Category: Uncategorized

Reported in The Week 13 March 2021, page 21

The Atlantic current system that underpins the Gulf Stream – and ensures Europe’s mild climate – is weaker now than it has been for 1,000 years, a study has found, and climate change is likely to be the cause.

Further weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a “conveyor belt” which brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to the north Atlantic, could lead to more storms battering the UK, heatwaves across Europe, and rising sea levels on the east coast of the US.

The AMOC has been measured directly since 2004; researchers studied sediments and Greenland ice cores to estimate historic patterns.

They believe the current has already slowed 15% since 1950, and that if the planet continues to warm, it could be 45% weaker by the end of this century, bringing it dangerously close to a tipping point, where it becomes irrevocably unstable and at risk of collapse.

“The consequences of this are so massive that even a 10% chance of triggering a breakdown would be an unacceptable risk,” said study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

‘No Man is an Island’

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

1624

Is it better to use electricity than to burn fossil fuels? Well, electricity isn’t a fuel in itself, so it depends how the electricity is generated.

The UK has a national policy, so it is easy to get the figures.

35% of the UK’s electricity is generated from gas fired plants. 2% from coal fired plants. 3% from oil fired plants. 12% from bio-mass fired plants. Nuclear accounts for 16% of electricity generation and wind for 24.2%.

So – at least 40% of the UK’s electricity is produced in plants fuelled by fossil fuels.

The USA varies from State to State. For example, West Virginia generates nearly 90% of its electricity in plants burning fossil fuels. Delaware gets 95% of its electricity from natural gas. Washington State gets over 60% of its electricity from plants powered by hydroelectricity from the Columbia River

This article will be updated as I come across more news.

The following about the death rate in Monkeypox is from an article of 20 May 2022 in the journal Nature, that is mentioned in an article in Quartz about the development of vaccines for Monkeypox.

What researchers can tell from this preliminary genetic data is that the strain of the monkeypox virus found in Portugal is related to a viral strain predominantly found in West Africa. This strain causes milder disease and has a lower death rate about 1% in poor rural populations compared with the one that circulates in Central Africa. But exactly how much the strain causing the current outbreaks differs from the one in West Africa and whether the cases popping up in various countries are linked to one another remains unknown.

Watching a tutorial about underpainting, the tutor recommended an online paid-for application that can resize images. It’s called Rapid Resizer and it comes in a number of options, from $39 to $119 a year (with quarterly options) depending on what you need. The idea is that you sketch something and feed it into the application. Then you tell it what size you want – maybe five times bigger – and it converts and does it and prints onto a number of A4 sheets (or maybe there are American size paper sheets) and lay them out so you can make whatever you are making. It could be embroidery or stained glass, or anything when you need a bigger version.

I guess you could resize in Photoshop, but you still wouldn’t be able to print on four sheets so that the sheets fit together to make a whole.

A jeremiad is a long, mournful complaint or lamentation. It is a list of woes. More than that, it is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s deserved downfall because it will not change its ways.

Its origin is in the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament.