Please join us. It will be at the West Metro Critical Thinking Club on Saturday, December 28, 2013, at 10:00 AM at the RidgePointe Senior Apartments on 12600 Marion Ln. W, Minnetonka, MN.
I know these people. This will be a tough audience. This is a well educated and thoughtful group. Also, there are many climate skeptics in the group, and a talk given last September that questioned the strength of the evidence for Global Warming was well received. So, this is going to be interesting and fun!
Here’s the writeup for the talk, and more info can be found HERE:
The Global and Local Impacts of Climate Change
Anthropogenic climate change, also known as “Global Warming,” has emerged as a significant reality affecting societies and economies around the world and at home. In this talk we’ll examine the contentious questions of changes in weather patterns and sea level rise. Both of these effects of warming have already had impacts and these impacts are expected to increase in the future. What does the science say about “weather whiplash,” severe storms, and the rise of seas in the near and longer term future, how certain are we of what may happen, and how severe might these impacts be?
Greg Laden is a science communicator and teacher who has studied the relationship between human evolution and ecology, climate change during the Holocene, and African and North American prehistory. He has addressed, mostly through his writing on National Geographic Scienceblogs, the science of climate change, and has presented several talks and workshops on this issue. He is currently teaching at Century College and is writing two books, one on fieldwork in the Congo and the other, a novel, on life in the upper Midwest and Plains in a post-climate change world. He strongly hopes that the novel remains fiction rather than prediction. Greg lives with his wife and two children in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.
I’m purposefully not going to address the following things beyond a brief mention:
<ul>
Atmospheric CO2 has increased and this increase is because of the burning of fossil fuels by humans.
<li>This change in the chemistry of the atmosphere has caused the warming of the atmosphere and oceans in accord with expectations from the physical science, and continues apace.</li></ul>
These are facts so well established by science that I don’t need to drive across town to tell them to people. Within that second fact is the question of the so-called “Hiatus” and I’ll address that briefly but really, it is just a Fox News meme and need not demand the energy and time of this thoughtful group of well educated people.
Sea level, storms, and weird weather, on the other hand, are a different thing. There are aspects of this feature of climate change that climate scientists argue about among themselves, and the there are differences between what the IPCC officially said in its recently released report and what many groups of mainstream climate scientists say. The differences are not deep or huge … we are not talking about science denialism here. But there is uncertainty and we are approaching new territory. This makes the science interesting, and the potential consequences of climate change make it important.
See you on December 28th, come hell or high water. As it were.
The Accidental Species by my friend and colleague Henry Gee is a new, and excellent, book on Human Evolution. I recommend it. I’ll even review it soon. But in the meantime, you can get a free chapter of it by clicking this link to download a PDF supplied by the NCSE.
I cribbed this from NPR. The Brain Scoop channel is here. If you’ve not watched it you are missing some good stuff!
…Emily Graslie’s “The Brain Scoop” is one of the warmest, slyest video blogs on the web. She’s where I go to find out what museum scientists are up to — and right now she’s at the Field Museum in Chicago, where she wanders from department to department, exploring, delighting, asking questions that you and I would ask if someone gave us a free pass to gawk our way through one of the great natural history museums in the world. So I was more than a little surprised to catch her recent post, a meditation on the mail she gets.
The number one distribution was, as usual Ubuntu. But, Ubuntu only got 16 percent, with Debian coming in second at 14.1 percent. So, one could say that Debian is strong since Ubuntu is based on Debian. One could also say that Ubuntu is surprisingly weak. One would think it would be higher. One possibility is that Linux Journal readers are pretty hard core, and might often eschew Ubuntu for other distributions that cause more pain. Face it. Real Linux users like to wear hair shirts.
I myself voted for Ubuntu when the poll came around even though at the time I was following Shawn Powers dangerous advice and had installed one of the original Unix desktops on my laptop. I totally messed up the workings of my computer and managed to simulate a recurring hardware glitch that was really just a software conflict involving the power management system. I fixed that by putting Ubuntu with Unity on a fresh install and things have been working fine since then. It was a fun trip, though, totally worth it.
The point is, I don’t like Unity, I’m unhappy with Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is the system that first got me to have a working Linux box (all prior efforts failed) and even if the Unity interface and Ubuntu’s business model compete with each other for Most Annoying Thing in the Universe I still think Ubuntu is the distribution that keeps Linux afloat at the moment. Based on Debian.
The nature of the Linux Journal Reader is revealed by examining the next few distributions in line that have numbers nearly as strong as the first two: Arch Linux at 10.8%, Linux Mint at 10.5%, Fedora at 6.9% and openSuse at 5.2 %. Remembering that Debian is pretty pure geek (I’d love to know what percentage of users compiled their own kernel) this is a list that seems to demonstrate the duality of Linux at the cutting edge. Love-hate Ubuntu, favor and use other more geeked–out distributions but there are so many Ubuntu rises to the top by default. There are, by the way, 30 distributions on the list.
Linux Journal didn’t used to give the full list of candidates and percentages, but we can look back at some old issues and see how things have changed.
During the late middle ages, in 2003, the top three distributions were, in order, something called “Debian GNU/Linux” (that’s Debian spelled PC), Mandrakelinux (one word) and Gentoo. The first incarnation of Ubuntu was 2004, and the 2005 awards have it on top already, with CentOS and Fedora Core in second and third. By 2009 Ubuntu was number one with 45%, with Debian getting an honorable mention at 10%. So, in that year, Ubuntu was far ahead of the pack with all other distributions coming in at or below 10%. That’s interesting
I don’t have the percentages for 2010 (I think you can get them somewhere) but Ubuntu is selected as best distro, with honorable mention/runner up being PCLinuxOS, with third, fourth and fifth place going to Debian, Fedora and Pardus. The following year (2011) it was Ubuntu with Debian as the runner-up. In 2012 we have the first all-data listing and that year has Ubuntu at 30.1 percent, with Debian at 14.7 followed by Mint, Arc, Fedora and so on with only Debian and Mint getting above 10%.
That looks like a big change, from 2012 to 2013, but it is partly a matter of how the counting is done. The 2012 number for Ubuntu includes all flavors, but the 2013 numbers break them down. So, Ubuntu-presumably-with-Unity gets 16, Kubuntu 2.8, Xubunto 2, Server 1.6 adding up to 23.9%
So it has been a complex horse race among various distributions post-dating 2004, with Ubuntu always on top and generally with a strong lead and other distros moving around in the lower slots. However, despite methodological changes in the polling, it does seem that Ubuntu is weakening. A separate category for best distro for netbooks or other baby hardware put Ubuntu with Unity on top with Android second, but by a nose (10.6 vs 10.4%)
Now, skipping past all the categories that I am not interested in…
The best distribution for high performa computing award is an interesting category, especially because I was thinking about doing some of that. I’m not completely sure what it is but it sounds cool. The top distros with percentages are CentOS (11.4), Other (8.6), Gentoo (7.3), Mint (7.2) and so on. This sounds like a lot of people randomly guessing to me. In any event, I’m sure the best distribution for high performance computing is the one where you compile the kernel yourself. Right?
There is a category for best desktop (as opposed to overall) distro and it runs like this: Ubuntu (23.3), Mint (16), Fedora (8.6), Debian (8.1), and so on.
The next category of interest is important. This is the best desktop environment. In some ways it is hard to separate this category from best distro because some of the distros are distinct because of their desktop (i.e, Kubuntu vs. Ubuntu with Unity). But it is a distinct category, of course. To me the most important question is where is Unity on this list. Turns out KDE is first at 17.9% with Unity running close behind at 12.9%
But there’s a catch. The third place desktop is KDE Plasma with 12.7 percent, and then, the next named desktops on the list are mostly variants of old fashioned Gnome, including Xfce, Gnome 3, Cinnamon and Gnome 2. In other words, even though Ubuntu’s Unity (which is billed as though it only runs on Ubuntu, which is funny) is just a tiny bit behind KDE, combining the desktops realistically gives us this:
KDE: 30.6
Gnomish Not Unity or KDE: 25.2
Gnome 3 cuz it’s not Unity even though it looks like Unity: 14.1
Unity: 12.9
(Other had 4.5 percent and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that “other” would fit into “Gnomish Not Unity” bringing it nearly tied with KDE.)
The Raspberry Pi was, naturally, the best gadget with nearly 70% and nobody cares about the other gadgets mainly because many of them, like the Amazon Kindle or the Roku, are not gadgets. System 76 came in as the best Linux Laptop Vender. I’d like one of those. Lenovo held second place by a tiny margin.
The best Linux Friendly hardware vendor is a strange category because what the heck is a hardware vendor? First place is Intel, second place Raspberry, third place System76 (which makes desktops and laptops), third place AMD, fourth place, Lenovo, etc. This category is a bit like the “Best Vehicle” category where number one is a Leer jet, number two is a Subaru, number three is a company that makes mountain bikes and number four is NASA’s Space Shuttle division. This category may need some reworking.
For web browsers, Firefox came in first place at 52.8 while Chrome/Chromium took second with 35.4 percent and all other browsers maxed out below 5% each. So there are two Linux browsers. Firefox is the default browser on many desktop distros, so that probably helps keep it in the lead. I stopped using Firefox years ago and I’ve not checked it out. I wonder if it still sucks compared to Chrome?
This is one worth going into the past for. In 2004, the top browser was “Mozilla” which you can think of as Firefox if you want. Second and third were Konqueror and Opera. In 2005 one and two were Mozilla Firefox and Konqueror. So, the one that was default in Gnome was first and the one that was default with KDE was second, in the old days.
Firefox (“Mozilla” label dropped) had an amazing 87% of the vote in 2009, was number one with “Chrome” in second place in 2010. The editors note that
We suggested last year that by awards time in 2010, you should “look for an inevitable battle royale if Google can deliver a polished Chrome for Linux in time for you to give it a test-drive”. Well, folks, that battle has ensued, and the era of unchallenged Firefox supremacy is over. Chrome leaped from a barely perceptible 0.35% of the vote in 2009 to 24% this year.
By 2012 Firefox had 50.3% of the votes and Chromium had 40.8%. So we seem to have reached a two year long equilibrium. Or, maybe, Firefox has improved a little and I haven’t noticed that but others have. I’ll probably build a version from source for my High Performance Computing Machine and see how it flies.
It is interesting to see LibreOffice holding supreme in the Office Suit area at 71.8%. Google drive is 11.8 percent. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that Apache is only at 6.7%, even though I get the impression Apache has more current and quicker updates. LibreOffice surpassed OpenOffice in 2011, probably because of a perception that OpenOffice had gone evil. But I’m pretty sure the Evil Empire thing is over now and it is OK to use OpenOffice. If you can get LibreOffice uninstalled from your Ubuntu distribution, that is. Good luck with that… it is installed using unholy links so you may need a priest. Another one to build from scratch for my new supercomputer.
Interestingly Nvidia took a strong first place for best video chipset, despite this:
For the cloud, Dropbox came in with a strong first at 35.5% and Ubuntu One at a weak 7.1% Your doing it wrong, Ubuntu, though I’m not sure what it is your are doing wrong exactly. I do know that the one time I tried to install Ubuntu One it simply didn’t work, and the first time I tried to install Dropbox it did.
The best package management tool was voted as apt-get with 38.5%, second best as Synaptic at 13.7. You know this is a lie, in a way. Synaptic is a graphical-ish front end for apt-get and probably gets more use. But, the truth is, you use apt-get when you want to do it quick and dirty, and either one of two things applies: You totally know exactly what you want or you totally have no clue what you want. You can use apt-get to specify the installation of a particular package you know about, or you can just guess that there might be a package out there that does a certain thing and has a certain name!
Git killed Subversion 78.3 to 11.8.
One of the most important of categories is, of course, best text editor. This is the number one thing I do on any computer. In some ways it is more important than the operating system. Here’s how that one broke down. 90.4% of those polled are going to hell. 9.6% are true believers.
What I’m waiting for is a Linux Port of BBEdit. I’ll pay for it.
File systems are important. Best Journaling Filesystem went to ext4, by a large margin. I would say don’t bother with anything else. I will be using it with my new high-powered supercomputer.
Linux file managers reached a peak with an earlier version of Nautilus and have been ruined since then. I’m seriously thinking of giving up GUI file manager totally. Anyway, Dolphin won with Nautilus close behind. But check this out:bash had 10.4% (and took third place), the Command line got 10.34 percent, Midnight Commander got 7.9% and Emacs got 1.4 %. Clearly, the majority of Linux Journal readers are unhappy with GUI file management systems in Linux at this time. But is anyone listening? ARE THEY?
The best Linux Journal Column was Shaw Powers’ “The Open-Source Classroom,” and that’s appropriate. The best Linux/OSS advocate was Linus Torvalds followed by a fair margin by a piece of software and with Richard Stallman in third place. For some reason I am not on that list.
The Worst Idea Ever award went to Gnome 3, naturally. Second, “Creating a new distro instead of a new application” and fourth Mir. Not the space station, but rather, the esoteric inner working of the computer system thingie. But since “Ubuntu going it alone” and “Ubuntu” (just by itself) adds up to a greater amount, Ubuntu is actually in third place in this important category . The LibreOffice fork is on the list, by the way. Just sayin’
Sadly, Raspberry Pi won the best new open source project for the year. Why is this sad? Because “Open Source Project” should be software and there should be a separate category for “Open Source Hardware Project.” Also sad because there is hardly anything new going on in the software area. Firefox came in second and a bunch of other stuff I never heard of is on the list.
The “Product of the Year” went to Raspberry Pi, which is perfect, then a thing called Jolla/Sailfish which is a phone, then Firefox, then a bunch of other stuff. The Roku is on that list, which I think is legit.
Beyond that the only thing I’m really interested in is the graphics stuff, and I do think this category should be broken down more. Gimp came in first with Inkscape second and Blender third, but those three applications are entirely different and do entirely different, mostly unrelated things.
Go check it out. There are a gazillion other categories that I did not mention but that you will want to know about.
Imagine going back in time to visit Nelson Mandela in prison and telling him this: “You will live through this and be free, you’ll lead your country and set an unattainable example of leadership, you’ll retire as president and die at a very old age. The violence associated with the end of Apartheid will be so little it will be mostly forgotten. There will be truth. And reconciliation.” That would have been a remarkable, impossible prediction at the time, because he was clearly destine to die in prison, and there was little possibility of reconciliation and there was every chance of bloodshed. Then you could add something equally unlikely: “There is a young African American man at a protest rally in the United States right now, agitating against apartheid. Long after your release from prison and your presidency, he will become the President of the United States and he will, in eulogizing you on your death, mention that his first political act was to protest racial injustice in your land.”
I can not say anything about Nelson Mandela that others with more knowledge and experience are saying now around the world. I’m hearing some remarkable voices saying some remarkable things. Go listen if you haven’t already. But I do remember a few things that I’d like to write down.
I remember, when Mandela was in prison and Apartheid was still the rule of the land in South Africa, but not knowing much about it, the protests in Harvard Yard and the mock shantytown that stayed up for months to agitate for divestment. I wonder if young President Obama was ever in that shantytown or if he organized or attended any of those rallies. Presumably so.
I remember watching transfixed, along with something like a billion other people, when Mandela made the final leg of his “long walk to freedom” on his release from prison. I remember being in Bloomington, Indiana, at a conference of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists, attended by numerous South Africans who had already sent in their absentee ballots, for the first election.
I remember turning down opportunities to work in South Africa, honoring the boycott, but later of course I did work in the New South Africa (and yes, that’s what they call it there) and I spent considerable time in the country across numerous visits. Some of my best memories are in South Africa, and it is where I met Lynne, one of my best friends ever. I remember being there during one of the elections and seeing two of my Afrikaner colleagues in tears because Mandela was president. They were tears of joy, mind you. These men, as boys, had been shuttled to school and back in an armored bus as part of an armed convoy, in the Northern Province, now Limpopo, under threat of the ANC bush army, which at the time was in part led by Mandela himself before he was imprisoned. At another time they showed me the place where they waited for the armored bus, on the edge of a farm by a highway.
I also remember visiting, not too far from there, an Apartheid fence. This was a five meter high double chain link fence topped with razor wire, designed as part of the first line of defense against invading armies that were expected in those days, armies from the front line states that would take over South Africa and throw out the Apartheid white minority government. The fence ran only a few hundred meters and stopped abruptly on both ends, which would have allowed the invading armies to simply walk around it. This was because the permission of the landowner was needed to put in the fence, and only one land owner overlooking that part of the Limpopo River was interested in having it. If you think that is strange, you just don’t know South Africa. It’s still strange, but at the same time, perfectly normal.
Travelling back south the same week, I learned that the bus stop was on a long straight section of highway designated by the South African military as a landing strip. There were apparently many of these, which would be used to move the army to the border at the time of the impending invasion. We all remember the assumption that Apartheid would likely end in a bloodbath, internally or by invasion or both.
But Mandela did not let any of that happen. The smartest thing the white minority did was to give the country, essentially, to Mandela. Truth and reconciliation ensued.
I also remember, in detail, every single one of the racist stories I was told by numerous disenfranchised whites, whom I would run into now and then around the country while doing my work. I remember the details so well because even though every one of those stories was about someone the person telling it knew, and set in a specific time and space like it had really happened, there were really only a handful of different stories but every story was repeated again and again by different people in far flung regions. When I encountered South African white racism in the wild I found it to be a joke, not a very funny one, a parody of itself, a badly strung together set of urban myths, self aggrandizing and used up. But most of the minority citizens I knew and became friends with in South Africa are as sad today that Mandela has died as anyone else.
As President Obama said today, there will never be another person like Nelson Mandela.
I’ve noted this before. Here is Peter Sinclair’s video on the topic:
The most sobering evidence of the planet’s response to greenhouse gases comes from the fossil record. New evidence scientists are collecting suggests that ice sheets may be more vulnerable than previously believed, which has huge implications for sea level rise.
Are there more tornadoes because of global warming? Are they stronger? Do they occur more frequently outside of the usual tornado season, or are they more common in areas that formerly had few tornadoes?
There are problems with all of these questions, and the main problem is the fact that the tornado data isn’t very informative.
Here’s the raw data from the NOAA tornado database, showing the number of tornadoes per year of all intensities greater than one mile long on the ground:
(Click on the graph to see the whole thing in case it isn’t showing for you.)
This looks like more tornadoes are happening. We could leave it at that but we’d be doing bad science if we did so. The problem is that over time, the way tornadoes are observed and measured has changed, and owing, probably, to changes in population distribution in the region that gets most of the tornadoes in the US, there may be a number of tornadoes in the earlier years that were not observed. But, we don’t know that. In fact, we have no idea whatsoever how to make these data useful. These data could represent a reasonably accurate picture of tornado frequency over time in the US, or they might not, but we have no quantification of how biasing effects might work over time.
A while back I tried to see if I could make the data speak more clearly by measuring the total length and width of tornadoes in the database and adding them up for the period 1990 to 2012. This eliminated the problem of missing tornadoes because I was only looking at recent times when the data would be better. The resulting graph looks like this:
(Click on the graph to see the whole thing in case it isn’t showing for you.)
This seems to show a dramatic increase in overall effects of tornadoes. But, it turns out that the way “width” of tornadoes was measured was changed during this period, so these data are still not that useful.
Why am I showing you bad data? Here’s why. Consider the possible interpretations of graphs like these. For example:
1) There are more tornadoes over time, possibly because of global warming.
2) There are fewer tornadoes over time, despite global warming.
3) We can’t say anything about changes in frequency, severity, or land coverage of tornadoes over time because the data suck.
4) The evidence shows that there is no effect of global warming on tornadoes over time.
If this was a multiple choice question, the correct answer would not be 1, because the data are not useful. The correct answer would not be 2, because the data are not useful. The correct answer would be 3, because the data are not useful.
But often, we hear people who want to minimize the effects of global warming and deny the importance of climate change claim that number 4 is true. But we can’t say this because … wait for it … the data suck! The data as presented here are not sufficient to say that there are more tornadoes, but the default fallback null model is NOT that there is no relationship between climate change and tornado frequency, severity, or landscape coverage.
Peter Sinclair has a post linking together the tornado question and a spate of climate science denialism in this post: Tracking the Truth About Tornadoes. Go have a look.
In that post Sinclair quotes Michael Mann:
Actual atmospheric scientists know that the historical observations are too sketchy and unreliable to decide one way or another as to whether tornadoes are increasing or not…
So one is essentially left with the physical reasoning…
…warm, moist air is favorable for tornadoes, and global warming will provide more of it. But important, too, is the amount of “shear” (that is, twisting) in the wind. And whether there will, in a warmer world, be more or less of that in tornado-prone regions, during the tornado season, depends on the precise shifts that will take place in the jet stream — something that is extremely difficult to predict even with state-of-the-art theoretical climate models. That factor is a “wild card” in the equation.
So we’ve got one factor that is a toss-up, and another one that appears favorable for tornado activity. The combination of them is therefore slightly on the “favorable” side, and if you’re a betting person, that’s probably what you would go with.
I’d like to add to this: Storminess in “Tornado Alley” is likely to increase. It may be more straight line winds and severe thunderstorm, more ALH (amazingly large hail), or more tornadoes. Personally, I suspect it will be all of this but with the actual rate of tornado formation varying a great deal from year to year, depending on effects such as wind shear, but that’s just a gut feeling. Vertical wind shear may help attenuate the development of tornadoes when it is happening, but it won’t make the energy go away, and that energy may be manifest in other ways through storms that don’t happen to form tornadoes. We’ll see, I guess.
It occurs to me that many of you may not know this because you don’t live in the Twin Cities or are not Facebook Friends of the Mayor of Minneapolis, but the guy is very funny and creative and produces a lot of poetry, especially this time of year.
In Minneapolis, there is an arcane system of plowing snow that I will not even attempt to explain. (I come from New York and Boston where the system for removing snow from the city streets makes perfect sense.) The point is, if you mess up they tow your car to a sort of automotive dungeon and it costs a lot of money to get it back.
So, when the snow flakes start flying RT starts rhyming, as a public service. Like this:
On snow emergency routes:
Here’s your motto
By nine o’clock tonight
Please move your auto
Here in Fun City
Rock out, wine and dine
But from snow emergency routes
Move your car by nine
You ain’t so groovy
You ain’t no playa
If you can’t move your car
Without a poem from da Maya
The mayor will be replaced in January, but we are hoping he will stay on as Poet Laureate of the City of Lakes.
This makes total sense. Physics was unable to deliver us our flying cars or jet packs. But what were we going to do with them anyway? Well, go to the bookstore, of course! Alas, in the absence of advanced space age technology we are forced to drive, or even walk, to the bookstore.
But not any more, because Jeff Bezos at Amazon has promised us … promised … the new “Amazon Prime Air” service. This is where the books (and other stuff we order from Amazon.com) fly to us, encased in small brightly colored boxes that apparently we get to keep after the delivery. They fly attached to the underbelly of a robotic helicopter.
Here it is happening, for real:
Amazing.
There may be a few holes in this story though. For one thing, why are humans packing the brightly colored boxes? I would think that the first thing you’d do if you were creating a robotic delivery system is to replace those humans with much more efficient robots. For another thing, why is the flying robot, which Mr. Bezos has, in a brilliant moment of marketing genius called a “Drone,” dropping the object in the middle of the driveway? My driveway is also a thoroughfare for dozens of middle and high school students going to and from school. That would not work for me. Maybe we need to have tiny heliports on our roofs. For another thing, what about big things, or orders where multiple packages will be delivered at once? Do these flying robots scale up? Will they cooperate when flying in flocks? Also, having delivery of potentially essential items taken out of the hand of the post office for whom “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” with different rules, like airlines have, about flying … I am not sure that I am comfortable with this.
(Below is the 60 minutes segment on which the Drone was announced.)
This is all well and good. Well, actually it is disturbing and evil. Anyway, I’m sticking with my original contention regarding Amazon: It has become, effectively, a public good (for better or worse) like roads and canals and such, but it is a public good owned by some guy. Those things, roads canals and such, were often originally created and maintained by private corporations licensed by the government, until society realized that that would not do. Proper free market competition and fair play (to the extent that those two things sometimes work together) can only happen if the infrastructure is a public good and that which uses the infrastructure mostly isn’t. Jeff Bezos has made clear, explicitly, that he wants Amazon to sell everything to everyone. And, they hold patents to do that sort of thing. And now they intend to take over the sky. Aren’t there rules about that?
Somebody tipped over a bag full of a white powdery substance. Most of what fell out splayed across the dirty wooden table, but about a cup poured onto the dirt floor of the open-air Baraza at our research site in a remote part of the Congo’s Ituri Forest. Embarrassed about tipping onto the ground more of this valuable substance than most people living within 50 kilometers would ever see in one day, the tipper started to push loose dirt onto the powder to cover it up. But the spill had been noticed by two children lounging nearby; in what seemed like a fraction of a second, the boys were face down on the ground licking up the spilled material, taking with it mouthfuls of dirt and who knows what parasites and other kooties. It was a sudden and short lived fiasco and a scene etched hard into my mind. To this day, decades later, when I think of this I breathe a sigh of relief that it was not me who tipped over the bag of white sugar.
These kids and everyone else in the Baraza that day were very familiar with sugarcane. Everyone grew at least a little. Sugarcane was to the Ituri Forest villagers what Hastas is to urban gardeners in the US. Everyone grew at least a little where it would fit and not get trampled or take up extra gardening space for real food.
The sugarcane was eaten raw. You would use a machete to cut a off a long section of the giant grass plant, and carry it around. With your teeth or with the help of a knife you would slice open a section of the cane and chew on it, sucking out the sweet water inside. When the sugarcane was ripe, the pathways and, really, any open surface would be littered with spent wadges. But still, not much sugarcane is grown in the Congo compared to other crops then or now. Sugarcane, originally from the Pacific and India, was, however, grown for centuries in large quantities where it was transplanted in the New World. You probably know of it as one of the vertices of the Triangle Trade (sugarcane = rum). But there is still a connection to these kids, the two who scarfed up the dirt and sand and sugar spilled on the baraza floor.
No sense sugar-coating it. The story of sugar is the story of slavery. The Congo was probably not the biggest source of slaves for the Caribbean and South America. The eastern Congo, especially, was on the Indian Ocean slave route. But generally speaking, West and Central Africa supplied millions of people, captured, owned and sold, to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Over the centuries since its introduction to West Asia and Europe, and by extension, the New World, sugar grew in importance from a rarity to a common element in the diet, often carrying with it symbolic importance as an indicator of class or by its use in food art. Sugar is distilled and concentrated solar energy that preserves well and is easily transported. The production and distribution of sugar is one of a handful, maybe the most important of engines for the rise of Immanuel Wallerstein’s global system (that I almost did my PhD on by the way).
You’ve got to love it when a molecule changes history. Primates (and a few other groups of animals) lost their ability to synthesize and use ascorbic acid because fruit producing plants had evolved to have their seeds dispersed in exchange for Vitamin C rich pulp. Therefore, the British Mercantile System. Similarly, C12H22O11, one of a class of molecules used by plants to store energy (and sometimes entice monkeys or ants to do their bidding) drove the most momentous of historical changes and its production, in one form or another, makes up an inordinate percentage of the effort expended to feed our species.
Nobody really questions the importance of sugar, but how aware is the average person of the details of its sweet success? More so than before for those who have read Elizabeth Abbott’s “Sugar: A Bittersweet History.” Before you go check and yell at me for not restricting my writing to things that happened during the last five minutes, I’ll admit that the book came out in 2010 and I’ve only just now noticed it. I was focusing on other things, I promise. But I am pretty sure that no major revisions of history of the last thousand years or so have been made that would make this engaging book out of date or less relevant.
We all like to consume knowledge, but if you also like knowledge of what you consume you should read this book. It will make you feel bad, and likely awed, but also, a lot smarter, hopefully enough to offset the shame.
One of the most important things that ever happened in history is really a category of things and took a few centuries. This was the transplantation of crops and to a lesser extent horticultural technologies across the globe beginning with the Portuguese and extending at a quickened pace with all the major colonial ventures. This is probably more pervasive than you think. The lifeways and culture of the Yanomamö were greatly transformed, in my opinion, buy the introduction of south and southeast Asian (and possibly African) crops, mainly the plantain. The earliest records suggest that the Yanomamö were foragers, but all the later ethnography shows them as horticulturalists. The difference between “typical” equatorial foragers and the Yanomamö may well be the inclusion in their economy and society of a key crop that is also a highly vulnerable resource. Vulnerability of one’s resource base can shape one’s attitude at the socio-cultural level. What crops are mainly grown in swidden fields in Africa? South American ones. There would have been no Irish potato famine had there been no potatoes. They come from the Andes. And as mentioned sugar/rum was one of the vertices of the Triangular Trade and along with a few other crops (like Cotton) formed the agricultural structure of the slave-based economy that made up the largest single capital component of the rise of the United State’s economy. If the modern US economy is the fat bank account, slavery was the first big deposit in that account and New World Slavery happened because of this small number of transported crops.
By the twentieth century, sugarcane had circled the globe, traveling north and west from New Guinea then back again to the Pacific, and its legacies mark its global passage even where it is no longer grown… In the Caribbean, where King Sugar is now expiring as a major industry … and where most former colonies have become independent, political and commercial unions remain skewed along historical lines. Sugar culture is at the root of why Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians and Guyanese are mired in political enmity, why Hawaii and Fiji endure perpetual conflict between their Native and their Asian populations and why the official currency fo Mauritius, off the coast of Africa, is the rupee and its population is primarily Indian…
It is a good book. Overlook Publishers, available for the Kindle. I am probably going to work this into this week’s lecture in Intro to Archaeology.
