Category: History

The weather conundrum!

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

Niccolò Ubalducci Photographer — Photo by Niccolò Ubalducci

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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 Statistics from three decades ago no longer represent what is possible in the present day.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.

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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!

Essentially, life is about play

We take our decision from watching the animal kingdom.

A recent post in The Conversation provides the article for today’s blog post.

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At its core, life is all about play − just look at the animal kingdom

Throw it to me! Mike Linnane / 500px via Getty Images

David Toomey, UMass Amherst

At Cambridge University Library, along with all the books, maps and manuscripts, there’s a child’s drawing that curators have titled “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers.”

The drawing depicts a turbaned cavalry soldier facing off against an English dragoon. It’s a bit trippy: The British soldier sits astride a carrot, and the turbaned soldier rides a grape. Both carrot and grape are fitted with horses’ heads and stick appendages.

A child's drawing of two soldiers ridind a grape and a carrot — ‘The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers,’ a drawing on the back of a manuscript page from Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species,’ attributed to Darwin’s young son Francis. Cambridge University Library, CC BY-ND

It’s thought to be the work of Francis Darwin, the seventh child of British naturalist Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma, and appears to have been made in 1857, when Frank would have been 10 or 11. And it’s drawn on the back of a page of a draft of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin’s masterwork and the foundational text of evolutionary biology. The few sheets of the draft that survive are pages Darwin gave to his children to use for drawing paper.

Darwin’s biographers have long recognized that play was important in his personal and familial life. The Georgian manor in which he and Emma raised their 10 children was furnished with a rope swing hung over the first-floor landing and a portable wooden slide that could be laid over the main stairway. The gardens and surrounding countryside served as an open-air laboratory and playground.

Play also has a role in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. As I explain in my new book, “Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself,” there are many similarities – so many that if you could distill the processes of natural selection into a single behavior, that behavior would be play.

No goal, no direction

Natural selection is the process by which organisms that are best adapted to their environments are more likely to survive, and so able to pass on the characteristics that helped them thrive to their offspring. It is undirected: In Darwin’s words, it “includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development.”

Through natural selection, the rock pocket mouse has evolved a coat color that hides it from predators in the desert Southwest.

In contrast to foraging and hunting – behaviors with clearly defined goals – play is likewise undirected. When a pony frolics in a field, a dog wrestles with a stick or chimpanzees chase each other, they act with no goal in mind.

Natural selection is utterly provisional: The evolution of any organism responds to whatever conditions are present at a given place and time. Likewise, animals at play are acting provisionally. They constantly adjust their movements in response to changes in circumstances. Playing squirrels, faced with obstacles such as falling branches or other squirrels, nimbly alter their tactics and routes.

Natural selection is open-ended. The forms of life are not fixed, but continually evolving. Play, too, is open-ended. Animals begin a play session with no plan of when to end it. Two dogs play-fighting, for instance, cease playing only when one is injured, exhausted or simply loses interest.

Natural selection also is wasteful, as Darwin acknowledged. “Many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive,” he wrote. But in the long term, he allowed, such profligacy could produce adaptations that enable an evolutionary line to become “more fit.”

Keepers noticed that Shanthi, a 36-year-old elephant at the Smithsonian national zoo, liked to make noise with objects, so they gave her horns, harmonicas and other noisemakers.

Play is likewise profligate. It requires an animal to expend time and energy that perhaps would be better devoted to behaviors such as foraging and hunting that could aid survival.

And that profligacy is also advantageous. Animals forage and hunt in specific ways that don’t typically change. But an animal at play is far more likely to innovate – and some of its innovations may in time be adapted into new ways to forage and hunt.

Competing and cooperating

As Darwin first framed it, the “struggle for existence” was by and large a competition. But in the 1860s, Russian naturalist Pyotr Kropotkin’s observations of birds and fallow deer led him to conclude that many species were “the most numerous and the most prosperous” because natural selection also selects for cooperation.

Scientists confirmed Kroptokin’s hypothesis in the 20th century, discovering all manner of cooperation, not only between members of the same species but between members of different species. For example, clown fish are immune to anemone stings; they nestle in anemone tentacles for protection and, in return, keep the anemones free of parasites, provide nutrients and drive away predators.

Play likewise utilizes both competition and cooperation. Two dogs play-fighting are certainly competing, yet to sustain their play, they must cooperate. They often reverse roles: A dog with the advantage of position might suddenly surrender that advantage and roll over on its back. If one bites harder than intended, it is likely to retreat and perform a play bow – saying, in effect, “My bad. I hope we can keep playing.”

River otters at the Oregon Zoo repeatedly separate and reunite while playing in a tub of ice.

Natural selection and play also may both employ deception. From butterflies colored to resemble toxic species to wild cats that squeal like distressed baby monkeys, many organisms use mimicry to deceive their prey, predators and rivals. Play – specifically, play-fighting – similarly offers animals opportunities to learn about and practice deception.

To live is to play

Darwin wrote that natural selection creates “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” Play also creates beauty in countless ways, from the aerial acrobatics of birds of prey to the arcing, twisting leaps of dolphins.

In 1973, Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky published an essay with the take-no-prisoners title “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Many biologists would agree. Perhaps the most satisfying definition of life attends not to what it is but to what it does – which is to say, life is what evolves by natural selection.

And since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may with some justification maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful.

David Toomey, Professor of English, UMass Amherst

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

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Prof. Toomey’s analysis is spot-on.

All of life involves some form of play.

Picture Parade Four Hundred and Forty-Four

As promised, yet another set of photographs courtesy of Jess.

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Beautiful photographs, and thank you, Jess! We especially loved the second one, yet they were all glorious.

Dogs can smell our human stress

An article from Live Science tells all.

Before I share the article with you, I felt I should mention that I haven’t found a link to share the Live Science item and it may need to be moved. We will see what happens.

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Dogs can smell their humans’ stress, and it makes them sad.

By Sara Novak, published July 27, 2024.

Dogs can smell when people are stressed, and it seems to make them feel downhearted.

A new study shows that dogs pick up on our emotions through their sense of smell. (Image credit: Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images)

Humans and dogs have been close companions for perhaps 30,000 years, according to anthropological and DNA evidence. So it would make sense that dogs would be uniquely qualified to interpret human emotion. They have evolved to read verbal and visual cues from their owners, and previous research has shown that with their acute sense of smell, they can even detect the odor of stress in human sweat. Now researchers have found that not only can dogs smell stress—in this case represented by higher levels of the hormone cortisol—they also react to it emotionally.

For the new study, published Monday in Scientific Reports, scientists at the University of Bristol in England recruited 18 dogs of varying breeds, along with their owners. Eleven volunteers who were unfamiliar to the dogs were put through a stress test involving public speaking and arithmetic while samples of their underarm sweat were gathered on pieces of cloth. Next, the human participants underwent a relaxation exercise that included watching a nature video on a beanbag chair under dim lighting, after which new sweat samples were taken. Sweat samples from three of these volunteers were used in the study.

Participating canines were put into three groups and smelled sweat samples from one of the three volunteers. Prior to doing so, the dogs were trained to know that a food bowl at one location contained a treat and that a bowl at another location did not. During testing, bowls that did not contain a treat were sometimes placed in one of three “ambiguous” locations. In one testing session, when the dogs smelled the sample from a stressed volunteer, compared with the scent of a cloth without a sample, they were less likely to approach the bowl in one of the ambiguous locations, suggesting that they thought this bowl did not contain a treat. Previous research has shown that an expectation of a negative outcome reflects a down mood in dogs.

The results imply that when dogs are around stressed individuals, they’re more pessimistic about uncertain situations, whereas proximity to people with the relaxed odor does not have this effect, says Zoe Parr-Cortes, lead study author and a Ph.D. student at Bristol Veterinary School at the University of Bristol. “For thousands of years, dogs have learned to live with us, and a lot of their evolution has been alongside us. Both humans and dogs are social animals, and there’s an emotional contagion between us,” she says. “Being able to sense stress from another member of the pack was likely beneficial because it alerted them of a threat that another member of the group had already detected.”

The fact that the odor came from an individual who was unfamiliar to the dogs speaks to the importance of smell for the animals and to the way it affects emotions in such practical situations, says Katherine A. Houpt, a professor emeritus of behavioral medicine at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Houpt, who was not involved in the new study, suggests that the smell of stress may have reduced the dogs’ hunger because it’s known to impact appetite. “It might not be that it’s changing their decision-making but more that it’s changing their motivation for food,” she says. “It makes sense because when you’re super stressed, you’re not quite as interested in that candy bar.”

This research, Houpt adds, shows that dogs have empathy based on smell in addition to visual and verbal cues. And when you’re stressed, that could translate into behaviors that your dog doesn’t normally display, she says. What’s more, it leaves us to wonder how stress impacts the animals under the more intense weight of an anxious owner. “If the dogs are responding to more mild stress like this, I’d be interested to see how they responded to something more serious like an impending tornado, losing your job or failing a test,” Houpt says. “One would expect the dog to be even more attuned to an actual threat.”

Sara Novak, Science Writer

Sara Novak is a science writer based on Sullivan’s Island, S.C. Her work has appeared in Discover, Sierra Magazine, Popular Science, New Scientist, and more. Follow Novak on X (formerly Twitter) @sarafnovak

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Dogs are such perfect animals and Sara brings this out so well. As was pointed out in the article dogs have learned to live with us humans over thousands of years.

Well done, Sara!

Our amazing trees.

Beyond our imagination.

Until quite recently I had imagined that a tree was just a tree. Then Jean and I got to watch a YouTube video on trees and it blew our minds. Here is what we watched:

That led us on to watching Judi Dench’s video of trees:

Which is a longish introduction to a piece on The Conversation about trees.

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Trees don’t like to breathe wildfire smoke, either – and they’ll hold their breath to avoid it

Trees and other plants can’t escape wildfire smoke. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Delphine Farmer, Colorado State University and Mj Riches, Colorado State University

When wildfire smoke is in the air, doctors urge people to stay indoors to avoid breathing in harmful particles and gases. But what happens to trees and other plants that can’t escape from the smoke?

They respond a bit like us, it turns out: Some trees essentially shut their windows and doors and hold their breath.

As atmospheric and chemical scientists, we study the air quality and ecological effects of wildfire smoke and other pollutants. In a study that started quite by accident when smoke overwhelmed our research site in Colorado, we were able to watch in real time how the leaves of living pine trees responded.

How plants breathe

Plants have pores on the surface of their leaves called stomata. These pores are much like our mouths, except that while we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen.

A highly magnified view of stomata in a maize leaf. Umberto Salvagnin/Flickr, CC BY

Both humans and plants inhale other chemicals in the air around them and exhale chemicals produced inside them – coffee breath for some people, pine scents for some trees.

Unlike humans, however, leaves breathe in and out at the same time, constantly taking in and releasing atmospheric gases.

Clues from over a century of research

In the early 1900s, scientists studying trees in heavily polluted areas discovered that those chronically exposed to pollution from coal-burning had black granules clogging the leaf pores through which plants breathe. They suspected that the substance in these granules was partly created by the trees, but due to the lack of available instruments at the time, the chemistry of those granules was never explored, nor were the effects on the plants’ photosynthesis.

Most modern research into wildfire smoke’s effects has focused on crops, and the results have been conflicting.

For example, a study of multiple crop and wetland sites in California showed that smoke scatters light in a way that made plants more efficient at photosynthesis and growth. However, a lab study in which plants were exposed to artificial smoke found that plant productivity dropped during and after smoke exposure – though those plants did recover after a few hours.

There are other clues that wildfire smoke can impact plants in negative ways. You may have even tasted one: When grapes are exposed to smoke, their wine can be tainted.

What makes smoke toxic, even far from the fire

When wildfire smoke travels long distances, the smoke cooks in sunlight and chemically changes.

Mixing volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides and sunlight will make ground-level ozone, which can cause breathing problems in humans. It can also damage plants by degrading the leaf surface, oxidizing plant tissue and slowing photosynthesis.

Illustration of a burning tree with particles showing their size. — Smoke has particles much smaller than the width of a hair and gases that evolve in sunlight. Jen Burgess/IsolineStudios for BC Centre for Disease Control

While scientists usually think about urban regions as being large sources of ozone that effect crops downwind, wildfire smoke is an emerging concern. Other compounds, including nitrogen oxides, can also harm plants and reduce photosynthesis.

Taken together, studies suggest that wildfire smoke interacts with plants, but in poorly understood ways. This lack of research is driven by the fact that studying smoke effects on the leaves of living plants in the wild is hard: Wildfires are hard to predict, and it can be unsafe to be in smoky conditions.

Accidental research – in the middle of a wildfire

We didn’t set out to study plant responses to wildfire smoke. Instead, we were trying to understand how plants emit volatile organic compounds – the chemicals that make forests smell like a forest, but also impact air quality and can even change clouds.

Fall 2020 was a bad season for wildfires in the western U.S., and thick smoke came through a field site where we were working in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

On the first morning of heavy smoke, we did our usual test to measure leaf-level photosynthesis of Ponderosa pines. We were surprised to discover that the tree’s pores were completely closed and photosynthesis was nearly zero.

We also measured the leaves’ emissions of their usual volatile organic compounds and found very low readings. This meant that the leaves weren’t “breathing” – they weren’t inhaling the carbon dioxide they need to grow and weren’t exhaling the chemicals they usually release.

Side-by-side photos show the air was smoky, similar to a foggy or smoggy day, but no so think that you can't see the forest ahead. — A clear day at the Colorado test site, on the left, compared to the smoky day when trees responded to the poor air quality, on the right. Mj Riches, CC BY-SA

With these unexpected results, we decided to try to force photosynthesis and see if we could “defibrillate” the leaf into its normal rhythm. By changing the leaf’s temperature and humidity, we cleared the leaf’s “airways” and saw a sudden improvement in photosynthesis and a burst of volatile organic compounds.

What our months of data told us is that some plants respond to heavy bouts of wildfire smoke by shutting down their exchange with outside air. They are effectively holding their breath, but not before they have been exposed to the smoke.

We hypothesize a few processes that could have caused leaves to close their pores: Smoke particles could coat the leaves, creating a layer that prevents the pores from opening. Smoke could also enter the leaves and clog their pores, keeping them sticky. Or the leaves could physically respond to the first signs of smoke and close their pores before they get the worst of it.

It’s likely a combination of these and other responses.

The long-term impact is still unknown

The jury is still out on exactly how long the effects of wildfire smoke last and how repeated smoke events will affect plants – including trees and crops – over the long term.

With wildfires increasing in severity and frequency due to climate change, forest management policies and human behavior, it’s important to gain a better understanding of the impact.

Delphine Farmer, Professor of Chemistry, Colorado State University and Mj Riches, Postdoctoral Researcher in Environmental and Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

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

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The biggest tree in the world is reputed to be the General Sherman tree in California. Here is the introduction from WikiPedia:

General Sherman is a giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) tree located at an elevation of 2,109 m (6,919 ft) above sea level in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in Tulare County, in the U.S. state of California. By volume, it is the largest known living single-stem tree on Earth.

Amazing!

Introspection.

A recent article by George Monbiot gets me thinking.

George Monbiot is 61; his birthday is on January 27th. Thus he is 14 years younger than me. He is an experienced writer for The Guardian newspaper. Plus he has authored quite a few books and founded a charity, and given TED Talks, and I am sure more than this.

I read all of the articles that are published by him. His website is widely read. Please read his biography. Some of his many articles really get me thinking.

Some time ago I asked Mr. Monbiot for permission to republish his articles and that was granted. A small number of them have been republished on Learning from Dogs.

Today I want to republish an article that was presented on July 3rd.

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The Fight Against Oligarchy

Oligarchy is the default state of politics, and it is surging back. How do we stop it?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27^th June 2024

We are about to return to normal politics. After 14 years of Tory corruption and misrule, a Labour government will put this country back on track. Justice and decency will resume, public services will be rebuilt, our global standing will be restored, we will revert to a familiar state. Or so the story goes.

What is the “normal” envisaged by pundits and politicians of the left and centre? It is the most anomalous politics in the history of the world. Consciously or otherwise, they hark back to a remarkable period, roughly 1945 to 1975, in which, in certain rich nations, wealth and power were distributed, almost everyone could aspire to decent housing, wages and conditions, public services were ambitious and well-funded and a robust economic safety net prevented destitution. There had never been a period like it in the prior history of the world, and there has not been one since. Even during that period, general prosperity in the rich nations was supported by extreme exploitation, coups and violence imposed on the poor nations. We lived in a bubble, limited in time and space, in which extraordinary things happened. Yet somehow we think of it as normal.

Those “normal” politics were the result of something known to economic historians as the “great compression”: a drastic reduction in inequality caused by two world wars. In many powerful countries, a combination of the physical destruction of assets, the loss of colonial and overseas possessions, inflation, very high taxes, wage and price controls, requisitioning and nationalisation required by the wartime economy, as well as the effects of rising democracy and labour organisation, greatly reduced the income and assets of the rich. It also greatly improved, once the wars had ended, the position of the poor. For several decades, we benefited from the aftermath of these great shocks. Now the effect has faded. We are returning to true “normality”.

The history of many centuries, including our own, shows that the default state of politics is not redistribution and general welfare, but a spiral of accumulation by the very rich, the extreme exploitation of labour, the seizure of common resources and exaction of rent for their use, extortion, coercion and violence. Normal is a society in which might is right. Normal is oligarchy.

In his magisterial book The Great Leveler, published in 2017, the historian Walter Scheidel explains that only four forces have ever significantly reversed inequality: mass-mobilisation warfare (such as the two world wars), total and violent revolution, state collapse and devastating plagues. Decisions, decisions.

He shows how warfare economies were turned into welfare economies, sometimes by force. For example, following the defeat of Japan, the US occupation government, led by General Douglas MacArthur, sought what it called “the democratization of Japanese economic institutions” to ensure “a wide distribution of income and ownership of the means of production and trade”. To this end, it imposed high property taxes, with a top marginal rate of 90%; broke up business conglomerates; demanded a labour union law enabling the right to organise and strike, and higher wages for workers; organised comprehensive land reform, which dissolved large holdings and distributed them to peasants; and introduced fiscal reform that led eventually to taxes on the highest incomes of 75% and an inheritance tax on the largest estates of 70%. These programmes resulted in the near-total destruction of income from capital and the creation in Japan of a political and economic democracy, almost from scratch.

All the major combatants were similarly transformed. In the US, the top rate of estate (inheritance) tax rose to 71% in 1941, and income tax to 94% in 1944. The National War Labor Board raised workers’ pay while holding down executive pay. Union membership soared. In the UK, the top rate of income tax was held at 98% from 1941 to 1952. It took decades to decline to current levels. A purchase tax on luxury goods was introduced in 1940, with rates that later rose to 100%. The share of incomes captured by the richest 0.1% fell from 7% in 1937 to just over 1% in 1975.

In the absence of one of the four great catastrophes, income and capital inexorably accumulate in the hands of the few, and oligarchy returns. Oligarchs are people who translate their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power. They build a politics that suits them. Scheidel shows that as inequality rises, so does polarisation and political dysfunction, both of which favour the very rich, as a competent, proactive state is a threat to their interests. Dysfunction is what the Tories delivered and Donald Trump promises.

Oligarchs seek the destruction of oversight, which is why UK bodies such as the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive have been comprehensively gutted. The same desire was the driving force behind Brexit. They want the cessation of protest. They want a failing NHS, to justify privatisation. They want malleable politiciansand a tame BBC. They get what they want, distorting every aspect of national life. They pour money into neoliberal and far-right political movements, which help capital to solve its perennial problem: democracy. The arc of history bends towards injustice. But every so often it is broken over the knee of catastrophe.

If you want a return to the rich nations’ “normality” of 1945 to 1975 – in other words, to redistribution, a shared sense of national purpose, robust public services and a strong economic safety net, high employment and good wages – and I think most people would, you need a politics that is not just abnormal, but unprecedented. Snapping the arc of injustice would mean going way beyond Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto, let alone Keir Starmer’s limp offering, which treads so carefully around the interests of the rich. We would need to do what the world wars did, without the violence and physical destruction: a peacetime MacArthur programme for overthrowing the oligarchs.

Political parties would need to overcome their fear of economic power: of the newspaper barons, the property developers, the fossil fuel companies, hedge funds, private equity bosses and assorted oligarchs who now fund and influence our politics. The longer we leave this confrontation, the more extreme and entrenched oligarchic power becomes. If we want even a modicum of democracy, equality, fairness and a functioning state, we need not the accommodation with economic power that Starmer seeks, but the mother of all battles with it.

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Let me repeat a sentence from the article: “Oligarchs are people who translate their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power.”

I am towards the end of my life. Whether or not things will change politically, as Monbiot suggests above, I do not know. But if asked to guess I would say probably not.

I would love to see a different, as in a better way, of us humans running things. I can’t put it better than how George Monbiot expressed it in that last sentence: “If we want even a modicum of democracy, equality, fairness and a functioning state, we need not the accommodation with economic power that Starmer seeks, but the mother of all battles with it.”

Finally, George Monbiot has a saying on his website: “I love not man the less, but Nature more.” I wish that were not the case, I wish oligarchy was a dead word, but Nature is so beautiful.

Photo by Daniel Beilinson on Unsplash

Independence Day

July 4th, 2024

From WikiPedia (in part):

Independence Day, known colloquially as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the Declaration of Independence, which was ratified by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, establishing the United States of America.

The Founding Father delegates of the Second Continental Congress declared that the Thirteen Colonies were no longer subject (and subordinate) to the monarch of Britain, King George III, and were now united, free, and independent states.^[1] The Congress voted to approve independence by passing the Lee Resolution on July 2 and adopted the Declaration of Independence two days later, on July 4.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

This is home!

Reflections on Oregon.

Or more precisely Southern Oregon.

We live in a beautiful State.

Roughly 100 miles North-East of us is Crater Lake.

Photo by Anukrati Omar on Unsplash

It was formed when this former volcano, “which collapsed on itself during an eruption just 7,700 years ago and slowly filled with melted snow, now stands as Oregon’s only national park.”

At over 2,000 feet deep it is the deepest lake in the United States of America.

There is a website, 16 Reasons Why Oregon is the Best State in the Country, and Jean and I believe it. Do visit this web page.

Oregon has acres and acres of forest and wild lands.