Monthly Archives: September 2014

Humans have caused more than 100% of climate change over last 50 years

Not really a fully fledged blog post, just a quick link pointing you to something interesting.

More than 100%? Sounds funny, doesn’t it? Let me rephrase. Humans have caused so much climate change that some of the climate change changed some of the climate back.

Still sounds kinda funny.

OK, try again: Humans have caused a whole bunch of global warming. Nature has caused a small amount of global cooling, which has offset a little of the human caused global warming. But also, humans have caused a little bit of global cooling as well.

Make sense? OK, look at this graph:

Screen Shot 2014-09-20 at 6.11.37 PM

I’m sure you’ve got it now. But if not, go read this: The 97% v the 3% – just how much global warming are humans causing?

BP/DOE's Koonin: Anthropogenic Global Warming is Real, Important, and Must Be Addressed

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Steven Koonin, former Department of Energy Undersecretary and BP scientist makes the case that global warming is caused by humans, important, that we must do something about it, and that further research on key topics is necessary to help guide policy.

He states,

The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter … We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries.

Unfortunately, Koonin also argues that climate science is largely at sea, and that we know so little about climate change that, he implies strongly, we really don’t know what to do about it. He seems to be suggesting that we should do nothing.

He states that the amount of anthropogenic change in global temperature is a fraction of natural change, but this is wrong. The amount of change over the industrial era caused by humans is far more than expected from natural change, and is all in the same direction. He states that estimates of projected “climate sensitivity,” the eventual change in surface temperature given a certain increase in added CO2, have not changed in 30 years. This is utterly false. The total range of sensitivity has, actually, stayed about the same but recent work has indicated that most climate scientists are more comfortable narrowing down the sensitivity to something like “Two. Or more. But I hope not. Maybe five.” More importantly, the issue of climate sensitivity has moved from being an “unkown unkown” to a “known unknown” over this time.

Koonin badly botches his discussion of models and how they work, confusing and conflating scales of time and space, and overall mischaracterizes what climate models do and how well they work. They actually work pretty well. He deosn’t seem to know that.

Koonin’s piece is well characterized by the title of a responding blog post at Climate Science Watch: “On eve of climate march, Wall Street Journal published call to wait and do nothing

I’d like to write more about it now but I have to shut down the computer for an unseasonal severe storm about to sweep over us. Bye for now.

Media Matters addresses the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of climate here.

Baby Cries Cause Concern For Mothers Of Other Species

It has long been known by humans that female mammals can be attracted with the call of a young in distress. There is a famous documentary film of the Hadza, a foraging group in Tanzania, in which this method is used by young boys to trap Dasssies (rock Hyrax). First you catch a baby Dassie (not hard) then you hid and bit it in the neck so it cries out, then when the momma Dassies come to rescue it you shoot them at short range with an arrow or whack them with a stick. Adult Efe Pygmy hunters sometimes imitate the call of a young Duiker (a forest antelope) in distress in order to draw in females. I’ve spent a fair amount of time hanging around with adult male Efe hunters and never saw this work, but they claim it does and I tend to believe them.

Now, researchers have demonstrated cross-species response to distress calls by young. They recorded distress calls by various mammals such as seals, dogs, cats, and humans. Never mind how they got the distress calls. Anyway, they played these for White Tailed Deer females and got a response. The mother deer moved towards the recordings. These baby mammals all have similar pitched calls. The researchers also recorded bats and lowered the pitch to be within that range, and the deer responded to this as well.

Presumably there is strong selection on responding to distress calls of young, but not strong selection on being selective, probably because the circumstances do not arise that often.

More here.

Global Warming Negatively Impacts Wild Monkey Diets

Yes, yes, we hear it all the time: More CO2 is good because plants love CO2

That is a rather dumb thing to say for a number of reasons; nature is not simple. You don’t change one variable and expect other variables to respond as though we were turning a garden hose up or down. For example, while plant growth might be enhanced with more CO2 in the atmosphere, there is no reason to think this would be linear, or similar across all plants. You have to dance with the one who brung ya. The plants we have are the plants that have been under Darwinian selection optimizing growth and maintenance physiology for gazillions of plant generations. Changing a fundamental variable may have little effect (and in fact, CO2 increase only enhances growth somewhat, and for only some plants) and may even have negative effects.

A new paper out in Ecology looks at the nutritional value of plants in a Ugandan rainforest and finds that the nutritional value of the leaves eaten by some Colobine monkeys there has declined, because fibre has increased at the expense of usable protein. From the abstract:

Global change is affecting plant and animal populations and many of the changes are likely subtle and difficult to detect. Based on greenhouse experiments, changes in temperature and rainfall, along with elevated CO2, are expected to impact the nutritional quality of leaves. Here, we show a decline in the quality of tree leaves 15 and 30 years after two previous studies in an undisturbed area of tropical forest in Kibale National Park, Uganda. After 30 years in a sample of multiple individuals of ten tree species, the mature leaves of all but one species increased in fiber concentrations, with a mean increase of 10%; tagged individuals of one species increased 13% in fiber. After 15 years, in eight tree species the fiber of young leaves increased 15%, and protein decreased 6%. Like many folivores, Kibale colobus monkeys select leaves with a high protein-to-fiber ratio, so for these folivores declining leaf quality could have a major impact. Comparisons among African and Asian forests show a strong correlation between colobine biomass and the protein-to-fiber ratio of the mature leaves from common tree species. Although this model, predicts a 31% decline in monkey abundance for Kibale, we have not yet seen these declines.

Jessica M. Rothman, Colin A. Chapman, Thomas T. Struhsaker, David Raubenheimer, Dennis Twinomugisha, and Peter G. Waterman, 2014. Long term declines in nutritional quality of tropical leaves. Ecology

UN Security Council Resolution on Ebola

Just a quick note. The UN Security Council has ad its first ever emergency meeting over a health issue, specifically the current West African Ebola outbreak. From a summary in Science, the Council …

… unanimously passed a resolution that declared the spread of the virus a “threat to international peace and security” and called on the world to send more health care workers and supplies to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, and not to isolate those countries.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who chaired today’s meeting, noted that the resolution had 130 co-sponsors, more than any previous one in the history of the Security Council.

There may be over 10 billion of us by 2100

Climate change may be the existential threat, but underlying this is, of course, population size. And this is a problem that never seems to go away. There are of course two ways, broadly speaking, to limit population growth aside from draconian policies governing reproduction (such as China’s One Child policy). One is sometimes called the demographic transition. This is when a combination of factors including so-called modernization which may involve increase quality of health care in combination with increased social equality lead to lower birth rates. The other is when things go badly wrong and interruptions in the food supply, warfare genocide, and epidemic disease simply cull out large parts of the population.

The following chart shows the effect of two major famines on the overall population increase in Ethiopia since 1950. If you squint and look at it kinda sideways you can see the slowing of population increase during this period. But really, it made little difference.

Screen Shot 2014-09-20 at 8.44.05 AM

And here is the population of Rwanda since 1950, with the 1994 Genocide marked in. Here the event is much more clearly indicated but again, over the long term, there is not that much of an effect, just a delay in reaching some high future number.

Screen Shot 2014-09-20 at 8.49.48 AM

Until recently, experts on population had estimated that world population would reach about 9 billion by around 2050, and then level off. But a new study by the UN indicates that population is likely to increase to more than 10 billion or so by the end of the century. The study came out in this week’s issue of Science (Gerland, P., Raftery, A. E., Šev, H., Li, N., Gu, D., Spoorenberg, T., … Heilig, G. K. (2014). Reports World population stabilization unlikely this century, (September), 1–5. doi:10.1038/42935, with additional information here). Here is what the projection looks like for the world, but you can go to the link and see the projections for each country, various regions, and projections for other demographic values.

Screen Shot 2014-09-20 at 8.56.57 AM

From the Abstract:

The United Nations recently released population projections based on data until 2012 and a Bayesian probabilistic methodology. Analysis of these data reveals that, contrary to previous literature, world population is unlikely to stop growing this century. There is an 80% probability that world population, now 7.2 billion, will increase to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion in 2100. This uncertainty is much smaller than the range from the traditional UN high and low variants. Much of the increase is expected to happen in Africa, in part due to higher fertility and a recent slowdown in the pace of fertility decline. Also, the ratio of working age people to older people is likely to decline substantially in all countries, even those that currently have young populations.

The new study is done differently than most earlier studies. According to Patrick Gerland, a UN demographer, “Earlier projections were strictly based on scenarios, so there was no uncertainty. This work provides a more statistically driven assessment that allows us to quantify the predictions, and offer a confidence interval that could be useful in planning.” Also earlier studies made unrealistic assumptions about fertility, allowing the entire world to have a higher or lower fertility to develop a range of outcomes. Author Adrian Raftery notes, ““In a given year and country the fertility rate might be half a child higher, but the probability that it would be half a child higher in all countries in all years in the future is very low.”

We need to be working towards a more rapid demographic transition, which in large part involved education of girls and access to good health care so babies survive better, and good reproductive services so women can no be so easily coerced into being baby factories.

What will this winter be like in North America?

The Polar Vortex hurt. We who lived in it, through it, with it, are like farm animals that got zapped by the electric fence a couple of times … notice all that long grass growing by the fence. Stay away. It hurt! So we are worried that this will happen again.

It is a reasonable worry, from a scientific point of view. The Polar Vortex visitation last winter was the result of changes to trade winds and jet streams that has characterized our weather for the last few years. One of the big questions on my mind is this: Are wavy jet streams and corresponding changes in the distribution of excessive rainfall and drought likely to become spatially patterned? In other words, is it likely that when the Polar Vortex wanders that it will tend to wander to the same small set of locations, like Siberia or North America? So far this seems to be at least partly true. The drought in California has not been maintained because of a lack of rainfall at that latitude, but rather, a lack of certain seasonal precipitation (winter snows) at that longitude, because of the oft-cited “ridiculously resilient ridge” which is actually one of several standing waves in the polar jet stream that shunts wet air around California, to places the Midwest. It is conceivable that the Polar Vortex, as part of the climate change induced “new normal,” will wanter off-pole and onto a landmass (either Eurasia or North America) often-ish, from now on, or until continued global warming results in some other pattern which we’ll probably call “New Normal 2.0”.

This is a question I’ve asked various scientists who are working on this problem. The answer I’ve gotten so far has been, paraphrased, “Yeah, I don’t know, maybe, we’re thinking about that. Get back to you later.”

But there is hope. I’ve put links to three places you can go for more discussion and information below. Here’s the tl;dr. The National Weather Service does a very good job of predicting what winter will be like in North America, but the accuracy of that prediction, unsurprisingly, drops off month by month. So the current prediction is probably pretty good for November/December, but as January and February come along, what is predicted now may be off. With that caveat, these are the salient predictions:

1) There will not be a Polar Vortex excursion into North America. Probably. The thing is, if this is a recent phenomenon and increasing in likelihood, the predictions may be off, but there are good reasons to believe they are not. Don’t assume the Polar Vortex will visit us, but don’t sell your wool pants at that last garage sale of the year.

2) California may actually get some rasonable precipitation this winter. It is hard to say if it will be drought-breaking rain, but it may help.

3) Although winter seems to be starting early this year (with many inches of snow having fallen or about to fall on the Front Range, the Dakotas, etc.) the overall prediction is a somewhat warmer than average winter for most of North America.

4) The Southwest, California, Texas, North-Central Mexico will have a bit more moisture than average, but other than Pacific coastal Mexico, not a lot more. That won’t translate into huge snowfalls except at high elevations. The middle of the country, from Montana to western Ohio and Michigan, south to a line running from southern Idaho across to Florida, including the Southeast, will have average precip. So, Minnesotans may see early snow if it remains cool, but this will not be an exceptionally snowy winter. Less than usual moisture is predicted for Kentucky, Ohio, western Pensylvaina, parts of New York and most of New England. But, this is only a small amount, so don’t sell your snow blower at that garage sale.

Parts of the Pacific Northwest and inland across to western Montana may be a bit dryer than usual.

Overall, temperature wise, no region is expected to be especially cold, mostly somewhat warm. The regions of Canada and Alaska along the Arctic Circle will be very warm (relatively … so many degrees below zero instead of many more degrees below zero) as we would expect with “Arctic Amplification.” Moisture levels, overall, are not going to be extreme in either direction anywhere, though the dry in the Northwest may be noticeable.

In other words, the average person’s perception of weather, which varies from reality a great deal, will include the actual realized variation, if the predictions hold up.

The NWS predictions can be found via this page.

Eric Holthaus has a discussion of the coming winter here.

Paul Douglas of Weather Nation has more here, with a lot of other info relevant to Minnesota.

Anthony Watts Starts Up Cloud Based Anti-Science Organization

The Open Atmospheric Society

Climate science pseudo-skeptic Anthony Watts recently bought and registered the domain “theoas.org” and has just announced the formation at that Internet address of a new society explicitly designed to organize people in meteorology and related areas intent on opposing the scientific consensus on climate change. And yes, there is a scientific consensus on climate change.

Dr. Roy Spencer once said to me that trying to organize climate skeptics would be like “trying to herd cats”. While this Society is not trying to “herd” anyone, nor is it specifically focused on climate skepticism, it will serve to represent a group of people and ideas that up until now has been essentially ostracized because the ideas and viewpoints are counter to “consensus”.

Secret Society, Just Like The Illuminati?

Membership in the society will be secret. The eventual plan is to be a non-profit. There will not be a board of directors initially but eventualy one will be formed of five members plus Anthony (ex-officio) and representation from among non-full members. The process of electing board members has not yet been determined.

Associate membership will be $45, with additional membership categories designed on one hand to allow student members and on the other hand to raise more funds (lifetime membership, etc.).

A Scientific Society Designed To Oppose Science?

This organization, explicitly designed as a group opposing scientific consensus, will operate a peer reviewed scientific journal, the editor of which will be initially appointed by the board apparently from a short list provided by Executive Director Anthony Watts. From the Charter:

Article IX: Scientific Journal

Section 1. The OAS shall have an official publication, to be known as The Journal of the Open Atmospheric Society. (JOAS). An ISSN number will be applied for and assigned to the publication.

Section 1.1 Members of the OAS as well as others of expertise outside of the OAS may serve as peer review referees for potential publications for inclusion in JOAS.

Section 1.2 A collaborative and open peer-review process will be conducted using an Internet publishing platform. Reviewer comments will be published along with the publication itself so that the process is transparent.

Section 1.3 Digital Object Identifiers (DOI’s) will be assigned by the JOAS Editor to each approved publication.

Section 2. An editor to JOAS shall be appointed. During the first six months of operations, the Executive Director will solicit candidates to present to the board of directors. The Board of Directors shall conduct online video interviews and appoint a qualified editor for JOAS by a majority vote from the candidate pool. The editor may be a compensated position, with any compensation schedule to be determined by the Board of Directors

Section 3. Initially, JOAS will be a quarterly publication. As membership and interest grows, the Board of Directors may opt to make it a bi-monthly or monthly publication.

Section 4. The goal of JOAS is to promote and publish reproducible Atmospheric and Earth science papers. To that end, all technical submissions to JOAS must be accompanied by all manner and means of materials to enable such reproduction during peer review. This includes all data, equations, software code, examples and supplementary materials. Rebuttals to technical submissions must also meet the same requirements. Editorial submissions such as opinion or commentary that don’t have such technical elements may be excepted from reproducibility requirements, but the JOAS has the option of asking for any additional materials that may be required.

Science or Fundraising?

So far the effort has raised $330. But Watts has high hopes:

Right now, membership is the most important goal. I encourage everyone who reads WUWT to become a member, or an associate member. Like any organization, it starts out small with an idea, and grows as momentum builds. As the momentum builds, so will the organization. My role is to put all the pieces in place, and help it grow.

Another Anti-Science Stab at Peer Review?

This new organization is well timed, in that there have been significant setbacks to the science denialist community’s efforts in wedging into the peer reviewed process. I am reminded of a quote by Winston Churchill:

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

And another quote made famous by Rita Mae Brown:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

The announcement for the new society is here.

AskDrMann! PennFuture's 9/17 Twitter chat with climate scientist Michael Mann (@MichaelEMann )

Check this out:

PennFuture is hosting a Twitter chat with renowned Penn State climate scientist (and our good friend!) Michael Mann aka @MichaelEMann on Wednesday, September 17, from 2pm-3pm EDT. Use the hashtag #AskDrMann to participate. You won’t wanna miss it!

Mann has been at the forefront of the climate change conversation over the past decade, from his widely-recognized research to his many media appearances explaining the science behind global warming.

He recently penned an op-ed in the Allentown Morning Call, where he urged the public to become more involved in the climate debate, and called on policymakers to regulate both carbon dioxide and methane — greenhouse gases that are accelerating climate change.

Mark your calendar!

The effects of windmills and other clean energy on birds

I’ve been collecting information on this topic for a while, and yesterday, I sat down to write a post that would clarify the question of the impacts of windmills on bird populations. It turns out, however, that I was totally unsatisfied with the available data on everything from windmills to building strikes to cats, so instead I wrote a post making that very point: We really have no idea. This is an interesting and important problem, though, so it is worth having a conversation about.

The post is here: “How many birds are killed by windmills and other green energy projects?

Odile, Polo, and the Eastern Pacific Hurricane Season 2014

Odile was the strongest hurricane to strike the Baja Peninsula during the period of available data, roughly similar to Hurrican Olivia (1967). The storm reached Category 4 strength but was then weakened because of interaction with the effects of a prior hurricane in the area (Norbert). At the moment, Odile is a tropical storm and still in the Baja. There was flooding, and two fatalities, including a lightning strike and a nine year old boy taken by floodwaters. Several building in Acapulco were damaged. There has been a lot of damage and disruption in the Baja region.

Tropical Storm Polo is currently south of Mexico and is expected to stay away from the coast, and it is not clear that it will reach Hurricane strength. If so, only for a brief time.

Hurricane Iselle was the strongest tropical cyclone to hit Hawaii (the big island).

Hurricane Marie was the first Category 5 Pacific hurricane in the region in four years.

Hurricane Genevieve was the first hurricane to pass through all three defined Pacific hurricane basins since 2003.

Including Polo, there have been 17 named storms in the Eastern Pacific so far this year. Eleven have been hurricanes. The average Eastern Pacific hurricane season has 15.4 (range 7-25) storms with 8.4 hurricanes (range 3-16). Officially the season ends on November 30th. So, this is clearly an exceptional year.

Warmest August on Record, Global Warming Continues

According to data just updated by NASA, last August was the warmest August for the entire instrumental data record, which begins in 1881. This has been something of a mixed year but overall warm. Of the 134 years for which there are data, the coolest month this year so far was February, at 17th place, with July also being cool, at 11th place. Keep in mind this is over 134 years. For the months of January through August, there are no one-digit ranks (1 through 8) prior to 1989, inclusively, and you don’t really start getting consistent “top ten” ranks until 1998.

Monthly ranks so far this year, January was 4th, Feb was 17th, March was 4th, April was 2nd, May was first, June was 3rd, July was 11th, and as noted, August is 1st. For a year in which we are not (yet) experiencing an El Niño, that is very, very warm.

Again, these are global temperatures. Your local mileage may vary.

We don’t know how 2014 will rank as a year. If there is no El Niño it will rank high. If an El Niño gets going soon enough to affect the year’s average, 2014 may well be in the top few warmest years since global warming began.

Here is where the year to day (Jan through Aug) stands in relation to the years in the data set since 1990 inclusively:

Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 11.47.10 AM

Pterosaurs by Mark Witton

Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy by Mark P. Witton is a coffee-table size book rich in detail and lavishly illustrated. Witton is a pterosaur expert at the School of Earh and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth. He is famous for his illustrations and his work in popular media such as the film “Walking With Dinosaurs 3D.”

The first pterosaur fossil was found in the late 18th century in the Jurassic Solnhofen Limestones, in Germany, the same excellent preservational environment that would later yield Archaeopteryx. They person who first studied it thought the elongated finger bones that we now know supported a wing served as a flipper in an amphibious creature. Not long after, the famous paleontologist George Cuvier recognized the winged nature of the beast. Witton notes that at the time, and through a good part of the 19th century, it was possible to believe that many of the odd fossils being unearthed were of species that still existed but were unknown to science. This is because most of the fossils were aquatic, and who knew what mysterious forms lurked beneath the sea? But a very large flying thing like this first pterosaur was very unlikely to still exist, unseen by European and American investigators. It had to be something major that was truly extinct. So in a way the history of extinction (the study of it, that is) was significantly shaped by this find. By the early 20th century there had been enough publication and study of pterosaurs to give them a place in paleontology, but not a lot else happened until the 1970s, when a combination of factors, including advanced technology that allowed more detailed and sophisticated study of fossils, led to much more intensive study of pterosaur anatomy and behavior.

Pterosaurs are part of the large taxonomic group that includes the lizards, dinosaurs, and birds, but they branched off within that group prior to the rise of the latter two. So, they are not dinosaurs, but cousins of dinosaurs. You can call them flying lizards, but not flying dinosaurs.

Witton explores this interesting history in some detail, and then proceeds to explore various aspects of pterosaur biology, starting with the skeleton, the soft parts (of which there is some direct but mostly indirect evidence), their flight, how they got around on the ground, and their reproductive biology. These explorations into pterosaurs in general is followed by several chapters devoted to the various groups, with a treatment of the evidence for each group, reconstructions of anatomy, locomotion in the air and on the ground, and ecology.

The resemblance of this layout to a detailed field guide for birds (or some other group) is enhanced by the use of color-coded bleeds at the top of each page, separating the book’s major sections or groups of chapters. The book ends with a consideration of the origins and endings of the “Pterosaur Empire.” It turns out that we don’t actually know why they went extinct. They lasted to the end of the Cretaceous, so going extinct along with their dinosaur cousins is a reasonable hypothesis, but they had already become somewhat rare by that time.

Pterosaurs are cool. Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy is a cool book.

Of related interest:

  • LOL Pterosaurs ….
  • Reconsidering the Reconstruction of the Pterosaur
  • Flying Dinosaurs: A New Book on the Dinosaur Bird Link
  • Giant Semiaquatic Predatory Dinosaur
  • Titanic Fearless Dinosaur Unearthed
  • Honey, I Shrunk The Dinosaurs …
  • The Age of Radiance

    The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson (author of Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon) is a well done history of the atomic age. If you are a bit squeamish (justifiably I’m sure) about the nuclear industry or nuclear stuff generally you’ll find Nelson’s dismissal of your concerns as the product of a public relations fail on the part of the nuclear industry to be patronizing and annoying, but there isn’t too much of that in the book, and he’s partly right; most fears people have about nuclear energy are not especially accurate, but then again, that applies to all fears all the time, it seems. Nuclear power does not have as much of a power to make people stupid as nuclear power advocates suggest. But I digress…

    …. this is a biography of an important age in our history, one that we are currently leaving but will still be with us for hundreds of thousands of years, seeping into the groundwater. It is a fascinating story. I mean, seriously, the whole idea of nuclear physics is fascinating. Everything we knew about everything prior to the discoveries related to the cracking of the atom have two important characteristics: 1) almost off of that applies perfectly to the world around us (basic chemistry and Newtonian physics) and 2) it is all wrong. The opening days of the nuclear age involved that remarkable discovery. There was research, radiation, x-rays, then bombs and power generation. The cold war, terrorism, accidents. Nelson’s book is, really, just full of interesting stories.

    That Facebook Book Meme Thing

    My friend Iain Davidson tagged me with the facebook novel meme. Here are the rules: Oh, hell, never mind the rules. I wanted to provide links to the books so I decided to do this as a blog post which I’ll paste on my facebook page (and of course tag some unlucky facebook friend).

    Here it is. I broke some rules. So what?

    Moment in the Sun: Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment by Dr. Robert Reinow was my Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. As a child I watched Reinow’s Sunrise Semester course on TV a couple of times. He would give a lecture on some manner or other by which humans were ruining the environment. Then he and his wife would put on a skit demonstrating it satirically. I especially remember the Reinow family sitting around to eat a nice dinner, and Mrs. Reinow sneaking over to the stove, opening the top of the pot in which the stew cooked, and dumping in copious quantities of DDT. “This is what we are doing to ourselves!” One day I started a project. I had just started driving and I wanted to visit every public road between Rout 9W and the Hudson River from Albany south at least a couple of counties distance. Early on during that project I came across Holly Hock Hollow Road. It sounded familiar. I drove up the road, and along it were various signs made to look like they were written by elves or gnomes, about this and that aspect of nature or the environment. Finally I came to an unoccupied (at the moment, but lived in) cottage and small complex of outbuildings. I had come to the Reinow estate. I went back a couple of times later but never managed to run into them. The book, which is the point of this paragraph, was prescient. It predicted pretty much everything that happened over the 20 years or so after it was written, from acid rain to DDT. The book made me an angry supporter of the environment, like Reinow was.

    I had messed around with the Sherlock Holmes Canon here and there for a long time then one day decided to read them all cover to cover. Then I did it again. Twice. I don’t know why, I just like it.

    Karl Hiassen wrote Tourist Season and then he wrote a bunch of other books, fiction, not children’s fiction, with a guy named Skink in them. I use those attributes to define the “Skink Canon” though in truth Skink himself is a relatively minor character in some of the books, and is never the main character. But he is in all of the books. The protagonist and antagonist in his novels shift though they are often similar to each other while Skink stays in place. In the swamps. Where he lives. I guess I like the Skink canon because if I lived in Florida I’d probably be Skink by now.

    Everybody seems to either love or hate Anne Rice, and when they do, it is all about the vampires. The vampires are nice, and I would certainly included those stories on a longer list of books, but less appreciated but in my view better is the series related to the Mayfare Witches: The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos. Creepy weird good stories. Take notes, you’ll need them. Maybe a nice genealogy program will help.

    Rita Mae Brown wrote a number of novels exploring both related and unrelated themes in the same setting (though sometimes varying the century). This includes a long series co-authored with her cat. Rubyfruit Jungle is her famous, break-through, prize winning work. Amid this larger set of works is a trilogy, if memory serves correctly but I may be missing a piece (and they were written out of order but I’m giving you the historical order of the story here) that I take to represent her larger work. They are: Six of One, Loose Lips, and Bingo.

    Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers is an historical novel set during World War II following several different individuals of varying degrees (including zero) of connection to each other.

    I read Lord of the Rings when I was too young to totally get it but I enjoyed it. (It was about the second or third “adult” thing I read). Then I read it again when I was older and then one more time. Then, when I as in the Congo with a really bad case of Malaria I read a good part of it again and the story entered my delusional state, which was … interesting. I survived both. I’ll include Hobbit in with the trilogy because it fits.

    About the same time I was reading Lord of the Rings, I read The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (in my case, two paper back volumes, one on physical science, the other biology). It is how I got introduced to science, sort of (I was actually introduced earlier but this was my first systematic learning of science, insofar as reading a book serves in this way). The science I was reading was a bit out of date but to a kid one digit in age that hardly mattered. Black holes were a conjecture, the big bang as I recall somewhat more accepted. Many particles had not been “found” but that search was very much underway. The biology section sticks with me less probably because I’ve gone ahead and unlearned all of the 1960s biology, since I’m kind of a biologist.

    When people ask me what novel to read, I often say “Hey, did you read The Egyptian by Mika Waltari yet? No? Read it!

    If you haven’t gotten around to Mastering Regular Expressions yet than you are missing out.

    I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the seventh grade, and it was quite life changing.

    I read Deschooling Society (70 Edition) in the ninth grade. It was quite revealing.

    I dropped out of school in the 10th grade. But that’s another story and there is no book.

    One day my sister said, “You’re kind of a freak, here, read this,” and handed me Welcome to the Monkey House. It was my first adult fiction. I didn’t find it freaky. That must prove I was a freak. Soon after I read Fahrenheit 451, then everything by Bradbury and Vonnegut (available at the time) along with, as mentioned Lord of the Rings. So that is how I got my start on literature.

    A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World: The Voyage of the Beagle is the most revealing of Darwin, within a reasonable volume of words. I don’t know if it changed me but it has stuck with me and I refer to it often.

    Although A Perfect Spy might be a perfect Le Carré book, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone who hadn’t already read the Smiley canon. And, really George Smiley is where it is at: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality,The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Honorable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People, and so on (there are about three others).

    Sungudogo, the story of a pair of adventurers traveling across the Congo in search of an elusive primate that may or may not exist, reminds me of a lot of things I’ve done myself. Brilliant novel.