Heard on the radio this morning, Radio 4 that is :) (if I heard correct) the pollution equates to around 450 thousand vehicles over one year of driving.
There is a huge plume of black smoke over California apparently and people are urged to stay indoors and not to exercise outdoors.

Where on earth did they come up with the figure 450 thousand vehicles? Do they mean trucks, cars, or motorcycles? So I did a quick sear using these terms radio4 pollution 450000 and low and behold the figure 450000 appears quite a lot over a whole heap of subjects, possibly some statisticians favourite number.

I doubt we shall see the true figure. For example, if it rains heavily the pollution is removed from the air, unlike 450000 vehicles used daily for a year where the pollution is constant.

I also heard that to prevent fires happening and causing as much damage in the future, huge swathes of trees need to be removed from around properties?

They just don't get it do they. The problem is not the trees, it is the human encroachment. That Old song, It never rains in California rings true here, but why? Because these stupid people have removed the forests from the coastlines which cause it to rain by removing the thermal barrier along the coast that lowers air pressure sufficiently to allow moisture from the ocean to cross on to the land!

Remove the trees? Right, does history tell these morons anything? What happens now the fires have ravaged the lands? More trees and scrub will establish itself over the next few years and more fires will happen more frequently eventually causing the soils precious remaining organic material to be dedicated and blown away in the wind. REMEMBER THE AMERICAN DUST BOWEL? [img]http://www.learningfromlyrics.org/dustbo8%5b1%5d.jpg[/img]

The magnificent Giant Californian Redwoods stand as witness to the logic of maintaining coastal forest, These ancient trees when left alone do not burn down, but continue to grow spectacularly, year in year out. Moisture is observed to cross over onto the land here and provides the huge volumes of water these wonders of nature require.

Can we not learn how to live in harmony with nature? Australia has completely devastated its natural living resources. Slash and burn has been long admired as land management by the Aborigines and adopted by the sheep farmers. The end result is always the same, massive deserts growing now at rates we could never have anticipated in the past. But we should have been able to anticipate them! There are many fossils of plant eating creatures found in deserts. What happened to the lands?

They did exactly the same as stupid humans are doing now but much slower. They removed the vegetation from the coastlines and then the rains stopped just as they are stopping all over the world right now! Once the rains no longer fall on the inland forests they become tinder dry! Sound familiar yet? After many fires the soil becomes so poor the wind blows away the remaining organic matter until all that is left is dust and sand, eventually the dust is all blown away into the ocean or on our car windscreens here in the UK and the rest of Europe until all that remains are the larger particles SAND!

Deserts can be both hot and cold. Hot deserts heat up the air around them to scorching temperatures this causes thermals to rise and more air to be sucked in to replace it. This is known as the Hadley Cell. Again it is a density flow system using gas rather than fluids but the principles are exactly the same. This causes air to be recycled within the desert rather than cooling cloud cover blocking out the suns energy. This is the real source of global warming. The deserts are the cylinder heads of this vehicle to our own extinction and just like the dinosaurs our own bones will be buried in the sands just like those found in the Atacama desert, one of the driest places on earth. http://www.extremescience.com/images/mumia2.jpg

I was in Spain a while back, it rained every night, but only once in the day. The weather was very warm and dry, yet at night rain came in from the ocean and covered an amazing forested area that runs right up to the coast stretching for more than 25 miles of the most amazing picturesque landscapes, this was as far as we travelled miles. The area was East of Loret da Mar, Costa Brava, along the coastal road. Friends were staying West about 40 –45 miles from us at the same time. While it didn’t rain at all for them, they had clear blue cloudless skies and scorched landscape and very little precious tree cover close to the coast in Reus, a tightly packed heavily built up area with lots of buildings, tarmac and concrete, (Manufactured deserts)

In deserts when it does rain it often rains hard as a rapid cooling effect takes place on the hot air sucking in huge volumes of moisture which cools rapidly and delivers vast quantities of rain rapidly. The ground is not able to deal with deluges of this nature as the capacity of the organic material in the soil to hold onto the water has long since gone. The results are devastating flash floods and sure enough this had happened near where our friends were staying, there was much evidence of destruction, cars washed over the edges of roads etc. But while our friends stayed there not a drop of rain fell in this area when a week before it was pelted with torrential rain. The same has happened in many places throughout the world.

Reducing emissions is child splay compared to the real task at hand if we are even to begin slowing down global warming we must act now and reclaim desert coastal areas by planting billions of trees along the edges of the worlds deserts. To do this we need water and organic material in order to create a fertile crust above the deep sands, otherwise irrigation water will simply evaporate from the surface leaving behind a crust of salt or sink below the surface and cause the ground water to become salty. Replacing organic material in the soil can be done by using the excess human and animal bodily waste in sewage and waste water, which is currently dumped in rivers and oceans throughout the world, or processed expensively where the effluent is still released into the oceans and rivers and the solids are disposed of in landfill.

We currently have a network of huge crude oil carrying ships, VLCC’s and ULCC’s that use sea water as ballast in order to lower their massive structures back into the water after delivering massive cargoes of crude oil to the developed and developing countries. It would be so simple to fill these ships with a cargo of humanure and animal manure enriched water full of essential fats and organic materials to replenish the lost material from the desert sands. And more to the point will eliminate the need to treat this sewage problem other than the removal of unwanted plastics etc and reduce our phenomenal water rate bills into the bargain, while eradicating pollution at a stroke.

Ironically these crude carriers are returning to deserts in North and South Africa and the Middle East where the inherent lack of water prevents reforesting huge areas. Even so many of these countries are using their own wastewater to reforest and reclaim deserts by growing trees in soils irrigated with the waste water from populated areas.

Once sufficient coastal areas have been covered in trees, the thermal barrier that is in place at the moment will be effectively gone. Moisture from the ocean can now cross onto the land and the tree cover vastly reduces the surface temperature of the land enabling moisture to be milked from the sky by the low pressures that develop from irrigation and forestry.

If we only realised now that the deserts represent some of the biggest challenges for humanity and in fact our own salvation, we might begin to address this impending Armageddon we have unleashed upon this fragile world and all its inhabitants.

I have written a book about this whole scenario and require a publisher in order to progress it to the minds of people that can change policy and put this amazingly simple project into practice for the benefit of everyone.

Andrew K Fletcher