JLfromNH

Putting The Fix In

The Northern Pass Project is still trying to steamroll its way through New Hampshire and now the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing have become a little more overt. Last month Les Otten, the Maine developer trying to revive the Great White Elephant of the North known as the Balsams Resort accepted a ‘no strings attached’ $2 million dollar ‘investment’ from Eversource to help fund his project. Now (no big surprise) Mr. Otten is in favor of the Northern Pass project. Shocker, huh? We probably shouldn’t be too surprised, though. Eversource and their Hydro-Quebec corporate associates haven’t been noted for their consideration of the feelings of locals when it comes to projects that (in their minds anyway) have the potential for big bucks (for them, not us) so greasing local palms is just business as usual for them.

Still, you have to shake your head in amazement at the strong arm tactics used recently on the North Country Chamber of Commerce. Of course Mr Otten denies that he threatened to back out if members didn’t cave in to the demands of himself and his ‘supporters’. Instead he insists that Northern Pass opponents ‘hijacked’ the board and were responsible for the Commerce’s stance. Judging from the comments sections on the news stories, nobody really buys this.

The depressed economy of the north country with the loss of the paper mills makes people desperate to improve the job situation for the area and as a result be vulnerable to these sorts of tactics. But anyone who thinks that the Balsams, a relic of an earlier era, can somehow be magically revived and bring back the good times, is living in a dream world. The shaky economy, dwindling cheap oil supplies, and the spectre of global economic contraction lurking in the wings ensures that this project of Mr. Otten’s will in all likelihood never be finished or once built be a money pit that will relentlessly devour any funds poured into it and wind up getting abandoned to bankruptcy leaving locals worse off than they were before. The scandal that has just broken over the the EB-5 VISA Program in Vermont should provide readers a bitter cautionary tale.

It’s much the same for Northern Pass. Eversource stubbornly insists it’s not economical to bury the lines, which would eliminate much of the opposition to the project. This is an odd argument if HydroQuebec is the profitable entity it presents itself as being. But maybe it wouldn’t be so odd if you could manage to look behind the curtain. Like the Wizard, there is likely a good deal of humbug involved. Northern Pass is not the economic salvation its advocates insist it is. Either above or below ground it is vulnerable. As power companies everywhere are enamored of high tech connectivity, the power lines will be part of a national grid that has already shown itself disturbingly accessible to international hacking. Why anyone would want to build something that any Iranian or Chinese cyberthug could and probably will at some point trash is beyond me. Oh, and by the way, does anyone know what a Carrington Event is?

People don’t like to think about how fragile most if not all of the high technology we are so dependent on actually is. Instead they forge ahead, building projects that are resource intensive, prodigiously expensive, increasingly complex and hard to maintain, with seemingly little thought given to what might happen when a bump in the road comes along. The Disney movie Mousehunt has a scene where the two dimwitted house owners try to catch a pesky mouse by setting up a room full of traps only to discover they have ‘painted’ themselves into a corner with predictable results. In real life the consequences of ‘painting’ ourselves into a technological corner might not be so hilarious.

HydroQuebec no doubt is addressing security and adding redundancy to protect against disaster but none of this will come cheap. Are we really protected if the backup systems are themselves composed of vulnerable high tech? How sustainable is it really if there is a perpetual struggle to guard against grid collapse and hack attacks?

Instead of wasting money constructing ever larger and more complex versions of an already difficult to maintain power generation system, we need to look at decentralizing and downsizing power demands, simplifying our lifestyles. Let’s pull the plug on a lot of gizmos that, quite frankly, we don’t need in order to have comfortable lives. As long as we struggle to hang onto an unsustainable way of life, Mr Otten and allies will be able to arm twist their way into pushing through the money pit called Northern Pass.

Spring Equinox 2016

Well, spring officially arrived at Sunday March 20 at 4:30 Universal Coordinated Time or 12:30 AM EDT for you locals. We modern humans insist on having a definite official signpost to clue us in to the change of the seasons hence the above date and time for the moment when day and night become equal lengths (apparently we can’t be bothered with looking out the window).

In reality the transition from winter to spring is rather amorphous with balmy warm days switching over to chilly late winter conditions teasing us with the promise of pleasant weather then firmly reminding us we’re not quite there yet. Sap begins flowing in the trees during warm days and receding when the night temperatures fall below freezing, a process that makes for good maple sugaring when these temperature fluctuations occur. Birds begin migrating and early spring flowers like crocuses and snowdrops begin poking out of the ground.

The recent record El Nino has made for a very weird winter here in northern New Hampshire. Temperatures were well above normal multiple times this past winter, pretty much annihilating the snow pack we usually have up here. Any snow that did fall was less than 6 inches (at least where I live) and quickly wilted away under rains that followed. While we may yet get an early spring surprise snow storm dumping a respectable amount of snow on us, it definitely won’t last. The ski areas are hurting and I have not seen any snow mobiles this winter even though the town hopefully graded the snow paths they usually zoom around on. The warm temperatures only made the snow trails vanish under rain.

While many animals have benefited from the low snow fall, such as deer, moose and turkeys, there are animals that depend on heavy snow cover and suffer when there is a lack of it. One of them is a small mammal called a vole , a small rodent similar to mice and often confused with them or with moles which are small insectivores, not rodents, adapted for burrowing underground. Voles do tunnel but do not have the specialized digging feet that moles have. Voles average between three to five inches in length and have very short life spans, usually less than a year, reproducing frequently to replenish their numbers. During the winter they depend on a good snow pack, so they can safely tunnel through it, hidden from predators. Dependent as they are for snow cover, this winter has likely been a disaster for them. Without snow to hide them, they are vulnerable to hungry owls, foxes, cats and other animals looking for a quick bite of protein

Last February I looked out an upstairs window after rain showers had eaten away at the meager snow and spotted the tunnels that a vole had dug.

The meandering structure was clearly visible and seemed to lead to a circular area, visible at the left in the upper half of the picture. Curious I went out to look more closely at it.

Judging from the bird seed scattered about the edges, this was a storage area for the vole. A grey squirrel was cheerfully helping himself to the bonanza when I came out with my camera. Since it was almost all sunflower seed, I knew the vole had been scavenging fallen seed from my birdfeeder and carefully storing it in a chamber he had dug out in the snow where he could feast in safety. Alas, the unseasonable warmth undid all his hard work.

While one can feel some sympathy for the voles, those of us who are gardeners can only sigh in relief. Voles can be very destructive of plants, bulbs and root crops such as potatoes. A neighbor who lived many years ago down the street had a cat who was a terrific mouser (and voler apparently). She didn’t realize how good he was until after he had passed on to Kitty Heaven. Suddenly she began to find her garden potatoes getting gnawed on by the little varmints. Like mice, these troublesome rodents can make the life of a gardener difficult as we try to plant crocus bulbs or seed potatoes. The market as usual offers a vast array of rodent removers that, judging from the reviews, are more effective in separating you from your money than getting rid of the little beasts. As usual the old fashioned methods are the best.

Leap Day

Every four years an extra day gets tacked onto the end of February giving it 29 instead of 28 days. This is to keep the calendar we follow synchronized with the astronomical year. The astronomical year is roughly 365.2425 days long and creating a calendar that follows it as closely as possible has always been a challenge in that Mother Nature refuses to provide anything in neat manageable chunks.

The Gregorian calendar,which is the one most nations use, is a refinement of the older Julian calendar which itself was a reform of yet an earlier calendar. It applies a convoluted formula in order to determine when to apply the needed extra day to ensure the calendar remains accurate. The fact that the Earth’s rotation is very gradually slowing down due to the tidal effects of the Moon. Given the short human lifespan, this slowing down is not something that should greatly concern us as it only matters to the keepers of atomic clocks who like to measure things in milliseconds.

If you were born on February 29th, technically your birthday would be celebrated only every four years, though in reality Leap dayers celebrate their birthdays either February 28th or March 1st. This doesn’t cause any legal issues as apparently this quirk of the calendar has never caused any issues that might attract the attention of law makers. Probably just as well.

There is a tradition of women being able to propose to men on this day, a custom that seems to have originated in the nineteenth century despite claims for a much earlier origin. If the man refuses the proposal, he is apparently obliged to give her money or buy a dress. If a member of the upper class, he has to buy her 12 pairs of gloves, presumably so she can cover her hands to hide the fact she was refused. This last one baffles me as it seems to work under the assumption that people will be too dumb to realize that her failure to show off the ring is a sure fire tip off no marriage is in the works.

There’s really no reason why a woman can’t propose to a man other than cultural convention. The BBC has provided an article showing various women who proposed to the men (or in one case a woman) in their lives. It’s a very quirky and sweet article.

So – Happy February 29th!

Weird Places To Visit

At this time of year when the snow and cold have (finally!) settled around us, it doesn’t take long for cabin fever to set in. This is when many people plan vacations to far off (and hopefully politically stable) places that are warm and offer interesting things to see.

If I had the time and money to travel, there are any number of places I would like to see. The Hawaiian Islands, Great Britain, perhaps Italy. Rather than visit the usual tourist haunts, I might check out some off-the-beaten-path places where you don’t have to jostle with crowds of people.

Then there are the places where there are truly weird and wonderful things to see. However for various reasons, they are off limits or inaccessible due to distance, war, or extreme environments.

One of the odder places I might like to see is in Tanzania. It’s a very weird volcano called Ol Doinyo Langai volcano.

This curious creation of some rather bizarre geologic processes is associated with the East African Rift, an area that is slowly being torn in two by plate tectonics. Rather than erupting the silicate type of lavas we are familiar with, it spouts a natrocarbonatite lava, a gumbo of carbonate minerals, that makes for a very runny lava. National Geographic ran a story on this volcano an number of years ago and showed pictures of a bizarre landscape of carbonatite lava that makes intricate formations that quickly deteriorate and crumble away, once exposed to the air. Why go see this? Well, it’s one of a kind. Conventional volcanoes are a dime a dozen. This rare beast stands apart from them all and would definitely be worth a look.

Another weird place I’d like to see is a little harder to get to. It’s located deep underground in Mexico and is called Cave of the Crystals.

The crystals are made of gypsum and were deposited as the result of chemical action between ground water and water saturated with sulfide ions. Cooked over a long period of time by a magma chamber underneath, these enormous crystals, some nearly forty feet in length, are over 900 feet underground and were discovered by a Mexican mining company. As the temperatures in the cavern average a toasty 130 degrees Fahrenheit with over 90 percent humidity not surprisingly it remains largely unexplored. With my hot flashes this is definitely a deal breaker in terms of paying a visit, but still fascinating to think about all the same.

A little more tolerable is a place located in southern Libya. I happened to spot it on Google Earth when doing some arm chair exploring. A strange anomalous dark spot in the middle of an orange desert caught my eye and zooming in on it I discovered, much to my astonishment, a volcanic caldera. It is known by the charming name of Waw an Naumus which in English translates as the Oasis of the mosquitoes.

While it may look strangely anomalous, in fact it is part of the Haruj, a large field of ancient volcanoes that erupted periodically over the eons leaving a generous sprinkling of calderas and lava flows.

Though the caldera of Waw an Naumus looks very fresh, it is not known to have erupted in recorded history and is considered extinct. It has certainly been quiet long enough for water to collect in small lakes and vegetation grow undisturbed along their banks. It has been a stop for caravans going through the desert and its voracious mosquito population (however did they get there?) earned it its distinctive name. If Libya ever stabilizes, it certainly would be an interesting place to visit as long as you bring along a generous supply of insect repellant.

But perhaps the most unusual place I would like to see is also the most inaccessible, largely due to the fact it is located in orbit around the planet Jupiter. That would the moon Europa.

If ever there was a place with an ‘Earth monkeys keep out’ sign, it’s this distant little globe. Scientists have been salivating over this moon and what may lie under its icy crust, since Voyager and later Galileo sent back pictures. Current evidence suggests there is an enormous liquid ocean possibly as much as 60 miles deep beneath an icy covering ranging from 6 to 19 miles in thickness. Since life here on Earth got its start in the oceans, it’s not difficult to surmise that conditions suitable for life may very well exist in the mammoth depths of Europa’s ocean.

However a number of things stand in the way of scientists (and myself) satisfying their curiosity about this place. One is the sheer distance of Europa from Earth. It’s hard to convey to the average person the enormous scale of outer space as there is nothing in our mundane existence that would give us any meaningful context to grasp it (though Bill Nye gives it a pretty good try).

Conditions on Europa’s surface are not very congenial either. It’s a toss-up over whether you will be frozen or zapped to death. Temperatures are around -260 degrees Fahrenheit, not exactly on the balmy side. Unless you were really well insulated, you would likely freeze solid in seconds and become another chunk of the frigid landscape. Not only that, the radiation emitted by Jupiter is a lethal 540 rem per day (100 rem is usually fatal for most humans).

Europa may be an interesting place to visit but you wouldn’t really want to live there. Robot proxies are the only way we will get to see the surface of Europa. There’s an argument currently going on as to whether the crust is thin or thick. I don’t think it really matters. Given that ice at these low temperatures is as hard as iron, the proposal to try to drill into Europa to see what’s underneath is very likely undoable as well as prohibitively expensive.

However we humans are an incurably nosy lot, so I suppose eventually a multi-billion dollar lander may make its way to the surface of Europa to send back breath-taking vistas of this strange place. Sadly we will have to satisfy ourselves with staring longingly at photos and exercising our under-used imaginations to visualize what lies beneath.

Christmas Eve 2015

Today is December 24, 2015. Here in northern New Hampshire the average temperature for this month is usually 34 degree Fahrenheit. Today’s high (for southern NH at least) is projected to go into the 60’s exceeding the old record set in Concord back in 1871 of 57 degree Fahrenheit. Usually snowfall by this date is usually about six inches or more (it varies from year to year of course.). Today – nada. When I went for my morning walk today, I found one dinky little patch of snow by the side of the road (likely thrown up by a plow) in a shaded area which given how warm it felt will probably be gone by the afternoon.

After doing a bit of last minute grocery shopping (yes, I know, I’m crazy to go out there today), I drove through Main Street just before noon today. I stopped only long enough to snap this picture.

Fifty four degrees Fahrenheit is definitely above the norm for up here and since we tend to be about 5 to 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the state with the White Mountain range close by, it’s a safe bet the southern half of the state is pushing 60 easily.

My snowdrops are clearly confused by the gyrations in temperature. I snapped this picture today when the warm temperature prompted me to take a peek and see if they were doing anything.

I planted them a little too close to the foundation of the house so the warmth of the concrete makes some of them bravely poke up in early March or mid-February, depending on the weather. I have even seen them push the envelope in mid-January (usually the coldest month up here, followed by February). But never, NEVER have I seen them start to emerge in late December. They have been growing in this spot for nearly twenty years and this is a first.

Climate change deniers can huff and puff and bloviate all they want but the oscillations in temperature we have been seeing recently show no sign of going away. In fact some troubling reports indicate things may get worse in the near and far futures. The Climate Change Summit in Paris this past month with its “Paris Agreement” promising yet again to begin implementing reductions on green-house gas emissions ended with the usual rounds of praise, mutual back patting and other forms of congratulations on this ‘historic’ meeting. However as many of us are sadly aware, very little of what was agreed to will be implemented or amount to a hill of beans if it is.

John Michael Green pointed out in his latest blog posting that many of the changes the Paris Summit was supposed to address and find solutions for, are already occurring and will continue to accelerate while bureaucrats fumble and procrastinate as they have always done. Mother Nature feels no obligation to wait while we mill around trying to make up our minds what to do. Given this disheartening prospect, what are we to do?

Well, we do what living organisms have always done. We adapt. This won’t be easy of course given that the countless unknowns of climate change make it difficult to precisely anticipate what’s to come. However today’s living organisms (which includes us by the way) are the heirs to millions of years of perpetually adapting on the fly to unexpected circumstances such as previous climate changes, continental drift and the occasional asteroid strike or methane burp. All this was done without the benefit of large brains. Are we with our 1.5 kg brains really going to sit around wringing our hands because we don’t know what kind of future to plan for?

There is enough information out there to give us a rough idea of what to expect even if there is no real certainty. Human ingenuity, not in the form of high tech gimmicks that break when you look at them cross-eyed, but in the form of what our hands can build, our minds think up, is what will help us muddle through whatever Nature tosses at us. It will mean junking many of our treasured toys and simplifying our life style in a way a fair number of people might find hard to swallow. This does NOT mean going back to caves but it DOES mean living at a slower, lower-tech, less complex pace. One that, while it will not allow us to fly to the stars or zoom around wearing jet packs, will allow us to live in modest comfort, help us get the exercise we’ve always been meaning to get, eat locally produced food that, not having lost its nutritious qualities, has the surprising side-effect of producing better health. Oh, yes and rediscover the myriad benefits of direct social interaction that our current madcap life style has deprived us of.

Change is going to happen whether we do anything or not. To paraphrase a quote from All About Eve: Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy future. How bumpy it will be depends on how well we can adapt.