Climate change, under our noses


Temperature data for Greensboro, NC, June 2011

If the American people were rational, rather than cracked up on right-wing propaganda, they would suspect that the same people who are lying to them about climate change also are lying to them about other things. But there is something about right-wing minds that makes it easy to deny what is right in front of their noses if it conflicts with some belief or prejudice.

Just over a week ago, NOAA released new 30-year temperature normals, revising average U.S. temperatures up by .5 degree F. These 30-year averages are kept lower by data that is up to 30 years old, of course. We’re actually, on average, even warmer than that now. “The climate of the 2000s is about 1.5 degree F warmer than the 1970s,” NOAA’s director of climate data said. We’re not talking about models, or predictions. This is official observation data.

The chart at the top of this post shows temperatures for June 2011 in Greensboro, NC. That’s the station closest to me with official weather data. If you do some scouting on the NOAA web site, you’ll be able to find similar data for your state.

There were those who thought I was just being subjective — and just plain wrong — about this summer’s weather being much hotter than when I was a boy. But look what the chart above shows. There were 24 days in June when the temperature was above normal — often far above normal. There were 12 days when the temperature went above 95. There were only three days during the entire month of June when the high temperature was in the normal range. There were only five nights in June when the temperature went below normal, and only slightly below normal at that. So far for July, every single day the temperature has been above normal.

Not only is this miserable, it is making dry weather and droughts much more dangerous to crops and other growing things. A drought with normal temperatures is one thing. A drought when temperatures are running 10 degrees above normal is deadly.

Anyone who is not terrified by this is in a state of denial. This changes everything, for ourselves and for our children.

And we’re doing nothing about it, because of greed, denial, and the right-wing mind.

Baby pumpkin

There’s something magical about pumpkins. I’ve never grown pumpkins before, but I’ve wanted to for years. I thought they might be hard to grow, and they’re said to be heavy feeders. But the vines from my two pumpkin plants are now the biggest, most vigorous plants in the garden.

Last week’s rain helped the garden get through the hot, dry week that followed, with temperatures over 95. Yesterday evening, 1.1 inches of rain fell. I took advantage of the soft ground to do some weeding and hoeing this morning. The forecast for the next five days looks good — pretty good chances of rain and normal temperatures in the upper 80s.

Even with the drought, the garden has supplied 99 percent of my fresh food for over two months. I hardly ever go to the grocery store these days. I had been planning to make my monthly trip to Whole Foods this week, but I realized that there really isn’t anything I have to have, so I’ll wait until I run out of half and half or something. For those of us who use a lot of fresh produce, I can definitely testify that a garden saves a bunch of money.

As for the pumpkins: pumpkin pie!

The abbey organ has been upgraded


Rodgers Cambridge 730, made in 1992

For a long time, I’ve known just what sort of organ I really want. It needed to be a Rodgers, because Rodgers has such a sterling reputation. I’m talking about electronic organs, of course. There’s no way I could afford a wind instrument. I wanted a Rodgers made after 1990, because that’s when Rodgers switched from analog technology (oscillators — an artificial, synthesized sound) to digitally sampled pipe organ sounds. The post-1990 Rodgers organs also have MIDI interfaces, which allows the organ to be controlled (and played, like a self-playing instrument) by a computer connected to the organ. I also wanted an organ with at least one 32-foot stop (I’ll explain what that is in a second). And I wanted a classical instrument, not a theater organ.

I kept hoping that such an organ would jump into my lap, at a price I could afford. One did. The organ was being abandoned by a church about 20 miles from here that has changed to a different kind of music. They just plain didn’t want the organ anymore. It was taking up too much room up front on the platform that they call “the stage.” Anyway, their loss is my gain.

Rodgers has an interesting history. The company was started in 1958 by some nerds from Tektronix. For a while they were owned by CBS, which also owned Steinway. In 1988, they became a subsidiary of the Roland Corp. — good sound engineers, they.

This 1992 organ is by no means obsolete. It has only been out of warranty for eight or nine years. It uses the same digital sampling technology that Rodgers still uses today. They call it “Parallel Digital Imaging.” Using several microphones, they record the sound from thousands of individual organ pipes, each pipe separately. When you touch a key, you hear the sound of actual organ pipes. Each pipe sound is played through a minimum of two speakers for a kind of stereo effect. My organ has six audio channels (two for each keyboard and two for the pedals) and requires a minimum of six speakers, though it came with 10. There are two subwoofers, each weighing 92 pounds. The other eight speakers are of more normal size, 40 pounds each. That’s 500 pounds of speakers, plus about 650 pounds for the organ console. It was no easy moving job. And it does make a mighty sound, though it also can be very quiet and sweet. I was prepared for this. I knew before I built Acorn Abbey what kind of organ would eventually be here, so I made sure that the house had an appropriate place for the console (in the living room) and the speakers (upstairs). I put wiring in the walls for the speakers when the house was being built.

The subwoofers are there for the 32-foot pedal stop. Not all organs have 32-foot stops — only larger organs. With a 32-foot stop, the longest pipe in the rank is 32 feet long. This produces a very low note — 16 cycles per second, too low for human hearing. Nor can recordings of organ music capture this sound, because few stereo systems support frequencies that low, and I believe frequencies that low are outside the specification for CD recordings. But the sound can be felt, as a kind of vibration in the room. This profound organ sound is something you’ll only experience when you’re in the same room as a large organ. The organ is the only musical instrument that can make a note that low.

The abbey’s new Rodgers 730 is a more competent organ than I am organist, to tell the truth. But I’m practicing to work on gaining technique that I’ve lost over the years. And of course the computer will be able to play what I can’t play.

I’ll post YouTube videos of me, or the computer, playing the organ in coming weeks.

Note: It’s probably misleading that I call my house an abbey, and there’s a church organ in it. Though I value much of the cultural and community work that churches do, I consider myself a pagan, like my Celtic ancestors before Rome with its armies and bishops came around and stomped all over everyone.

Jefferson the foodie


Monticello

Salon magazine has a nice article about how Jefferson was America’s first foodie.

I sure would like to know what the sources are for all this information about Jefferson. My guess is that it’s scattered throughout Jefferson’s letters and diaries. I’ve read two biographies of Jefferson in the last year, and though there are passing references to Jefferson’s vegetable garden, there’s not much else.

Of the founding fathers, Jefferson is my favorite. He was a Southerner and proud of it, but he didn’t let that close his mind to the larger world. His values were Enlightenment values, not the Puritan values that stank up the political environment then, as now. He loved languages. He loved science and technology. And best of all, he never stopped being rebellious. He was as much a rebel when he died (at age 84) as when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson’s cuisine was a fusion cuisine: Southern comfort food fused with Mediterranean, and wine rather than whisky.

Oh what I would give if it were possible for Thomas Jefferson to write an op-ed in today’s New York Times, wielding his rhetorical light sabre against the Puritans, corporatists, Philistines and know-nothings who have bought the government.

Know your farmer? Not if she can help it…

There is no creature in the U.S. Congress more vile, more black-hearted, more ignorant, and more determined to horse-whip us all back to the Dark Ages than Virginia Foxx. I am ashamed to say that she represents my district, the 5th District of North Carolina.

She’s always up to no good, in service of corporate greed and pandering to the fears and prejudices of the ignorati. Her most recent deed was to introduce an amendment that would shut down a U.S. Department of Agriculture web site known as the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative. Though the web site has no real budget to take away, its purpose is to lend a little support to small farmers and local markets. Foxx thinks that’s a bad idea, you see, because she doesn’t want any competition for corporatized, industrialized agriculture. There’s nothing that free-marketers hate more than any attempt by groups of citizens to band together to supply their own needs. Consider, as an example, the right-wing North Carolina legislature’s recent approval of a new statute that would prevent rural communities from setting up their own broadband systems. When groups of citizens dare to “compete with the private sector,” these libertarian types elected with corporate money just pass a law against it.

Tom Philpott blogs about this at Mother Jones.

Foxx is from up near Wilkes County, which is one of the largest producers of factory chickens in the United States. It’s this proximity to factory chicken farms, apparently, which qualified Foxx to sit on the agriculture committee, including a poultry subcommittee.

Here’s a link to the web site Foxx wants to shut down. Foxx does not approve of its mission: Support local farmers, strengthen rural communities, promote healthy eating, protect natural resources.


Where corporate chicken comes from

Rain!

Several times in the last month I’ve watched on radar as storms in the area figured out all sorts of clever ways to miss me. They’d be headed straight at me, then fork into two so that one could miss me to the north, the other to the south. Or a storm would be headed my way, then suddenly peter out a couple of miles away. One storm was so strong and so close that it knocked out my electricity, though I didn’t get a drop of rain.

But last night I was in the nexus of two good-size storms which hit pretty hard, leaving 1.3 inches of rain. This will save an awful lot of growing things. Even some young trees, native species, had started to wilt in the dry heat. There’s a 60 percent chance of rain today and tonight. With luck, maybe more rain will fall.

A meteorologist's roundup of wretched weather


My ever-empty rain gauge

The high temperature here today was 94 degrees. The normal for this date is 86. In the last month, I’ve had half an inch of rain. Lots of things are turning brown. Even the squash are wilting. High temperatures alone wouldn’t be so frightening, if there was rain. It’s the combination of hot and dry that is life-threatening. Crops will grow in hot and wet. Crops won’t grow in hot and dry.

Under these circumstances it’s a depressing time to read this roundup of extreme weather by Jeff Masters at Weather Underground. These are not climate predictions that right-wingers can say are lies. It’s just real, measurable weather, compared with the weather we used to have. Last year, remember, tied with 2005 for the hottest year on record.

From Masters’ post:

“The pace of incredible extreme weather events in the U.S. over the past few months have kept me so busy that I’ve been unable to write-up a retrospective look at the weather events of 2010. But I’ve finally managed to finish, so fasten your seat belts for a tour through the top twenty most remarkable weather events of 2010. At the end, I’ll reflect on what the wild weather events of 2010 and 2011 imply for our future.”