, frankly, it’s really driven by the data.”

The data come from sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and trade associations.

Newspaper reporter ranks below bricklayer, security guard, artist, author, painter, dishwasher, and janitor. Hmmmm. 

Economist Justin Wolfers points out a flaw in this ranking. He tweets: 

Simple observation: If newspaper reporter really were the worst occupation in America, it would be easy to find a jobonline.wsj.com/article/SB1000…

Bogart would say he has a point. From the classic Deadline USA, l952.

California does not need fear hurricanes, but it does every few years face El Niño, an oceanic shift that drives unimaginably vast amounts of water across the Pacific and up against the coasts of North and South America, raising the sea level by as much as a foot. It is similar to the storm surge that comes ashore with a hurricane, according to Susi Moser, a climate researcher at Stanford.

“Twelve inches [of sea level rise] is well within the kind of projection we can expect from a good storm surge during an El Niño,” she said. “It’s not exactly comparable to Superstorm Sandy because, for the most part, California’s coast is fairly steep. But where it is flat, such as low-lying areas around Ventura Harbor and the Oxnard shores, we have to expect major flooding. It’s not the end of the world for California, but if you think about the landfill areas in San Francisco Bay, for example, and take out the entire inner ring of the bay and lose the airport, that’s a pain in the ass.”

Like a scientist who can speak bluntly. Learned a lot doing this story -- interesting to see that projections from fourteen different climate models found that falls especially will be hotter, but Januaries will be as cold as ever. Hope you like the story.