Category: Government

The Edwin Hubble Great Debate

The following is more than fascinating; it is an example of how far science has reached; both figuratively and literally.

ooOOoo

One large Milky Way galaxy or many galaxies? 100 years ago, a young Edwin Hubble settled astronomy’s ‘Great Debate’

The Andromeda galaxy helped Edwin Hubble settle a great debate in astronomy. Stocktrek Images via Getty Images

Chris Impey, University of Arizona

A hundred years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble dramatically expanded the size of the known universe. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1925, a paper read by one of his colleagues on his behalf reported that the Andromeda nebula, also called M31, was nearly a million light years away – too remote to be a part of the Milky Way.

Hubble’s work opened the door to the study of the universe beyond our galaxy. In the century since Hubble’s pioneering work, astronomers like me have learned that the universe is vast and contains trillions of galaxies.

Nature of the nebulae

In 1610, astronomer Galileo Galilei used the newly invented telescope to show that the Milky Way was composed of a huge number of faint stars. For the next 300 years, astronomers assumed that the Milky Way was the entire universe.

As astronomers scanned the night sky with larger telescopes, they were intrigued by fuzzy patches of light called nebulae. Toward the end of the 18th century, astronomer William Herschel used star counts to map out the Milky Way. He cataloged a thousand new nebulae and clusters of stars. He believed that the nebulae were objects within the Milky Way.

Charles Messier also produced a catalog of over 100 prominent nebulae in 1781. Messier was interested in comets, so his list was a set of fuzzy objects that might be mistaken for comets. He intended for comet hunters to avoid them since they did not move across the sky.

As more data piled up, 19th century astronomers started to see that the nebulae were a mixed bag. Some were gaseous, star-forming regions, such as the Orion nebula, or M42 – the 42nd object in Messier’s catalog – while others were star clusters such as the Pleiades, or M45.

A third category – nebulae with spiral structure – particularly intrigued astronomers. The Andromeda nebula, M31, was a prominent example. It’s visible to the naked eye from a dark site.

The Andromeda galaxy, then known as the Andromeda nebula, is a bright spot in the sky that intrigued early astronomers.

Astronomers as far back as the mid-18th century had speculated that some nebulae might be remote systems of stars or “island universes,” but there was no data to support this hypothesis. Island universes referred to the idea that there could be enormous stellar systems outside the Milky Way – but astronomers now just call these systems galaxies.

In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held a Great Debate. Shapley argued that the spiral nebulae were small and in the Milky Way, while Curtis took a more radical position that they were independent galaxies, extremely large and distant.

At the time, the debate was inconclusive. Astronomers now know that galaxies are isolated systems of stars, much smaller than the space between them.

Hubble makes his mark

Edwin Hubble was young and ambitious. At the of age 30, he arrived at Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California just in time to use the new Hooker 100-inch telescope, at the time the largest in the world.

A black and white photo of a man looking through the lens of a large telescope.
Edwin Hubble uses the telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory. Hulton Archives via Getty Images

He began taking photographic plates of the spiral nebulae. These glass plates recorded images of the night sky using a light-sensitive emulsion covering their surface. The telescope’s size let it make images of very faint objects, and its high-quality mirror allowed it to distinguish individual stars in some of the nebulae.

Estimating distances in astronomy is challenging. Think of how hard it is to estimate the distance of someone pointing a flashlight at you on a dark night. Galaxies come in a very wide range of sizes and masses. Measuring a galaxy’s brightness or apparent size is not a good guide to its distance.

Hubble leveraged a discovery made by Henrietta Swan Leavitt 10 years earlier. She worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a “human computer,” laboriously measuring the positions and brightness of thousands of stars on photographic plates.

She was particularly interested in Cepheid variables, which are stars whose brightness pulses regularly, so they get brighter and dimmer with a particular period. She found a relationship between their variation period, or pulse, and their intrinsic brightness or luminosity.

Once you measure a Cepheid’s period, you can calculate its distance from how bright it appears using the inverse square law. The more distant the star is, the fainter it appears.

Hubble worked hard, taking images of spiral nebulae every clear night and looking for the telltale variations of Cepheid variables. By the end of 1924, he had found 12 Cepheids in M31. He calculated M31’s distance as a prodigious 900,000 light years away, though he underestimated its true distance – about 2.5 million light years – by not realizing there were two different types of Cepheid variables.

His measurements marked the end of the Great Debate about the Milky Way’s size and the nature of the nebulae. Hubble wrote about his discovery to Harlow Shapley, who had argued that the Milky Way encompassed the entire universe.

“Here is the letter that destroyed my universe,” Shapley remarked.

Always eager for publicity, Hubble leaked his discovery to The New York Times five weeks before a colleague presented his paper at the astronomers’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

An expanding universe of galaxies

But Hubble wasn’t done. His second major discovery also transformed astronomers’ understanding of the universe. As he dispersed the light from dozens of galaxies into a spectrum, which recorded the amount of light at each wavelength, he noticed that the light was always shifted to longer or redder wavelengths.

Light from the galaxy passes through a prism or reflects off a diffraction grating in a telescope, which captures the intensity of light from blue to red.

Astronomers call a shift to longer wavelengths a redshift.

It seemed that these redshifted galaxies were all moving away from the Milky Way.

Hubble’s results suggested the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving away from Earth. Hubble got the lion’s share of the credit for this discovery, but Lowell Observatory astronomer Vesto Slipher, who noticed the same phenomenon but didn’t publish his data, also anticipated that result.

Hubble referred to galaxies having recession velocities, or speeds of moving away from the Earth, but he never figured out that they were moving away from Earth because the universe is getting bigger.

Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre made that connection by realizing that the theory of general relativity described an expanding universe. He recognized that space expanding in between the galaxies could cause the redshifts, making it seem like they were moving farther away from each other and from Earth.

Lemaitre was the first to argue that the expansion must have begun during the big bang.

The Hubble telescope, which looks like a metal cylinder, floating in space.
Edwin Hubble is the namesake for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has spent decades observing faraway galaxies. NASA via AP

NASA named its flagship space observatory after Hubble, and it has been used to study galaxies for 35 years. Astronomers routinely observe galaxies that are thousands of times fainter and more distant than galaxies observed in the 1920s. The James Webb Space Telescope has pushed the envelope even farther.

The current record holder is a galaxy a staggering 34 billion light years away, seen just 200 million years after the big bang, when the universe was 20 times smaller than it is now. Edwin Hubble would be amazed to see such progress.

Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

So wonderful that in this modern era we can read articles from distinguished scientists in the comfort of our own homes.

Rillette, a wild boar, saved!

Saw this on the BBC and wanted to share it!

Here is a part of the BBC story:

Animal rights campaigners in France are celebrating after a wild boar facing the threat of death was allowed to stay with its owner.

The boar, named Rillette, was found in 2023 as a piglet by Elodie Cappé on her horse-breeding smallholding in Chaource, central France, after apparently being abandoned by its mother.

An accident

Blogging will come to a halt for a while!

I had a blackout while driving back from the shops last Saturday week, the 17th, swerved and hit an oak tree. Jean and I were both taken to hospital but I was discharged at the end of the day; Jean is still in hospital, the Asante Regional at Medford. Plus the DMV cancelled my driver’s license and the car was declared written off.

Jean is getting better all the time but until she is back home and we can put our heads together about a variety of things I shall not be blogging.

I’m very sorry but that is the way it is at the moment.

The summer of 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere.

Once more, an article on the changing climate.

Recently, the BBC News reported that:

Global efforts to tackle climate change are wildly off track, says the UN, as new data shows that warming gases are accumulating faster than at any time in human existence.

Current national plans to limit carbon emissions would barely cut pollution by 2030, the UN analysis shows, leaving efforts to keep warming under 1.5C this century in tatters.

The update comes as a separate report shows that greenhouse gases have risen by over 11% in the last two decades, with atmospheric concentrations surging in 2023.

ooOOoo

What the jet stream and climate change had to do with the hottest summer on record − remember all those heat domes?

Shuang-Ye Wu, University of Dayton

Summer 2024 was officially the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest on record. In the United States, fierce heat waves seemed to hit somewhere almost every day.

Phoenix reached 100 degrees for more than 100 days straight. The 2024 Olympic Games started in the midst of a long-running heat wave in Europe that included the three hottest days on record globally, July 21-23. August was Earth’s hottest month in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 175-year record.

Overall, the global average temperature was 2.74 degrees Fahrenheit (1.52 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average.

That might seem small, but temperature increases associated with human-induced climate change do not manifest as small, even increases everywhere on the planet. Rather, they result in more frequent and severe episodes of heat waves, as the world saw in 2024.

The most severe and persistent heat waves are often associated with an atmospheric pattern called a heat dome. As an atmospheric scientist, I study weather patterns and the changing climate. Here’s how heat domes, the jet stream and climate change influence summer heat waves and the record-hot summer of 2024.

What the jet stream has to do with heat domes

If you listened to weather forecasts during the summer of 2024, you probably heard the term “heat dome” a lot.

A heat dome is a persistent high-pressure system over a large area. A high-pressure system is created by sinking air. As air sinks, it warms up, decreasing relative humidity and leaving sunny weather. The high pressure also serves as a lid that keeps hot air on the surface from rising and dissipating. The resulting heat dome can persist for days or even weeks.

The longer a heat dome lingers, the more heat will build up, creating sweltering conditions for the people on the ground.

A 3D image of the US showing a heat dome above it.
High pressure in the middle layers of the atmosphere acts as a dome or cap, allowing heat to build up at the Earth’s surface. NOAA

How long these heat domes stick around has a lot to do with the jet stream.

The jet stream is a narrow band of strong winds in the upper atmosphere, about 30,000 feet above sea level. It moves from west to east due to the Earth’s rotation. The strong winds are a result of the sharp temperature difference where the warm tropical air meets the cold polar air from the north in the mid-latitudes.

The jet stream does not flow along a straight path. Rather, it meanders to the north and south in a wavy pattern. These giant meanders are known as the Rossby waves, and they have a major influence on weather.

An illustration shows how ridges create high pressure to the south of them and troughs create low pressure to the north of them.
Ridges and troughs created as the jet stream meanders through the mid-latitudes create high (H) and low (L) pressure systems. Reds indicate the fastest winds. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Where the jet stream arcs northward, forming a ridge, it creates a high-pressure system south of the wave. Where the jet stream dips southward, forming a trough, it creates a low-pressure system north of the jet stream. A low-pressure system contains rising air in the center, which cools and tends to generate precipitation and storms.

Most of our weather is modulated by the position and characteristics of the jet stream.

How climate change affects the jet stream

The jet stream, or any wind, is the result of differences in surface temperature.

In simple terms, warm air rises, creating low pressure, and cold air sinks, creating high pressure. Wind is the movement of the air from high to low pressure. Greater differences in temperature produce stronger winds.

For the Earth as a whole, warm air rises near the equator, and cold air sinks near the poles. The temperature difference between the equator and the pole determines the strength of the jet stream in each hemisphere.

However, that temperature difference has been changing, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. The Arctic region has been warming about three times faster than the global average. This phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, is largely caused by the melting of Arctic sea ice, which allows the exposed dark water to absorb more of the Sun’s radiation and heat up faster.

Because the Arctic is warming faster than the tropics, the temperature difference between the two regions is lessened. And that slows the jet stream.

As the jet stream slows, it tends to meander more, causing bigger waves. The bigger waves create larger high-pressure systems. These can often be blocked by the deep low-pressure systems on both sides, causing the high-pressure system to sit over a large area for a long period of time.

A stagnant polar jet stream can trapped heat over parts of North America, Europe and Asia at the same time. This example happened in July 2023. UK Met Office

Typically, waves in the jet stream pass through the continental United States in around three to five days. When blocking occurs, however, the high-pressure system could stagnate for days to weeks. This allows the heat to build up underneath, leading to blistering heat waves.

Since the jet stream circles around the globe, stagnating waves could occur in multiple places, leading to simultaneous heat waves at the mid-latitude around the world. That happened in 2024, with long-lasting heat waves in Europe, North America, Central Asia and China.

Jet stream behavior affects winter, too

The same meandering behavior of the jet stream also plays a role in extreme winter weather. That includes the southward intrusion of frigid polar air from the polar vortex and conditions for severe winter storms.

Many of these atmospheric changes, driven by human-caused global warming, have significant impacts on people’s health, property and ecosystems around the world.

Shuang-Ye Wu, Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

I maybe approaching my own end of life but millions of others are younger than me. When I see a woman with a young baby in her arms I cannot stop myself from wondering what that generation is going to do.

Starting a veterinary clinic

Like any new start-up of a business venture, this requires knowledge, skills and quite a bit of luck!

I am delighted to offer this guest post by Penny.

ooOOoo

Image: Freepik

Vision to Reality: Building a Profitable Vet Clinic

Launching a veterinary clinic is a significant endeavor that requires meticulous planning and strategic decision-making. This venture combines a passion for animal care with the intricacies of managing a successful business. Aspiring clinic owners must navigate several critical steps to lay a strong foundation and ensure operational excellence. Starting your own clinic promises not only to fulfill a dream of helping animals but also to establish a thriving enterprise in the community.

Build a Strong Foundation with an Effective Marketing Strategy

A robust marketing strategy is essential to attract potential clients in the digital era. Establishing a professional online presence through a user-friendly website that details your services, team, and location builds trust among pet owners. Engage actively on social media with regular updates and client testimonials to showcase your expertise and commitment to animal care. Forge partnerships with local pet-related businesses to increase visibility and drive traffic to your clinic, enhancing both your and your partners’ customer bases.

Craft a Clear and Detailed Business Plan

A well-constructed business plan acts as your clinic’s roadmap, detailing your mission, services offered, and the specific target market. Identify your niche early—whether it’s specializing in certain animals or treatments—to attract the appropriate clientele. Include comprehensive financial projections and a marketing budget in your plan to ensure financial preparedness and support your clinic’s promotional activities.

Enhance Your Business Knowledge by Pursuing an MBA

Running a veterinary clinic demands a blend of clinical and business expertise. Pursuing a master’s of business administration online can boost your proficiency in key business areas such as strategy, management, and finance. An MBA not only deepens your understanding of business operations but also enhances leadership skills and self-assessment capabilities. These competencies are essential for balancing the medical and business demands of your clinic, ensuring its long-term success.

Safeguard Your Business with Proper Insurance

Operating a veterinary clinic comes with inherent risks, making comprehensive insurance coverage essential. Essential policies include malpractice insurance to handle legal issues and general liability insurance for accidents on your premises. Property insurance is crucial to protect your clinic’s infrastructure and equipment against unexpected events. Consulting with an insurance expert can ensure that you have thorough coverage to protect against potential financial setbacks.

Invest in High-Quality Veterinary Equipment

Providing top-tier care necessitates investing in high-quality veterinary equipment. Essential tools like X-ray machines, surgical instruments, and lab equipment should be of the highest standard to ensure accurate diagnoses and treatments. Modern technologies, such as digital imaging systems, not only enhance patient care but also improve operational efficiency. While the initial cost may be higher, investing in quality equipment pays off in the long run by boosting efficiency and minimizing errors.

Secure the Necessary Funding for Your Clinic

Securing sufficient funding is critical when starting a veterinary clinic. Estimate your startup costs accurately to understand your financial needs, including equipment, premises, staffing, and marketing. Explore diverse financing options, such as bank loans, private investors, and specialty medical practice loans that might offer favorable terms. Adequate initial funding prevents cash flow problems and supports your clinic’s growth trajectory.

Choose the Right Location for Your Clinic

The location of your clinic is pivotal to its success, necessitating a spot with a high demand for veterinary services. Conduct thorough market research to choose a community rich in pet owners who need your services. Select a location that is accessible, visible, and has ample parking to ensure convenience for your clients. Proximity to complementary services like pet groomers or dog trainers can further enhance client traffic and provide expansion opportunities.

Opening a veterinary clinic is both challenging and rewarding, demanding a careful blend of dedication and strategic foresight. Success in this field not only enhances the well-being of pets but also contributes positively to the local community. It requires ongoing commitment to adapt and grow in a dynamic environment. Ultimately, the fulfillment of running a successful veterinary clinic comes from both the impact on animal health and the achievement of entrepreneurial goals.

Discover the timeless wisdom that dogs offer at Learning from Dogs, where integrity and living in the present are celebrated. Dive into our content and embrace the lessons from our four-legged friends.

ooOOoo

This is a skilled summary of the needs of opening a vet’s clinic. And thank you, Penny, for your last paragraph. It has been a pleasure!

Ancient times

This attracted me very much, and I wanted to share it with you.

The opening paragraph of this article caught my eye so I read it fully. As it was published in The Conversation then that meant I could republish it.

ooOOoo

Centuries ago, the Maya storm god Huracán taught that when we damage nature, we damage ourselves

An illustration of K’awiil, the Maya god of storm, on pottery. K2970 from the Justin Kerr Maya archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.

James L. Fitzsimmons, Middlebury

The ancient Maya believed that everything in the universe, from the natural world to everyday experiences, was part of a single, powerful spiritual force. They were not polytheists who worshipped distinct gods but pantheists who believed that various gods were just manifestations of that force.

Some of the best evidence for this comes from the behavior of two of the most powerful beings of the Maya world: The first is a creator god whose name is still spoken by millions of people every fall – Huracán, or “Hurricane.” The second is a god of lightning, K’awiil, from the early first millennium C.E.

As a scholar of the Indigenous religions of the Americas, I recognize that these beings, though separated by over 1,000 years, are related and can teach us something about our relationship to the natural world.

Huracán, the ‘Heart of Sky’

Huracán was once a god of the K’iche’, one of the Maya peoples who today live in the southern highlands of Guatemala. He was one of the main characters of the Popol Vuh, a religious text from the 16th century. His name probably originated in the Caribbean, where other cultures used it to describe the destructive power of storms.

The K’iche’ associated Huracán, which means “one leg” in the K’iche’ language, with weather. He was also their primary god of creation and was responsible for all life on earth, including humans.

Because of this, he was sometimes known as U K’ux K’aj, or “Heart of Sky.” In the K’iche’ language, k’ux was not only the heart but also the spark of life, the source of all thought and imagination.

Yet, Huracán was not perfect. He made mistakes and occasionally destroyed his creations. He was also a jealous god who damaged humans so they would not be his equal. In one such episode, he is believed to have clouded their vision, thus preventing them from being able to see the universe as he saw it.

Huracán was one being who existed as three distinct persons: Thunderbolt Huracán, Youngest Thunderbolt and Sudden Thunderbolt. Each of them embodied different types of lightning, ranging from enormous bolts to small or sudden flashes of light.

Despite the fact that he was a god of lightning, there were no strict boundaries between his powers and the powers of other gods. Any of them might wield lightning, or create humanity, or destroy the Earth.

Another storm god

The Popol Vuh implies that gods could mix and match their powers at will, but other religious texts are more explicit. One thousand years before the Popol Vuh was written, there was a different version of Huracán called K’awiil. During the first millennium, people from southern Mexico to western Honduras venerated him as a god of agriculture, lightning and royalty.

A drawing showing a reclining god-like figure with a large snake around him.
The ancient Maya god K’awiil, left, had an ax or torch in his forehead as well as a snake in place of his right leg. K5164 from the Justin Kerr Maya archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.

Illustrations of K’awiil can be found everywhere on Maya pottery and sculpture. He is almost human in many depictions: He has two arms, two legs and a head. But his forehead is the spark of life – and so it usually has something that produces sparks sticking out of it, such as a flint ax or a flaming torch. And one of his legs does not end in a foot. In its place is a snake with an open mouth, from which another being often emerges.

Indeed, rulers, and even gods, once performed ceremonies to K’awiil in order to try and summon other supernatural beings. As personified lightning, he was believed to create portals to other worlds, through which ancestors and gods might travel.

Representation of power

For the ancient Maya, lightning was raw power. It was basic to all creation and destruction. Because of this, the ancient Maya carved and painted many images of K’awiil. Scribes wrote about him as a kind of energy – as a god with “many faces,” or even as part of a triad similar to Huracán.

He was everywhere in ancient Maya art. But he was also never the focus. As raw power, he was used by others to achieve their ends.

Rain gods, for example, wielded him like an ax, creating sparks in seeds for agriculture. Conjurers summoned him, but mostly because they believed he could help them communicate with other creatures from other worlds. Rulers even carried scepters fashioned in his image during dances and processions.

Moreover, Maya artists always had K’awiil doing something or being used to make something happen. They believed that power was something you did, not something you had. Like a bolt of lightning, power was always shifting, always in motion.

An interdependent world

Because of this, the ancient Maya thought that reality was not static but ever-changing. There were no strict boundaries between space and time, the forces of nature or the animate and inanimate worlds.

People walking through knee-deep water on a flooded street with building on either side and electric wires overhead.
Residents wade through a street flooded by Hurricane Helene, in Batabano, Mayabeque province, Cuba, on Sept. 26, 2024. AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

Everything was malleable and interdependent. Theoretically, anything could become anything else – and everything was potentially a living being. Rulers could ritually turn themselves into gods. Sculptures could be hacked to death. Even natural features such as mountains were believed to be alive.

These ideas – common in pantheist societies – persist today in some communities in the Americas.

They were once mainstream, however, and were a part of K’iche’ religion 1,000 years later, in the time of Huracán. One of the lessons of the Popol Vuh, told during the episode where Huracán clouds human vision, is that the human perception of reality is an illusion.

The illusion is not that different things exist. Rather it is that they exist independent from one another. Huracán, in this sense, damaged himself by damaging his creations.

Hurricane season every year should remind us that human beings are not independent from nature but part of it. And like Hurácan, when we damage nature, we damage ourselves.

James L. Fitzsimmons, Professor of Anthropology, Middlebury

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

It is such a powerful message, that when we damage nature, we damage ourselves.

But I am unaware, no we are both unaware of a solution, and there doesn’t appear to be a government desire to make this the number one topic.

Please, if there is anyone who reads this post and has a more positive message then we would be very keen to hear from you.

August’s video of felling our trees

August has produced a find video and it is presented today.

August Hunicke has completed the editing of the video he shot while taking down the very tall trees alongside our house on the 24th and 25th of last September.

It is shared with all of you today.

When a Smooth Job Meets Bad Company

The team involved in the project were shown in this previous post.

The Heart Wall in London

I love this!

I am writing this having listened to a programme on BBC Radio 4. (Was broadcast on Radio 4 on Tuesday, August 13th.) It shows how many, many people can have a really positive response to a dastardly negative occurrence such as the Covid outbreak or a pandemic.

ooOOoo

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Why are those lost to COVID not formally memorialised? How politics shapes what we remember

Mark Honigsbaum, City, University of London

Every Friday, volunteers gather on the Albert Embankment at the River Thames in London to lovingly retouch thousands of red hearts inscribed on a Portland stone wall directly opposite the Houses of Parliament. Each heart is dedicated to a British victim of COVID. It is a deeply social space – a place where the COVID bereaved come together to honour their dead and share memories.

The so-called National Covid Memorial Wall is not, however, officially sanctioned. In fact, ever since activists from COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice (CBFFJ) daubed the first hearts on the wall in March 2021 it has been a thorn in the side of the authorities.

Featured in the media whenever there is a new revelation about partygate, the wall is a symbol of the government’s blundering response to the pandemic and an implicit rebuke to former prime minister Boris Johnson and other government staff who breached coronavirus restrictions.

As one writer put it, viewed from parliament the hearts resemble “a reproachful smear of blood”. Little wonder that the only time Johnson visited the wall was under the cover of darkness to avoid the TV cameras. His successor Rishi Sunak has been similarly reluctant to acknowledge the wall or say what might take its place as a more formal memorial to those lost in the pandemic.

Though in April the UK Commission on COVID Commemoration presented Sunak with a report on how the pandemic should be remembered, Sunak has yet to reveal the commission’s recommendations.

Lady Heather Hallett, the former high court judge who chairs the public inquiry into COVID, has attempted to acknowledge the trauma of the bereaved by commissioning a tapestry to capture the experiences of people who “suffered hardship and loss” during the pandemic. Yet such initiatives are no substitute for state-sponsored memorials.

What is remembered and what is forgotten?

This political vacuum is odd when you consider that the United Kingdom, like other countries, engages in many other commemorative activities central to national identity. The fallen of the first world war and other military conflicts are commemorated in a Remembrance Sunday ceremony held every November at the Cenotaph in London, for example.

But while wars lend themselves to compelling moral narratives, it is difficult to locate meaning in the random mutations of a virus. And while wars draw on a familiar repertoire of symbols and rituals, pandemics have few templates.

For instance, despite killing more than 50 million globally, there are virtually no memorials to the 1918-1919 “Spanish” influenza pandemic. Nor does the UK have a memorial to victims of HIV/AIDS. As the memory studies scholar Astrid Erll puts it, pandemics have not been sufficiently “mediated” in collective memory.

As a rule, they do not feature in famous paintings, novels or films or in the oral histories passed down as part of family lore. Nor are they able to draw on familiar cultural materials such as poppies, gun carriages, catafalques and royal salutes. Without such symbols and schemata, Erll argues, we struggle to incorporate pandemics into our collective remembering systems.

This lacuna was brought home to me last September when tens of thousands of Britons flocked to the south bank of the Thames to pay their respects to Britain’s longest serving monarch. By coincidence, the police directed the queue for the late Queen’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall over Lambeth Bridge and along Albert Embankment.

But few of the people I spoke to in the queue seemed to realise what the hearts signified. It was as if the spectacle of a royal death had eclipsed the suffering of the COVID bereaved, rendering the wall all but invisible.

Waiting for answers

Another place where the pandemic could be embedded in collective memory is at the public inquiry. Opening the preliminary hearing last October into the UK’s resilience and preparedness for a pandemic, Lady Hallett promised to put the estimated 6.8 million Britons mourning the death of a family member or friend to COVID at the heart of the legal process. “I am listening to them; their loss will be recognised,” she said.

But though Lady Hallett has strategically placed photographs of the hearts throughout the inquiry’s offices in Bayswater and has invited the bereaved to relate their experiences to “Every Story Matters”, the hearing room is dominated by ranks of lawyers. And except when a prominent minister or official is called to testify, the proceedings rarely make the news.

This is partly the fault of the inquiry process itself. The hearings are due to last until 2025, with the report on the first stage of the process not expected until the summer of 2024. As Lucy Easthope, an emergency planner and veteran of several disasters, puts it: “one of the most painful frustrations of the inquiry will be temporal. It will simply take too long.”

The inquiry has also been beset by bureaucratic obfuscation, not least by the Cabinet Office which attempted (unsuccessfully in the end) to block the release of WhatsApp messages relating to discussions between ministers and Downing Street officials in the run-up to lockdown.

To the inquiry’s critics, the obvious parallel is with the Grenfell inquiry, which promised to “learn lessons” from the devastating fire that engulfed the west London tower in 2017 but has so far ended up blurring the lines of corporate responsibility and forestalling a political reckoning.

The real work of holding the government to account and making memories takes place every Friday at the wall and the other places where people come together to spontaneously mourn and remember absent loved ones. These are the lives that demand to be “seen”. They are the ghosts that haunt our amnesic political culture.

Mark Honigsbaum, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, City, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

plus Wikipedia have a long article on the National Covid Memorial Wall. That then takes us to the website for the wall.

ooOOoo

As was written in the last sentence of the article; ‘They are the ghosts that haunt our amnesic political culture.‘

Humans are a strange lot and I most certainly count myself in!

The weather conundrum!

We are in an era of unknown weather, across the world!

Niccolò Ubalducci Photographer
Photo by Niccolò Ubalducci

ooOOoo

The climate is changing so fast that we haven’t seen how bad extreme weather could get

Simon H. Lee, University of St Andrews; Hayley J. Fowler, Newcastle University, and Paul Davies, Newcastle University

Published: July 30, 2024

Extreme weather is by definition rare on our planet. Ferocious storms, searing heatwaves and biting cold snaps illustrate what the climate is capable of at its worst. However, since Earth’s climate is rapidly warming, predominantly due to fossil fuel burning, the range of possible weather conditions, including extremes, is changing.

Scientists define “climate” as the distribution of possible weather events observed over a length of time, such as the range of temperatures, rainfall totals or hours of sunshine. From this they construct statistical measures, such as the average (or normal) temperature. Weather varies on several timescales – from seconds to decades – so the longer the period over which the climate is analysed, the more accurately these analyses capture the infinite range of possible configurations of the atmosphere.

Typically, meteorologists and climate scientists use a 30-year period to represent the climate, which is updated every ten years. The most recent climate period is 1991-2020. The difference between each successive 30-year climate period serves as a very literal record of climate change.

This way of thinking about the climate falls short when the climate itself is rapidly changing. Global average temperatures have increased at around 0.2°C per decade over the past 30 years, meaning that the global climate of 1991 was around 0.6°C cooler than that in 2020 (when accounting for other year-to-year fluctuations), and even more so than the present day.

A moving target for climate modellers

If the climate is a range of possible weather events, then this rapid change has two implications. First, it means that part of the distribution of weather events comprising a 30-year climate period occurred in a very different background global climate: for example, northerly winds in the 1990s were much colder than those in the 2020s in north-west Europe, thanks to the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the global average. Statistics from three decades ago no longer represent what is possible in the present day.

Second, the rapidly changing climate means we have not necessarily experienced the extremes that modern-day atmospheric and oceanic warmth can produce. In a stable climate, scientists would have multiple decades for the atmosphere to get into its various configurations and drive extreme events, such as heatwaves, floods or droughts. We could then use these observations to build up an understanding of what the climate is capable of. But in our rapidly changing climate, we effectively have only a few years – not enough to experience everything the climate has to offer.

Extreme weather events require what meteorologists might call a “perfect storm”. For example, extreme heat in the UK typically requires the northward movement of an air mass from Africa combined with clear skies, dry soils and a stable atmosphere to prevent thunderstorms forming which tend to dissipate heat.

Such “perfect” conditions are intrinsically unlikely, and many years can pass without them occurring – all while the climate continues to change in the background. Based on an understanding of observations alone, this can leave us woefully underprepared for what the climate can now do, should the right weather conditions all come together at once.

Startling recent examples include the extreme heatwave in the Pacific north-west of North America in 2021, in which temperatures exceeded the previous Canadian record maximum by 4.6°C. Another is the occurrence of 40°C in the UK in summer 2022, which exceeded the previous UK record maximum set only three years earlier by 1.6°C. This is part of the reason why the true impact of a fixed amount of global warming is only evident after several decades, but of course – since the climate is changing rapidly – we cannot use this method anymore.

Playing with fire

To better understand these extremes, scientists can use ensembles: many runs of the same weather or climate model that each slightly differ to show a range of plausible outcomes. Ensembles are routinely used in weather prediction, but can also be used to assess extreme events which could happen even if they do not actually happen at the time.

When 40°C first appeared in ensemble forecasts for the UK before the July 2022 heatwave, it revealed the kind of extreme weather that is possible in the current climate. Even if it had not come to fruition, its mere appearance in the models showed that the previously unthinkable was now possible. In the event, several naturally occurring atmospheric factors combined with background climate warming to generate the record-shattering heat on July 19 that year.

The highest observed temperature each year in the UK, from 1900 to 2023

A graph showing the highest observed temperature in the UK between 1900 and 2023.
The hottest days are getting hotter in the UK. Met Office/Kendon et al. 2024

Later in summer 2022, after the first occurrence of 40°C, some ensemble weather forecasts for the UK showed a situation in which 40°C could be reached on multiple consecutive days. This would have posed an unprecedented threat to public health and infrastructure in the UK. Unlike the previous month, this event did not come to pass, and was quickly forgotten – but it shouldn’t have been.

It is not certain whether these model simulations correctly represent the processes involved in producing extreme heat. Even so, we must heed the warning signs.

Despite a record-warm planet, summer 2024 in the UK has been relatively cool so far. The past two years have seen global temperatures far above anything previously observed, and so potential extremes have probably shifted even further from what we have so far experienced.

Just as was the case in August 2022, we’ve got away with it for now – but we might not be so lucky next time.

Simon H. Lee, Lecturer in Atmospheric Science, University of St Andrews; Hayley J. Fowler, Professor of Climate Change Impacts, Newcastle University, and Paul Davies, Chief Meteorologist, Met Office and Visiting Professor, Newcastle University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

That last sentence says it all: “Just as was the case in August 2022, we’ve got away with it for now – but we might not be so lucky next time.”

I am giving a talk, The Next Ten Years, next Saturday to our local Freethinkers group in Grants Pass. Close to the start of the presentation I say: “The Global Temperature anomaly, as of last year, 2023, is 1.17 C, 2.11 F, above the long-term average from 1951 to 1980. The 10 most recent years are the warmest years on record.“

Finally, I am getting on in age and part of me wants to die, hopefully naturally, before more climate extremes are reached, but then another part of me would like to experience it!

Dogs rescued from ‘Park Fire’.

That’s the fire in California that is growing so quickly!

There are so many stories around about these dogs being rescued. I have chosen the YouTube video which is the CBS News, Chicago, presentation.

A homeowner was forced to leave their truck behind with the adult rottweiler and her puppies. The owner told rescuers where they were, but the intense fire blocked access to the truck. Several days later, rescuers spotted the dogs from a helicopter and landed to get them.