Heatwave

In July the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK was observed at just over 38C on Thursday 25^th..At the same time continental Europe was suffering even higher temperatures while the central USA had had bouts also of unusual heat and there is drought in Australia. Shortly after parts of the UK saw very heavy rainfall which led to flood problems plus damage to a dam in Derbyshire. The physics is that hot air can hold more moisture but is less stable.

For a long time climate change deniers have been…. well denying. However the realisation is slowly dawning that these events are not the natural extremes. Climate scientists still cannot say that these extreme weather events are 100% caused by climate change; what they can say is how the odds on such events is increased with climate change. It is a fact that it is not just this summer but 9 out of 10 hottest July months have occurred in the past ten years.

At the other end of the spectrum just as was forecast there has been an increase in severe winter storms.

It seems to me that the evidence is now so plain and overwhelming that the reality of climate change is being accepted. Not by the terminally stupid liars like Trump. Not even sadly by Jair Bolsonaro the new Brazilian leader who wants to destroy the Amazon rain forest. While there are holdouts I think ( hope ) they are getting fewer and lacking credibility.

A paper claiming that climate change is caused by small differences in solar input has been shown to be severely flawed. Essentially it claimed the distance of the earth from the sun was changing slightly which has been shown to be wrong. Deniers have used papers such as this to try to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt ( FUD )

I do notice that other more visual issues are getting more publicity. While it is entirely right that the problem of plastic waste in the sea gets attention it would be bitterly ironic if this was at the expense of the far greater issue. What climate change needs are some cuddly pictures similar to those on Blue Planet..

It is trite to say that fossil fuels are the problem and big oil is the villain. The truth is that we are all villains for demanding and using fossil fuels. The way forward is becoming clearer. Transport need to be electrified with electricity generated by renewable sources. For the UK this means mainly wind power. On shore wind generation is now cost competitive and off shore wind approaching competitive with coal generation. Back up generation capacity will be needed and for a transition period combined cycle gas turbine looks the best bet. Longer term is less clear but wave or nuclear look good possibilities.

A more uncertain prospect is fusion power. Essentially this means a sun on the earth. A massive international program is based on ITER, a prototype facility in the south of France where almost all technically advanced counties have pooled their resources. The objective of ITER is to produce more power than is consumed in making it work. ITER is massive, over 70m high and costing many billions. There is some scepticism about the prospects for fusion power; the joke is that fusion power is 30 years away and always will be. This reflects the difficulty of retaining and controlling a plasma at a temperature of many millions of degrees. It is an encouraging sign that a few private companies have entered the field.

The more down-to-earth problem is that liquid fuels such as petrol or kerosene are excellent sources of concentrated energy. In contrast batteries are fairly heavy per unit of energy supplied. While there are small gains to be made in battery technology there is no great step change improvement in sight.  Research is continuing at a furious rate and there are some interesting possibilities .

 I find it interesting that electricity is now taken seriously for aviation. Already small electric aircraft are available. For commercial aircraft the way forward being explored is the hybrid where a gas turbine generates electricity which is then user to power electric thrusters. This relies on the gas turbine being small and running efficiently at constant speed while batteries supplement during take off and climb.

For larger aircraft ( wide bodied ) there is no substitute for liquid fuel. The hope here is for fuels made from renewable sources.. The technical difficulty is that while regenerative braking helps recharge car batteries there is no equivalent for aircraft. As I say above the general plan is to use an onboard turbo generator working efficiently at constant output using batteries to the full on climb out and recharging as the  aircraft descends. This would only be practicable for fairly small aircraft , say 50-100 seats.

Merrymeet

It isn’t often that the whole family can meet up. My son and family are in N Yorkshire while my eldest daughter lives in Guildford about 300 miles away. It is perhaps fortunate that we are roughly equidistant from the two. Our youngest daughter lives in Birmingham which is quite close by. The two sisters are close and often exchange visits. My son Martin and his family have become deeply enmeshed in local activities so tend to be very busy. We did manage a family gathering last year but this year we have done something more ambitious.

We hired a “partyhouse” engagingly called Merrymeet in Derbyshire to accommodate all of us for a long weekend. This was particularly significant because Alison our eldest daughter has decided to take Debajit as a partner. He has two sons from his first marriage and this was our first opportunity to meet them. The oldest boy, Rajiv, is fresh from extraordinary A level results obtaining 4 A star grades. He goes up to Cambridge to read economics this autumn. The younger boy, Ronnie, is 15 and embarking on his GCSE year. Although they are a little older than our grandchildren,( Ellie is 15 soon with the rest ranging down to 7), they had no problem joining both with our grandchildren as well as the adults.

Merrymeet was situated just on the southern edge of the Peak National Park at Back o’the Brook near Waterhouses. It was a fairly remote location approached by narrow single track lanes one of which crossed a ford. Designed to accommodate 16 of us it had a large lounge, dining toom with a massive table, six bedrooms and a massive games room. This latter was the initial attraction for the kids with table tennis, mini billiards, table football and not forgetting the X box. The games were so attractive that the older children were up until past 3 in the morning at the end of our first day.

The dining table was massive enabling all to join together for our evening meal. Essentially Annette and the girls had catered for casual breakfast and lunch. Each day we joined together for an evening meal. Frances provided pizza slices and trimmings one evening, Annette several flans another, while Martin prepared a massive chili on another. When he left to go to university Martin had no cooking knowledge at all but now he is quite adept in the kitchen. As he reminded me this is very much part of being a modern man.

One afternoon we had hired a “nerf gun” experience. Essentially this was light hearted team combat using “nerf” guns which fired a largely foam plastic bullet. This came with an organiser who set things up and suggested various games. These were team versus team. I organised the teams by the simple expedient of lining the participants up in height order and allocating alternate ones to the two teams. The location was a steep sloping lawn at the rear of the property which had blow up obstacles including a blow up tank. I sat on the side lines and watched but I admired Frances and Matt for joining in with the kids. The activity was chosen so that the youngest, Ben, could join in which he did with gusto.

Various groups went on various expeditions. There was a walk to nearby Grindon and then a long group walk following a guide book recommended route.. This was partly cross country along steep paths. I just did the portion on the paved part. Grindon is significant as some of my distant ancestors lived there and also at nearby Ford. We found some references to Hall’s in Grindon church but the gravestones of the period ( 16^th and 17^th centuries ) are too worn to be decipherable. We have earlier tracked some through parish records. More fruitful was  Fradswell ( a village in North Staffordshire ) where my ancestors lived until the mid 19^th century

Other visits were to Ilam with its National Trust parkland and gardens. The house at Ilam is a Youth Hostel and not open to the public. It does have an excellent tearoom.

Unfortunately Rajiv had to leave early to attend a combined cadet force dinner which I gather had represented a big interest outside school. I had always been rather cynical about these groups but Alex has found Whitby Air Cadets interesting. He plays in the band and has had several opportunities for flying experience.
Our group photo is below. My son Martin is 8 from left and daughters Frances and Alison are extreme right

Dinosaurs, units

When I was young dinosaurs hardly figured in history or in  my imagination. Things have changed so much that children seem fascinated by them. In the past 20-30 years there has been a plethora of dinosaur themed film and TV. The first Jurassic Park film and a TV series devoted to them not to mention other film and TV works. The original Jurassic Park film, by far the best in my opinion, was based on the idea that dinosaur DNA was preserved and used to recreate some dinosaur species who lived within a giant park on an island. Although plenty of hokum in a dino chasing humans plot the scenes of these pre historic creatures roaming around were truly breath-taking.

It isn’t only in popular media that dinosaurs have become important but many , many species have now been identified by science. These identifications are based on fossil remains.  A minute proportion have died in suitable conditions that their bones have become turned into stone. An even smaller number have had other tissue similarly preserved. Of some 1500 dinosaur species thought to have existed nearly a 1000 have been identified. It must be emphasised that we are looking a tiny percentage fossilised of whom only a small proportion have been found.

It appears that dinosaurs emerged after a great mass extinction about 250 million years ago. They emerged then because their predators, crocodile type creatures were nearly wiped out.  They then evolved through the Triassic and Jurassic ages until 66 million years ago. At that time an asteroid struck the earth in modern day Mexico. This was so massive that the blast, dust and climate change wiped out almost all life but some small feathered dinosaurs survived and evolved into birds we see today. Generically large meat eating birds are called raptors.

While all the publicity has been about gigantic animals such as brontosaurus, triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex in fact there were many types of dinosaur; many small and medium sized. Some were definitely feathered and some are thought to be flying species. They were an egg laying species so not unlike some modern reptiles. All of the ground dwelling types are thought to be wiped out in the asteroid impact.

Much about dinosaurs is still controversial. We guess they were scaly but maybe they were feathered. Generally soft tissue is not  fossilised and it only fairly recently that feathers have been on some species.

DNA is not preserved in fossils. The original premise of Jurassic park is that some is preserved in an insect itself trapped in amber. It may be possible to recreate some much more modern animals that have disappeared only recently. An example is the woolly mammoth . Samples have been found trapped in ice about 10,000 years old. It may be possible to extract viable DNA from these corpses and scientists are trying to do just that. It would be necessary for a modern day elephant to carry any potential mammoth to birth. There has been some effort to reconstruct a dinosaur like DNA from modern animals

In principle all cells carry the full DNA coding of the animal. DNA, which is a gigantic molecule, will undoubtedly have been broken up but reconstituting DNA from small parts is a known technology.

I’ve been slightly puzzled by the interest shown by small children. Part of the attraction is the truly gigantic scale of some dinosaurs. Sauropods could be 130 feet long and 60 feet high ( roughly 40x20m ) As mentioned above while these are more readily found as large fossils are more readily discovered some dinosaurs were small down to 18 inches ( 0.5m ) in length. The typical body type has big rear legs and small front ones while most seem to had frills, horns or spikes. They were not necessarily meat eaters

Units

I don’t whether to laugh or cry on the news that new minister Jacob Rees-Mogg has ordered his civil servants to use imperial units. Unconsciously it gives away his fierce Brexit stance. It is not motivated by thoughts of a new economic future but rather nostalgia for a lost era.

Yes the metric system was a product of the French revolution but it is now almost universal. That needs some qualification. Only American engineers still decreasingly use non metric units. When I was a schoolboy I was taught in a strange hotch-potch. It was common in science then to use the cgs system ( Centimetre-gram-second ) or its close cousin the mks system ( metre-kilogram- second ). There were peculiar units such as dyne for force and angstrom for small distances.. Essentially you had to remember what these were.

In the late 60’s a more coherent SI ( systeme international) ( yes in French , Jacob ) was introduced into science and is now universal.  When I became a research student my supervisor insisted I use SI units. I am grateful even though it was a slightly painful transition. For example surface tension, with which I was much concerned, became millijoules per square metre rather than the rather bizarre dynes per centimetre I had used until then. In this case the transition was easy because the numerical value is the same. One slight difficulty is that units can be very small, thus a joule is a very small unit of energy so kJ and MJ fit more commercial purposes.

SI introduced new units all based on the names of famous scientists. Thus the new unit of force was the Newton with all the usual centi, milli etc prefixes.  Over the past years we have become used to temperatures in degrees Celcious( this is centigrade renamed, numbers stay the same ). Again America is the holdout still using Fahrenheit along with some Caribbean counties. It is surprising that while many imperial units are in common use today they often have SI underpinnings thus the pound is 454 grams, and a 3x2 wood section is really 75x50mm. It is surprising how the units we are used to as children stay with us for life. Nearly 50 years after decimalisation when I picked up a fallen 5p coin I exclaimed there is sixpence. This isn’t even a correct conversion as the 2.5p coin disappeared years ago.