Things I Find Interesting

Peak Oil, Global Warming, all happening within my lifetime. With the rising oil prices come higher prices for driving, for food, for heating our homes, for manufactured items -- for everything.

I'm not waiting for a corporate America to do something about it. Why should they? They can live anywhere they want. They can afford the rising costs that are coming. They don't even need America - especially after it's become depleted of its natural resources. They can move to Dubai and live on an island, safe from the masses of starving consumers who have depended on oil to do their work for them, and who now don't even know how to grow their own food - especially since seed corporations like Monsanto only supplies seeds that are sterile - making us dependent upon them every year for more seeds.

I'm not waiting for the masses to "change their way of life" either. Hell you can't even stop them from drinking or eating too much junk food, let alone get them to give up their conveniences to make life better for future generations. No one's gonna turn off their lights or turn down their heat or cut back on their driving. Not til the cost of all that starts cutting into their beer/cigarette/lottery-ticket money.

I'm not waiting for science to figure out cold fusion either. Maybe if we spend $9 trillion on that instead of the war, we could stand a much better chance of surviving this mess. But the powers that be would rather fight over the last handful of beans than plant half of them to grow more.

So I figure I can either stand like a deer in the headlights, or do something about it myself.

This is what I intend to do:

I just finished reading Mike Ohler's book called "The $50 and Up Underground House Book". Before you start laughing - there are advantages to living this way - ie. - it doesn't cost much to heat, you can build into a hill in the woods where land is cheap and you won't be easily found by marauding hordes of hungry thieves (which is not too far-fetched a notion since most folks don't know how to grow their own food), against which an underground house would be easier to defend, and it's cheap to build - yourself - sans carpentry skills.

This is a sample of an underground house from his book.

As you can see, the house is dug into the hillside and dirt is piled up on top parallel to the gade of the hill to facilitate drainage. It's well insulated and protected from the weather. With openings lower in the house and windows on the sides, and clearstory windows facing downhill it's also well ventilated and well lit by natural lighting. In the event that global warming makes summer even worse, the temperature of the earth stays 50° or so under ground, so heat won't be as big a problem when A/C will no longer be an option due to soaring energy costs.

This should all help to reduce my cost of living since my main bill will be internet (for my job - assuming either still exists), which more than likely will be the expensive 'satellite' variety due to my remote location, and electricity, which I expect will be costly also, since most power plants run on depleting resources like coal and natural gas also.Even if my local electric company switches to another energy source, like solar and wind, supply will be limited and/or expensive as it will require substantial amounts of solar cells and wind turbines to match the energy consumption required at this time to support the current demand. My best bet would be to invest in my own solar kit, starting small and expand as I go. But I'll need to do this before the demand goes up, as that will boost the prices.

By creating a terraced patio uphill, as shown in Mike Ohler's illustation above, I can plant my own garden, fairly well hidden from view and somewhat protected from animals while still receiving ample sunlight. This leads me to my next step - learning Sustainable, Intensive Organic Gardening and Companion Planting, to fill that terraced patio with food. A greenhouse at the bottom of the house can also serve to produce more food through winter as well as channel more heat to the house. The roof will be soil also, so growing leafy vegetables and above-ground crops should add to my food supply.The more I plant the more food I'll have to eat and trade with.

Seed can still be found through Mother Earth News and other sources that will allow me to re-seed my garden annually from existing plants without having to buy new seeds every year. Perennials and fruit and nut trees will also continue to produce food annually.

I've been studying sustainable living techniques since I was 19 years old. While all my friends were buying cars and stereos when they moved away from home, I bought a backpack, a camp stove, winter gear and a sleeping bag good for 10 below zero. I had studied up to 40 wild edible plants and several edible mushrooms that grow in the Eastern US, so I was prepared for homelessness just in case my pursuit of an art career led along the same path as most other artists.

I've always been a little obsessed with bushcraft also, and I've gotten pretty good with knots and rope, which can come in handy for making my own things should I find I can't get them elsewhere. I remember even as a kid how much I liked Gilligan's Island because of the way they made everything out of what they had.

Not paying as much for heating and no longer paying rent (thank god I never fell for the home-buying scams) should save a substantial amount of money given the costs of living in the future -- enough to eventually afford Solar Panels to handle my electrical needs. So studying how they work a little more will be necessary. I'd read a lot about them a couple decades ago, so I'll need to brush up on it and see what's developed in that area since then.

So to start it all off, I'll need to save up some money to buy cheap land. Since I have some control over my income I can keep my goals in mind to keep me producing. In the mean time, in my spare time, I will need to start studying permiculture techniques and more sustainable living techniques. The internet is most instrumental in that. Mike Ohler's DVD with full building instructions is only around $100. That will be my next small expense.

I expect by the time the prices really start to escalate, some poor farmer will be willing to sell a chunk of his land to be able to afford to keep his home, and I'll take advantage of that when the time comes. By then I should have some cash stashed away.

Wouldn't hurt to invest in a gun or two and some ammo, both for personal protection (against human or animal) and occasional meat if I get hungry enough to kill something - which would have to be a pretty desperate condition for that to happen - but just in case - always be prepared.

Other books I've read that have come in handy are the Earthship books I thru III. Rainwater would be a much more easily obtainable source than a well, though both will be considered. Water conservation techniques from the Earthship Books are invaluable, things like reusing dishwater to flush toilets. One Idea I had come up with while reading those books a decade or more ago was to grow bamboo along the septic leachfield. Bamboo grows quickly and is ideal for building and making furniture and things with.

I'm working on a way to build a fireplace into the bottom of the underground house, the back of which would be against the hill, opening away from the hill, and have the heat tansferred under the floor of the next level, then that tansferred even farther up the hill, ending at a place near the top level where the heat would be exposed to a metal surface on which I could cook, then vent out the roof. (come back later and I'll have an illustration for you).The draw would be long and uphill, so I think it can work, depending upon the grade of the hill. But then - the higher the grade, the cheaper the land.

Another cooking method could be a solar cooker. All that's needed to make that is a couple cardboard boxes inside each other, lined inside with alluminum foil, a piece of glass to cover it and a black frying pan inside to capture the sun's heat.

No need to hide from the world, or become a hermit - or a nut. It's likely by the time things get bad folks will look more locally for things they need, and trading food will be a new economy.

I reckon it's gonna be a different world.

For more info on Peak Oil, see this website:
Life After the Oil Crash

Update to the 'Glowing Eggs' Post

2008-08-19T14:11:00.011-04:00

Hey, just got an update on my July Post "Glowing Eggs on Myrtle Beach" from the Assistant Interpretive Ranger at Myrtle Beach State Park.

I had sent her a letter asking if she might know what this was now that I had photos posted. She contacted the Interpretive Ranger at the Huntington Beach State Park who forwarded this suggestion...

"They look like juvenile jellyfish to me, but that doesn’t explain the bioluminescence. I wonder if they could be juvenile comb jellies; they are certainly bioluminescent. I think the air bubble is just a bubble trapped inside them."

I then did a bit of research on comb jellies (Mnemiopsis) and found this article at http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu (you can go to the link to read the full article)

Scrolling down, I found this segment:
"Bioluminescence

What really created an interest in comb jellies for me was their bioluminescence. When I worked on the coast of Georgia, students and I would catch comb jellies during dock study. When we got back to the classroom to look at what we caught, the comb jellies would usually steal the show (only skeleton shrimp created more of a stir). The students would watch the comb jellies' cilia on the video cam, but the best part came when the lights were turned off. If it was dark enough and someone disturbed the comb jelly it would glow! The best was if the students saw comb jellies bioluminescence in shallow pools during their night walk.

The bioluminescence (cold light) on comb jellies comes from the gastrodermis cells in the walls of the meridional canals. This makes it look like the light is coming from the comb rows and giving an overall appearance of a pulse or blob of light. When disturbed, the comb jellies as well as many other marine organisms (jellyfish, siphonophores, deep sea squid, etc), glow with bioluminescence. Some of those mentioned (unclear if comb jellies do) lose their glowing tentacles or release a glowing cloud to distract predators (Waller, 1996)."

The way the glow occurs when disturbed and along it's outer layer makes me believe it's the best answer so far. I've found a PDF online that mentioned these characteristics, too...

If you want to see what they look like, check out Chai's Marine Life Blog: "Comb Jellies on the Cottesloe Reef". He's got geat pics and descriptions.

So this could be it. They're still doing a bit of research just to verify it. Many thanks to the Assistant Interpretive Ranger at Myrtle Beach State Park and the Interpretive Ranger at the Huntington Beach State Park for taking the time to look into this for me. I was at Myrtle Beach State Park Nature Center in July and they're wonderful people and they have interesting displays there, and there's lots to do at the park.

So next summer, when you're strolling along Myrtle Beach at night, watch your footsteps for those glowing eggs. They're really fascinating to see.

Where did your tax money go?

2008-08-13T01:57:00.000-04:00

Where did your tax money go?

Six Degrees and you're dead

2008-08-09T14:11:00.003-04:00

Everyone talks about global warming and how it's gonna get hotter, but no one breaks down exactly what the effects will be if it happens. So I got National Geographic's "Six Degrees Could Change the World" and took a few notes, since most folks are too lazy to do the research.

These are my notes:

Usually warming occurs over thousands of years, not decades.

We've risen .8 degrees Celsius

1 degree Celsius Another
Dust Bowl in the Western US like the thirties - only bigger!
Sand dunes blow across the US plains
England will enjoy their best weather ever - able to produce wine and olives

2 degrees Celsius
insect migration to the north
some islands go under water
Coral reefs die, killing off 100s of 1000s of species.
Ocean algae that supports life and controls CO2 dies altering the way the ocean works completely
Coastal cities flood as Greenland melts
Nat'l Geographic says when the Arctic Ocean melts, that's when warming can become a 'runaway train'.

3 degees Celsius
will push warming over the edge
Arctic Ocean thaws all year.
Amazon Jungle turns to desert - (tributaries are already drying up)
We have El Nino every year
Europe becomes like the Middle east
Summer has Killer Heat Waves. - every summer
Paris 2003 30,000 died of heat strokes, which were uheard of there
Many deciduous trees start retaining O2 and releasing CO2
Dying trees from desrtification releases enough CO2 to raise warming to 4 degrees
Most violent storms ever - Katrina will be the norm
category 6 hurricanes
Basic life-support systems start to break down.

4 degrees Celsius -
hard to predict.
Rising Oceans displace a billion people from coasts and deltas
Glacial melting completes and cuts off freshwater flows to billions
Canada becomes agricultural
River Ganges - source of all freshwater in India - dries up to a creek
Manhattan floods
Europe develops desert as Alps melt and dry up

5 degrees Celsius
100s of millions of 'climate refugees' seek habitable land
civilization as a whole breaks down.
Only the rich remain comfortable, moving to better climates (which is why, I imagine, they don't care about it).
Natural disasters are common
People fight for dwindling resources

6 degrees Celsius
Mass extinction
Huge uninhabitable areas of land span the entire globe
Doomsday scenario
Cannibalism sounds like a good option

So I'm thinking the whole time I'm watching this movie, "What's the best method of population control?" Make as much money as you can, selling something that destroys the ecosystem, so you can blame the world's chaos on the masses, and take that money and build yourself a nice cozey little castle in the north til the rest of the population eats each other and kills each other off, then repopulate the world with your own DNA.

Survival of the fittest :-) Hey, it's just nature's way. The Cold Equation. (No ironic pun intended)

Guess it's the end of the world

2008-08-08T23:42:00.007-04:00

I got the article at the bottom of the page from here:
http://www.countercurrents.org/james080808.htm
It basically says the Arctic Ocean wasn't supposed to melt for another 80 years. It's melting this summer and so will likely reach total melting point in 4 years.

It says the computer models are wrong because the government made the scientists factor in the (incorrect) assumption that there would be a 60% reduction in greenhouse gasses (hah).

That means a 4 degree rise in global temperatures in our lifetime.

If you wanted to see what 4 degrees would do to the earth, you could Google "effects of global warming", or go to Wiki

But we'd be pretty much screwed at a simple 2 degree rise.

Soooooo - glad I never had kids.

Here's the article:

Doom Or Disaster?
By John James

08 August, 2008
Countercurrents.org

Nearly every projection for the future of civilization made in the IPCC reports has been exceeded. Events that were projected to emerge by the end of the century have been moved back to 2070, then to 2040, and even now to 'within the next few years'.

The goal posts are moving towards us at a terrible pace.

The most obvious is the visible state of the summer sea ice in the Arctic that was expected to still be there in the lifetime of my grandchildren, but is now well on the way to disappearing by 2012. What was to have deteriorated slowly over 80 years could now be gone in four.

It is the same with global temperatures, loss of species, sea-level rise and aggravated drought. Wherever we look at the figures we are, on nearly every front, approaching Armageddon at an appallingly fast rate.

Why were the IPCC projections so wrong? Why were 2500 contributing scientists from over 130 countries unable even 2 years ago to get their projections right?

Projections are established through computer modelling. The climate is so complex, and the factors that affect it are so interdependent that only computers can handle the mass of material required to make these predictions. Even then, the smallest change to the parameters can have huge consequences to the outcomes.

This is why many scenarios are run on each issue, which is why projections give a range of possibilities. For example, the Gulf Stream is driven by cold water flowing out of the Arctic. Naturally there is concern that the end of sea-ice would reduce this flow and could lead to a collapse of the warm waters that heat the countries around the North Atlantic Ocean. As only a small percentage of the computer models predicted total collapse, the IPCC reported there could be a diminution of flow and that there was little risk of the Gulf Stream actually stopping,

It now seems that many models were wrong. How could this have happened? How come that reality in the Arctic is so exceeding expectations that the world is moving towards doom rather than disaster?

The IPCC reports had to be approved by all the participating governments, and that included the US and the Howard administration in Australia, two nations that were committed to sabotaging effective action against global warming.

Their tactic was simple: include in every model the assumption that there would be a 60 percent reduction in projected emissions through the voluntary efforts of business. This, we now know, has not happened in spite of small yet significant moves in some areas. Up to now the voluntary reduction to emissions may amount to 5 percent, a long way from the assumption built into the models.

This is one reason why most computer projections are now being exceeded.

As a result, James Hansen told the US Senate that we now have three alternatives before us, none of them encouraging. The future may be bad, disastrous or fatal to any civilised life.

It depends on us.

As greenhouse gas emissions are increasing every year, as more and more coal-powered generators are being built, as larger trucks are carrying goods over longer distances and as the population continues to increase, it is blindingly obvious that Hansen's best scenario is now extremely unlikely.

We are left with disaster (that will be bad enough) or doom.

We need to understand what Doom means. There is no possibility that Frodo will drop the ring into the crater and suddenly save us all. Doom means anything over 4 degrees temperature increase. It means the loss of most of the world's best agricultural land to rising seas, the end of trade as docks and cities are flooded, and the displacement of billions of men, women and children.

It means nuclear war and genocide, enormous suffering and the end of diversity in both human cultures and living creatures. It means the end of civilisation and a return to the most primitive way of life imaginable for the few thousand scattered survivors.

It means that we will have long passed the point of no return, and that even if we do stop emitting more pollutants into the air we will have begun the unstoppable release of methane from permafrost and under-sea clathrates that will quite rapidly take the world to even higher temperatures at which little life will remain.
We could end up like Mars or Venus.

At the speed at which things are changing, this could happen in our lifetime.

Let me repeat, so this goes home into our consciousness: THIS COULD HAPPEN IN OUR LIFETIME.

Though there is a delay of some twenty years between the emission of greenhouse gasses and the full consequences, we know that today's temperature must more than double from what has already been emitted. Were we to immediately end all pollution worldwide today, and do it instantly, global temperature would reach 2 degrees within a few years. That is inevitable and cannot now be stopped.

By spreading the idea that we had time, that 4 degrees would not come until the end of the century so that we could go on living in luxury and leave it to our grandkids to sort out, we have been criminally misled.

Two years ago I wrote that we had ten years to end all emissions everywhere. Now we have eight left. What are you going to do to protect your children?

Dr John James is President of the Crisis Coalition, founder of the Footprints bi-weekly newsletter and webmaster of www.planetextinction.com.

A short list of Intelligent Websites

2008-08-06T08:04:00.005-04:00

I recently discovered Google Reader and there are some
websites I find interesting.

As I discover new ones, I'll add them to this blog and maybe move the blog up to date.
Currently these are my favorites:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pubnews.php
http://www.countercurrents.org/index.htm

I'll add more as I discover them.

Hummingbird Nest

2008-08-04T10:07:00.004-04:00

My brother Chester emailed me and said there was a hummingbird nest in his tee.

I'm there!

It was 20ft up, and my 12x zoom was wide open, so this was the best shot I could get :-)

On the Verge of Creating Synthetic Life

2008-08-03T21:51:00.001-04:00

This is why I watch TED.com

This is Craig Venter: On the Verge of Creating Synthetic Life

$50 and up Underground House

2008-08-03T00:15:00.006-04:00

I recently discovered Google Reader and the first thing I subscribed to was Cool Tools. Lo and behold I find this old book from the '70's! -- The $50 and up Underground House Book

I first heard of this book in my early twenties through Mother Earth News.
You can build a house for only a few thousand bucks --- underground.

Now before I hooked into this blogspot I had written a few blogs on my own website, one in particular was building a tent over a hole to live in. I even had detailed construction plans started. I had plumb forgotten about this old book, but this is the closest thing I'd seen to doing what I wanted to do with a tent.

It basically describes it as digging into a hillside, laying plastic between the earth and the poles & boards holding the earth back, then berming the earth up over the house. You see- plastic might not last long in the sunlight, but underground it can take a hundred years or more to decay. (Be sure to read Countryside Magazine's Article on the subject for more details.) So what better place to bury it than around your house to keep out the ground moisture?

I got a kick out of this place in Holland that was built without a permit. Evidently the building inspectors walked around it twice looking for the house and didn't see it. Now that's for me :-) My own Hobbiton!

Personally, I'd start with strawbales on the roof, (not quite as heavy as dirt) untied and spread out to allow decay, and plant a garden there. That would be the ultimate insulation, as well as efficient use of space, leaving the rest of the property as natural as you can.

And what's does an underground house look like inside?
This was taken in natural lighting - no flash.

Here's the website to review and order the book and - now, thanks to technology - the DVDs.
http://www.undergroundhousing.com/index.html
I'll be ordering mine.

Glowing Eggs on Myrtle Beach

2008-07-30T00:46:00.015-04:00

So recently I spent a week at Myrtle Beach with my best friend and his family, and while walking the beach we discovered a lot of critters. I poked around on the net but so far I haven't found what this could be.

They were tiny, gelatinous eggs that, when you walked the beach at night, if you stepped on one, it glowed for just a second, then stopped. If you pushed it around some more, it glowed a bit more but eventually faded out. We first noticed it walking at night just north of the Grande Shores Resort, so I grabbed a flashlight and got Michelle to hold one of the eggs so I could photograph it, using my keychain-flashlight to illuminate it.

Then we made several attempts to coordinate squishing the eggs with clicking my camera's shutter to get them to glow long enough for my camera to pick up the light, which it did. I enhanced the image just a bit to bring it out. It seems to have a geenish/blue tint to it.

Here's another shot of it, for size comparison.
Michelle is a petite 14y/o, that's her thumb.

So I went back in the morning and took a couple more shots while I was shooting the sunrise.

If you wanna see a real closeup, CLICK HERE

That link will open in a new window. Leave that window open and refer to it for the rest of this blog.

You can barely see some shape in the bottom right edge of it, a little yellow, like maybe an embryo of a fish or crustacean.... like that tiny dot at the end of the wormy yellow thing under the bubble might be an eye.

I asked a Myrtle Beach State Park ranger if she knew what it was and, not having seen it but obviously knowing a lot about the local ecosystems, she said maybe some bioluminescent phytoplankton. But looking at this, I'm wondering now if it isn't an egg. Maybe. Could be what I think is an eye could be just a fleck of dust - as tiny as this is. Those are grains of beach sand it's resting in to give you a better sense of scale.

I noticed all the shots seem to show that there's a bubble in each one -- whether it's air or a chemical that creates the bioluminescence when crushed and mixed with the rest of the organism, I don't know. It looks more like that little yellow pouch on the left side of that bubble would more likely be the source of the bioluminescence.

But the way that bubble bends the light like a convex lens (notice how the grains of sand appear smaller when you look through the bubble), it looks more like air, or a much less dense liquid than the matter surrounding it.

But if it is air, it explains why it floats and ends up on the beach instead of down in the ocean floor. The air bubble and/or the bioluminescence must have some evolutionary advantage. But I figure bioluminescence is more of an attractor than a repellent.

Maybe the bioluminescence is a residual trait (or one it uses advantageously as an adult) and the air bubble is the advantage that keeps it afloat -- so it stays in the daylight, and has a better chance of not attracting predators and getting eaten, like it would glowing down in the deeper, darker water.

Or the bioluminescence (which occurs only when crushed) is meant to 'freak' the predator out so it won't eat the rest of it's family. --- HA! or even better, acts like one of those explosive "dye bags" that explode all over bankrobbers to identify them, only this explodes all over the predator, making it easy to spot and avoid in the dark, or making it easier to spot by larger predators that might eat it before it eats the rest of them! Not likely, but weirder, more complex stuff happens in nature all the time!

I thought maybe it could be mole crab eggs, since mole crabs were all over the beach, but my research shows them as smaller, more orange, and carried under the mole crab's belly.

Anyway, it's interesting. If anyone who reads this knows what it could be please leave a comment.

UPDATE 8/19/2008:

I received an email from Myrtle Beach State Park about this.

Go here to view my updated blog