As you can tell from the title, I’m feeling much better. I hadn’t realised how much that cold had slowed me down this week, nor how much time I really spent sitting around and saying ‘Gah!’ when I was supposed to be doing something productive. Everything is at least a week behind where it should be.
Oh, the cold has left its usual residue of smashed cells and rampant bacteria but the head-fuzz has largely cleared and most other symptoms have gone. That’s why it’s called rhinovirus, you know. It’s like having a herd of tiny rhinos rampaging through your head.
It’s good to be able to think again. So I did.
What I thought about was pollution. The ecowarriors don’t seem to mention that very much these days, but then their wind-farms need neodymium in large amounts, so the eco-freaks are causing most of the serious pollution these days. Now they go on about carbon dioxide as a pollutant and how we produce so much of it every year and how this will build up and build up…
No it won’t. Plants use it. They use it to generate sugars to feed their cells. In fact, carbon dioxide and sunlight are their only real energy source. Since you need six carbon atoms to make glucose (five for fructose) then a single molecule of glucose produced in one cell in one leaf strips six carbon dioxide molecules out of the air. They absolutely must have that CO2, they can’t get their carbon anywhere else.
Apart from the ones who have learned how to eat insects, and if the ecoloons manage to take all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, only the plants that eat insects will be left, and they’ll dominate with no competition, and they’ll evolve until they get big enough to scoff a mouse, then a cat, then a dog, and so on.
When I was young, we had proper pollution. Rivers that were practically sterile due to industrial outflows, seepage from coal tips, places on land where even nettles wouldn’t grow. Gradually, all that was cleared up and although it’s not all done yet and there is lots of room for improvement, pollution is far less now than it was even forty years ago.
Okay, it probably has less to do with industry cleaning up than with government shutting down industry, but even so, the UK is far less filthy than when I was small. I wonder if that’s sparked a panic in the Green Men, the sort of panic we’d see in the Dreadful Arnott if every smoker stopped tomorrow? What? The problem is solved? But what about us? What do we do now?
Find another problem. An invisible one this time, so they can’t check. One that’s in the future so they can’t say ‘Okay, it’s getting better, you can go now’. The most terrifying words any of the zealots on any of the issues can ever hear is ‘Your work here is done’. That signals the end of the free money.
One of the best proofs that pollution has declined comes from the often wrongly attributed ‘evolution’ of the pepper moth.
J.W. Tutt first proposed the “differential bird predation hypothesis” in 1896, as a mechanism of natural selection. The melanic morphs were better camouflaged against the bark of trees without foliose lichen, whereas the typica morphs were better camouflaged against trees with lichens. As a result, birds would find and eat those morphs that were not camouflaged with increased frequency.
The lichens were killed off by the industrial revolution. They’re growing back now, well advanced in some areas although lichens are pretty slow-growing things.
The black moths thrived when the trees were de-lichened by pollution because the peppery version was easier for birds to find and eat. As pollution declined and the lichens grew back, the peppery ones were better camouflaged and the birds found it easier to see the black ones. A textbook example of natural selection in action. A change in the environment resulted in a rare variant getting an advantage over the main population.
But it wasn’t evolution. The black version had always appeared, it was simply a rare variant of the peppery version. After its brief glory-time while we filled the air with soot, it returned to being a rare variant (although by now it was less rare than before because it hadn’t been systematically eradicated by birds). It did not separate from the population, did not become another species, it remained at all times simply a darker version of the peppered moth but with no other differences at all. There are rumours that it’s a better dancer and can make a lady-moth’s eyes bulge, but no proof of this has ever been shown.
It’s like saying being ginger is proof of evolution. If the black pepper moth had evolved from the pepper moth, then it would have become a separate species. It didn’t. The environment changed again and the population changed back. Natural selection can go back. Evolution cannot go back. If it takes a wrong turn and produces something utterly ridiculous, such as some kind of mammal with a duck’s beak that lays eggs and has the most unnecessarily complex X-Y setup ever, it hides it in Australia.
As an example of natural selection, the pepper moth is perfect. As an example of evolution, it’s useless. Darwin’s Galapagos finches were a far better example: on islands where the main food source was insects, the finches had long thin beaks to pick them out of holes. On islands where the main food was seeds, the finches had short stout beaks to crack seed shells. Even if the finches could still interbreed at that time, they could not survive on islands where they weren’t suited to the food source so speciation was only a matter of time.
Could be a long time though. Look at humans. We’ve developed all kinds of variants to suit all kinds of environments but we are still all one species. We might have differentiated into different species by now, if humans weren’t naturally infernally nosey about what the people next door are doing.
At least we are cleaning up our act, and have been for quite some time. If the ecoloons are running scared for their funding, and inventing invisible monsters from the future to frighten us with, we must be getting it right.
interesting article on how wind & wave farms could possibly negatively effect the earth:
“Wind and wave farms could affect Earth’s energy balance”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063.300-wind-and-wave-farms-could-affect-earths-energy-balance.html
I take a spice “tea” I make myself, not had a cold in years
to make :
a mug & one half of water
one eighth level teaspoon turmeric
one eighth level teaspoon cayenne pepper
one eighth level teaspoon ginger powder
three cardamon pods – broken open
one teaspoon lemon juice
one teaspoon honey
add all but the last two ingredients to a small pan with a mug & a half of water
bring to the boil & boil for seven minutes (depends on how hard it’s boiling)
add the teaspoon of honey & lemon
continue to boil for a further two minutes
use a sieve to strain off the floaters
then enjoy
I now add about another 4 spice to help with things like aches & pains
ok I could be part of a small percentage group that this works for, but it does work
I’ve heard before that these windmills are actually causing the climate change they were supposed to prevent. Pretty much standard fare for anything the Righteous get involved with these days.
I’ll try that tea. The only thing I don’t have handy are cardamon pods but there are two supermarkets within easy reach tomorrow.
“Wind and wave farms could affect Earth’s energy balance”
One of the basic laws I remember from school (in the dark and distant past) was that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Ok, one windmill is going to have minimal effect, but when you put up fucking thousands of the things…
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
I made this exact point in a discussion on wind power in the comments section of the DT about 6 – 7 years ago. The idea that wind power is ‘free’ is naive in the extreme. Everything has a price that must be paid.
If “wind power” is for taking energy out of the atmosphere, in the form of heat energy (which is kinetic), then it must be cooling the atmosphere. This must mean that if the air was to get colder, then we would be bringing on the next Ice Age sooner.
Perhaps that’s what the bastards want. We’ll simply have to kill, barbecue and eat generations of their straying-children – who foolishly strayed “outside the shining wire” – that will be born earlier than the ones they intended. I’m sure Legiron can work out a facsimile for “the shining wire”, to work into his stories.
I called it ‘the credit limit’, the point at which your inbuilt chip won’t let you buy anything. It isn’t physically visible, it can be tailored to the individual and centred on their home. Stray outside your credit limit and the roadside scanners alert the authorities.
Naturally, there’s no warning
This is way out of my field but my limited understanding of tides, ocean currents, winds etc is that they are influenced by such things as the rotation of the planet, the moon’s gravity, and probably loads of other things I haven’t heard of.
But physics works both ways. These things have taken a long, long time to reach an equilibrium. Messing around with our end of the see-saw on a tiny scale isn’t going to matter, but when the whole planet is doing it, well…
I guess it’s like building a dam on a river resulting in blocking its flow downstream
should you ever get a headache, then a heaped teaspoon of cayenne pepper in this mix really does help clear your head
I can’t say it’s the equivalent of taking say two “Syndol” but it does relieve it to a good degree
personally my stomach isn’t able to handle what it could when I was a kid so I use the small amount mentioned above in 3 drinks over 2 hours for headaches
I’m averse to taking even aspirin, so every alternative is worth knowing about.
Seems the cold took my voice when it left, which with my luck, means there must be a job interview imminent.
Dear Mr Leg-iron
I remember the adverts on t’telly where we were told that nothing works better than Anadin.
So I took nothing and, you know, they were right.
DP
As I recall, they actually put the emphasis on the word ‘nothing’ in those adverts. So they weren’t lying.
Er, old fellow…..fructose’s formula is C6H12O6 just like glucose….it’s just that the ring isomer is a bent pentagon instead of a hexagon (chair or boat: which do you prefer?!) and has 5 atoms in it (one of which is an oxygen just like in glucose) and there are two -CH2OH bits stuck on instead of one. (Sorry….you can announce the award of the master-pedants’ Grand Challenge Cup any time that pleases you…)
You are right, of course, but cold remedies and whisky interfered with my visualisation, and picking up a biochemistry book when I already had a sore head could prove fatal.
I remember the photosynthesis pathway from school biology and we all almost gave a graphic demonstration of the end point of digestion when the teacher said it would be in the exam. He was joking. All we had to know was that plants used that huge diagram of pathways to turn CO2 and water into sugars. Six CO2 molecules, six water molecules, one sugar.
There is a polluting waste material, naturally. Every time the plant does this it shits out six oxygen molecules, the chemical responsible for global breathing.
Dear Mr Leg-iron
” …then a single molecule of glucose produced in one cell in one leaf strips six carbon dioxide molecules out of the air.”
And releases six molecules of oxygen into the air.
Can’t think what good that does ….
Ecoloons have no use for oxygen, none at all.
DP
PS In one of my wilder theories developed whilst soaking in the bath I postulated that some of the problems associated with married couples failing to conceive was that the parties were actually different species.
Speciation can occur in contemporary populations – this seems to have occurred in salmon which spawn in the same rivers. I understand the arctic tern can interbreed in a partial circle about the arctic, but the populations at either end of the partial circle – one in Norway and one in Iceland or Greenland, cannot interbreed.
Is anyone looking for human speciation? And if they found it, would they tell? DP
Perhaps Icke was right. Perhaps one of the pair is a lizard.
Interesting point though, it doesn’t take many mutations to make a different species. Outward appearance need not change at all.