IN A TIME OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT...TELLING THE TRUTH BECOMES A REVOLUTIONARY ACT

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone." John Maynard Keynes

" Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration" Abraham Lincoln

Thursday, March 7, 2013

...THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT... [and] THOUGHTS FROM M.I.T.

        ...THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT...

The staff of the Alaska Progressive Review, along with the populations of the majority of the countries of the World who have access to truthful news information mourn the passing from cancer Tuesday of President-elect Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela. This popular thrice elected left-leaning/progressive president was one of those rare, not just political leaders, but human beings, who had the courage to call things as he saw them, speaking what many people want to, but are afraid to say. Regardless of the consequences to his personal safety and well-being.  Pay special attention to the first five minutes of this webcast from his famous 2006 speech at the UN, the day after US President George Bush appeared.
 
He was briefly deposed for a few hours in a US-supported right-wing coup in 2002, but popular support from the military and general populace prevailed. The corporate/oligarchic media in this country, and even his own (yes, they have always had and still do have freedom of the press in Venezuela), continually demonised his actions, policies, and even his personal appearance and background. His crimes? Using the vast oil-wealth of Venezuela, which is developed/maintained by a nationalised company, to help better the living conditions of the poor majority of his country, and helping to unify South America and move it away from US/multi-national corporate domination. He and his followers and the people of Venezuela acheived remarkable success in these aims during his political career from 1998-2012.
                                          [Hugo Chavez and his two daughters, 2008]
 
The following article by the group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) documents the lies and distortions made by corporate media in this and other countries. When I took a russian language course my freshman year at the Univ. of Calif./Davis in 1982-83, my professor, who had studied in the USSR in the 1970s, said many people he met had a saying about their two official govt. news sources Pravda (Truth!) and Izvestia (News). The saying was "Pravda ne Pravda y Izvestia ne Izvestia," or roughly translated, there is no truth in Truth and no news in News. We think that's abundantly clear now for the US corporate media, in fact there are many interesting parallels between what is happening with and within the US, and what was happening in the old Soviet Union between 1980-85. But that's a subject for another time.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/03/06-12

Published on Wednesday, March 6, 2013 by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

In Death as in Life, Chávez Target of Media Scorn

by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

Venezuela's left-wing populist president Hugo Chávez died on Tuesday, March 5, after a two-year battle with cancer. If world leaders were judged by the sheer volume of corporate media vitriol and misinformation about their policies, Chávez would be in a class of his own.

Shortly after Chávez won his first election in 1998, the U.S. government deemed him a threat to U.S. interests--an image U.S. media eagerly played up. When a coup engineered by Venezuelan business and media elites removed Chávez from power, many leading U.S outlets praised the move (Extra!, 6/02). The New York Times (4/13/02), calling it a "resignation," declared that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator." The Chicago Tribune (4/14/02) cheered the removal of a leader who had been "praising Osama bin Laden"--an absurdly false charge.
 

But that kind of reckless rhetoric was evidently permissible in media discussions about Chávez. Seven years later, CNN (1/15/09) hosted a discussion of Chávez with Democratic strategist Doug Schoen, where he and host John Roberts discussed whether or not Chávez was worse than Osama bin Laden. As Schoen put it, "He's given Al-Qaeda and Hamas an open invitation to come to Caracas."
There were almost no limits to overheated media rhetoric about Chávez.


There were almost no limits to overheated media rhetoric about Chávez. In a single news article, Newsweek (11/2/09) managed to compare him to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. (Chávez had built a movie studio, which is the sort of thing dictators apparently do.) ABC (World News, 10/7/12) called him a "fierce enemy of the United States," the Washington Post (10/16/06) an “autocratic demagogue." Fox News (12/5/05) said that his government was "really Communism"--despite the fact he was repeatedly returned to office in internationally certified elections (Extra!, 11-12/06) that Jimmy Carter deemed "the best in the world" (Guardian, 10/3/12).
 
Apart from the overheated claims about terrorism and his growing military threat to the region (FAIR Blog, 4/1/07), media often tried to make a simpler case: Chávez wasn't good for Venezuelans. The supposed economic ruin in Venezuela was a staple of the coverage. The Washington Post editorial page (1/5/13) complained of "the economic pain caused by Mr. Chávez," the man who has "wrecked their once-prosperous country." And a recent New York Times piece (12/13/12) tallied some of the hassles of daily life, declaring that such frustrations are typical in Venezuela, for rich and poor alike, and yet President Hugo Chávez has managed to stay in office for nearly 14 years, winning over a significant majority of the public with his outsize personality, his free-spending of state resources and his ability to convince Venezuelans that the Socialist revolution he envisions will make their lives better.
 
Of course, Venezuelans might feel that Chávez already had improved their lives (FAIR Blog, 12/13/12), with poverty cut in half, increased availability of food and healthcare, expanded educational opportunities and a real effort to build grassroots democratic institutions. (For more of this, read Greg Grandin's piece in the Nation--3/5/13.)
 
Those facts of Venezuelan life were not entirely unacknowledged by U.S. media. But these policies, reflecting new national priorities about who should benefit from the country's oil wealth, were treated as an unscrupulous ploy of Chávez's to curry favor with the poor. As the Washington Post (2/24/13) sneered, Chávez won "unconditional support from the poverty-stricken masses" by "doling out jobs to supporters and showering the poor with gifts." NPR's All Things Considered (3/5/13) told listeners that "millions of Venezuelans loved him because he showered the poor with social programs."
 
Buying the support of your own citizens is one thing; harboring negative feelings about the United States is something else entirely. As CBS Evening News (1/18/13) recently put it, "Chávez has made a career out of bashing the United States." But one wonders how friendly any U.S. political leaders would be toward a government that had supported their overthrow.


Though this is often treated as another Chávez conspiracy theory--"A central ideological pillar of Chávez's rule over 14 years has been to oppose Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington, which he accuses of trying to destabilize his government," the Washington Post (1/10/13) reported--the record of U.S. support for the coup leaders is clear.The front page of Time.com
As a State Department report (FAIR Blog, 1/11/13) acknowledged, various U.S. agencies had "provided training, institution building and other support to individuals and organizations understood to be actively involved in the brief ouster of the Chávez government." The Bush administration declared its support for the short-lived coup regime, saying Chávez was "responsible for his fate" (Guardian, 4/21/09).
 

Of course, as with any country, there are aspects of Chávez's government that could be criticized. U.S. media attention to Venezuela's flaws, however, was obviously in service to an official agenda--as documented by FAIR's study (Extra!, 2/09) of editorials on human rights, which showed Venezuela getting much harsher criticism than the violent repression of the opposition in U.S.-allied Colombia.
 

In reporting Chávez's death, little had changed. "Venezuela Bully Chávez Is Dead," read the New York Post's front page (3/6/13); "Death of a Demogogue" was on Time's home page (3/6/13). CNN host Anderson Cooper (3/5/13) declared it was "the death of a world leader who made America see red, as in Fidel Castro red, Venezuela's socialist president, Hugo Chávez."
 
"The words 'Venezuelan strongman' so often preceded his name, and for good reason," declared NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams (3/5/13); on ABC World News (3/5/12), viewers were told that "many Americans viewed him as a dictator." That would be especially true if those Americans consumed corporate media.
 
The fact that U.S. elite interests are an overarching concern is not exactly hidden. Many reports on Chávez's passing were quick to note the country's oil wealth. NBC's Williams asserted, "All this matters a lot to the U.S., since Venezuela sits on top of a lot of oil and that's how this now gets interesting for the United States." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (3/5/13) concurred: "I mean, Venezuela is a serious country in the world stage. It is sitting on the world's largest proven oil reserves."
 
And CNN's Barbara Starr (3/5/13) reported: "You're going to see a lot of U.S. businesses keep a very close eye on this transition in Venezuela. They're going to want to know that their investments are secure and that this is a stable country to invest in." Those U.S. businesses would seem to include its media corporations.
© 2013 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
 
Another good article detailing Chavez' biography and legacy, written by a man who met and admired him, can be found here.
 
BBC Investigative reporter Gregory Palast put out a short article as well, on the Truthout site, here.

It leads off thus:

"As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a free download. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available."

In addition, we highly recommend you watch the movie film-maker Oliver Stone produced in 2010, "South of the Border" in which he meets and talks extensively with Hugo Chavez, and many of the other former and current prominent progressive politicians in South America, such as Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Nestor Kirchner (Argentina).
 
Hugo Chavez may be gone, but his words, deeds, and legacy will not soon be forgotten. He will go down in history as the first South American politician who was able to help unify that continent and forge a political and economic destiny independent from US/multinational corporate domination. Inspiring a new generation of politicians and activists on that and other continents. We can't help but think that the incredible stresses involved from this and the constant threats to his personal well-being he was under helped to hasten the progression of his demise. Rest in Peace Hugo!

                                               THOUGHTS FROM M.I.T.

We are proud to stand with Hugo Chavez in studying, admiring, and sharing the work of the prominent US and internationally-recognised MIT linguist and political analyst, Noam Chomsky.
 
And urge all to do likewise, as he writes compellingly but very analytically and in great detail. Describing how dangerous and destructive our current political and economic systems are to national and global health, which we have been saying here at the Alaska Progressive Review since our founding.
 
A recent article of his is no less informative. Coming from a source as eminent as this, the "elites", "ruling class", "corporatocracy/plutocracy", would be well to wake up from their-greed induced sociopathies before they destroy the ability of the planet to support "civilisation" as we know it, preceded by massive die-offs due to drought/flooding/wildfires and catastrophic sea level rises. Unless the vast majority of the people in the World are able to come together first and put an end to the excesses of our current political and economic system, successes in which so far have mainly been limited to parts of South America.
 

Noam Chomsky: Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?


Capitalism as it exists today is radically incompatible with democracy.


March 5, 2013 |
There is “capitalism” and then there is “really existing capitalism.”

The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks.

The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book “Digital Disconnect.”

“Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz.

Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey

The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will.

There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy – RECD for short – the question is effectively answered: They are radically incompatible.

It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive RECD and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. But could functioning democracy make a difference?

Let’s keep to the most critical immediate problem that civilization faces: environmental catastrophe. Policies and public attitudes diverge sharply, as is often the case under RECD. The nature of the gap is examined in several articles in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Researcher Kelly Sims Gallagher finds that “One hundred and nine countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power, and 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.”

It is not public opinion that drives American policy off the international spectrum. Quite the opposite. Opinion is much closer to the global norm than the U.S. government’s policies reflect, and much more supportive of actions needed to confront the likely environmental disaster predicted by an overwhelming scientific consensus – and one that’s not too far off; affecting the lives of our grandchildren, very likely.

As Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis report in Daedalus: “Huge majorities have favored steps by the federal government to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated when utilities produce electricity. In 2006, 86 percent of respondents favored requiring utilities, or encouraging them with tax breaks, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit. Also in that year, 87 percent favored tax breaks for utilities that produce more electricity from water, wind or sunlight [ These majorities were maintained between 2006 and 2010 and shrank somewhat after that.

The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy.

One current illustration of their concern is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” proposed to state legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth.

The ALEC Act mandates “balanced teaching” of climate science in K-12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.

Of course, all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking – a fine idea, no doubt, but it’s easy to think up far better examples than an issue that threatens our survival and has been selected because of its importance in terms of corporate profits.

Media reports commonly present a controversy between two sides on climate change.

One side consists of the overwhelming majority of scientists, the world’s major national academies of science, the professional science journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They agree that global warming is taking place, that there is a substantial human component, that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with severe social and economic effects. It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.

The other side consists of skeptics, including a few respected scientists who caution that much is unknown – which means that things might not be as bad as thought, or they might be worse.

Omitted from the contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who see the IPCC’s regular reports as much too conservative. And these scientists have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately.
[wildfires outside Moscow, Russia July, 2010 in their unprecedented summer drought/heat wave
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2011/04/alaska-fire-seasons.html]

The propaganda campaign has apparently had some effect on U.S. public opinion, which is more skeptical than the global norm. But the effect is not significant enough to satisfy the masters. That is presumably why sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the educational system, in an effort to counter the public’s dangerous tendency to pay attention to the conclusions of scientific research.

At the Republican National Committee’s Winter Meeting a few weeks ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that “We must stop being the stupid party ... We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.”

Within the RECD system it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences.
These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within RECD, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power.

The official doctrines suffer from a number of familiar “market inefficiencies,” among them the failure to take into account the effects on others in market transactions. The consequences of these “externalities” can be substantial. The current financial crisis is an illustration. It is partly traceable to the major banks and investment firms’ ignoring “systemic risk” – the possibility that the whole system would collapse – when they undertook risky transactions.

Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout.

In future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions – actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.

Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal.

The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2008/11/evo-si.html

The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction.

Thus Ecuador, with its large indigenous population, is seeking aid from the rich countries to allow it to keep its substantial oil reserves underground, where they should be.

Meanwhile the U.S. and Canada are seeking to burn fossil fuels, including the extremely dangerous Canadian tar sands, and to do so as quickly and fully as possible, while they hail the wonders of a century of (largely meaningless) energy independence without a side glance at what the world might look like after this extravagant commitment to self-destruction.

This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/06/open-veins-of-latin-america-latest.html
This is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict – unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of RECD.

(Noam Chomsky's new book is ``Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire. Conversations with David Barsamian.'' Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.)

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including Hegemony or Survival and Failed States. A professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, he is widely credited with having revolutionized modern linguistics. He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts
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Thursday, February 28, 2013

ARCTIC AMPLIFICATION IS SLOWING THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE JET STREAM

Very important research has just confirmed what the Alaska Progressive Review has been noticing, and been commenting on for some time. That extreme weather events are increasing across the globe, including here in Alaska. Many of which are being caused by changes in the jet stream leading to stronger, but slower-moving, and sometimes stationary, high pressure ridging episodes. Before we look at that though, we need to review some concepts, so that everyone understands exactly what is taking place. Because this is our future, scientifically confirmed.
 
First, what is Arctic Amplification? It refers to the fact that as the global atmospheric/oceanic system continues to warm due to the increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 and Methane from fossil fuel combustion, warming in the Arctic region is much greater than in lower latitudes. Due to changes in snow/ice cover extent and duration.

This is also occurring on the fringes of Antarctica, but because of it's much greater extent of ice/snow cover and high elevation, not as much in it's interior, so far.

Second, it's important to have a good understanding of how the global atmospheric circulation works. This little video is a model re-construction of an actual daily satellite composite of the western hemisphere, showing the different flow regimes, from the equatorial regions, to the higher latitudes.
http://serc.carleton.edu/eslabs/weather/3a.html

                                

Video courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Linked below as well, is a larger actual loop of infrared (IR) satellite images from the GOES east satellite, that sits over the equator and is one of two US satellites so configured, to remain over the same spot and provide continuous imagery 24/7, which is a primary tool for weather forecasting. Other countries have similar satellites focusing on their area of interest.
 
 
What are these showing us?

In a nutshell, the global atmospheric circulation is driven by the large-scale temperature differences between the equatorial and polar regions. Which exist because the sun is more directly overhead throughout the year in the tropical and subtropical regions, heating the continents and oceans much more than further toward the poles. Of course the fact that the Earth "wobbles" 23.5 degrees from the vertical on it's axis as it circles the sun drives the seasons, as portions of the globe are either tilted toward or away from the sun. But even with that, the overall solar energy inputs to the regions within 30 degrees either side of the equator are much greater than those further north or south. In fact, at our latitude here in Anchorage, AK (61N), from about early November, until roughly early February, more heat is lost through infrared radiation to space, than gained from the sun. Because of the low solar angles then.
 
On a stationary globe, what would end up existing, with the strong temperature gradients from the tropics to the poles, would be a giant circulation of rising air (because of the strong surface heating) over the tropics, with descending air in the polar regions. But because of the Earth's rotation, this simple circulation pattern breaks down roughly at latitudes between 20-35 N or S. And what we end up with is what you see in the image below, or in the satellite loops.
File:Earth Global Circulation.jpg
The Mid-Latitude cell on the above image corresponds to the area of the "jet stream", where high and low pressure systems meander around the globe, in a westerly overall direction (aided by the Earth's rotation), but with significant buckling toward and away from equatorial regions. These jet stream winds are strongest generally between 8000-11000 metres, but in weather forecasting several different atmospheric levels are used to track the features in the "jet stream" that drive the weather in the middle and higher latitudes. Here in the northern hemisphere, jet stream flow from the north drives colder air south from the polar regions, and from the south, warm air north from the sub-tropics.
 
Well, what we have been noticing over the past 10-15 years especially (since your lead editor has been a professional operational meteorologist since 1986), is that jet stream flows over western North America (since that is where I have been working) from the south, associated with upper-level high pressure ridging, have been getting stronger and often more slowly moving. So if you are in an area stuck under a stronger, more persistent high pressure ridge for weeks, or months, then generally speaking, much warmer, drier weather will result. A primary example being the US midwestern heat/drought (which still continues) of the previous spring/summer.
 
But if you are in an area ahead of or behind one of these slowly-moving or stationary high pressure ridges, under then overall low-pressure troughing, cooler, wetter weather will result. And depending on the exact area and pattern configuration, very adverse weather with flooding/heavy rainfall, or in winter, heavy snowfall, can result.
 
An excellent example of this here in South-Central Alaska was our truly dreadful month of September 2012, this past year.
 
A month that brought us just slightly cooler-than normal temperatures, but heavy rainfall, nearly double the average monthly amount, here in Anchorage. Punctuated with four low pressure systems/frontal passages that brought strong winds, the worst being the damaging storm of 9/04. Because S-Central Alaska was stuck in a pattern where strong southerly jet flow prevailed between colder upper low pressure to the west, and the strong ridging over the BC/WA/OR coasts. This strong south flow historically has been focused further south on the average, bringing heavy SEP/OCT climatologically expected rains from low pressure systems to SE Alaska. The enhanced west coast ridging forced this pattern north at times directly into S-Central Alaska in Sept. 2012. SE Alaska did receive it's climatologically "normal" rains in Sept., but further south in coastal BC Canada, it was much drier than average.
This picture, above, was during one of the weaker September storms, when winds at this time were probably gusting to 110 kph (67 mph) or so. Below, the North Fork of Campbell Creek was flowing at least three times larger than usual, toward the end of the month, at the end of a dreary 3-day "atmospheric river" rain event.
I had to make sure our research assistant Kluane didn't try and cross the raging middle portion of the creek. Mattie knew better. The little foot bridge crossing the creek was partially washed away, but some helpful souls, who remain anonymous, rebuilt it even better and stronger than it was afterward. Thanks to you all, whoever you are!
 
Whilst we were engaged in our September to forget, here in South-Central Alaska, downstream, jet-stream-wise, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington had an unprecedented nearly rainless month! September usually marks the time of the first of the fall rains returning in northern California, while further north in OR/WA, rains typically increase, as the jet stream usually begins to strengthen and dip a little further south. Not in September 2012! In fact, whilst visiting family in Oregon in early October, I was struck by the dry, desolate conditions in the Willamette Valley. Smaller trees and shrubs, coated in dust, were wilting from the drought. Fall rains didn't begin until mid-October, even in Oregon. Why? Stronger than average, persistent (slowly-moving) high pressure ridging along the west coast extending up into southern British Columbia, Canada.

Below are a few other articles the Alaska Progressive Review has presented on our changing climate due to global warming, and the effects we are seeing, locally and globally. Feel free to peruse these if you have the time.
 
 

OK, researchers in Europe are now able to scientifically model/describe why these kind of weather patterns (and many that are much worse) are occurring. Here is an article presenting their information, with a few comments from us for clarification. 

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112791761/weather-extremes-due-to-atmosphere-wave-patterns-022613/

Wave Patterns In The Atmosphere Help Explain Weather Extremes
February 26, 2013

Image Credit: Photos.com
 
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

In recent years, the world has suffered from severe regional weather extremes such as the heat wave in the US in 2011 [and 2012, eds], or the one in Russia in 2010 that coincided with an unprecedented Pakistan flood. There is one common physical cause behind these individual events, according to a new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research [PIK].

The findings of the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS], suggest man made climate change repeatedly disturbs the patterns of atmospheric flow around the globe’s Northern hemisphere through a subtle resonance mechanism.

“An important part of the global air motion in the mid-latitudes of the Earth normally takes the form of waves wandering around the planet, oscillating between the tropical and the Arctic regions [the jet stream, eds]. So when they swing up, these waves suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the US, and when they swing down, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic,” explains Vladimir Petoukhov.

“What we found is that during several recent extreme weather events these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks. So instead of bringing in cool air after having brought warm air in before, the heat just stays. In fact, we observe a strong amplification of the usually weak, slowly moving component of these waves,” says Petoukhov.

The study shows time is critical to this process. Two or three days of 86-degree Fahrenheit weather are no problem, but twenty or more days lead to extreme heat stress. prolonged hot periods can result in a high death toll, forest fires, and dramatic harvest losses for the many ecosystems and cities not adapted to such temperatures.

Global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil-fuels is not uniform. In the Arctic, for example, the relative temperatures, amplified by the loss of snow and ice, is higher than on average [Arctic Amplification, eds] . As a result, the temperature difference between the Arctic and, for example, Europe is reduced, yet temperature differences are a main driver of air flow. It should be noted that continents warm and cool more readily than the oceans.

“These two factors are crucial for the mechanism we detected,” says Petoukhov. “They result in an unnatural pattern of the mid-latitude air flow, so that for extended periods the slow synoptic [the larger-scale "long-waves", eds] waves get trapped.”

To describe the wave motions in the extra-tropical atmosphere and show under what conditions those waves can grind to a halt and become amplified, the team developed equations which were then tested using daily standard weather data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). The trapping and strong amplification of particular waves – like “wave seven” (which has seven troughs and crests spanning the globe) – was observed during recent periods of major weather extremes. The data collected by the researchers show an increase in the occurrence of these specific atmospheric patterns, which is statistically significant at the 90-percent confidence level.
[Jet stream flow depicted at 500 millibars, roughly 5000-6000 metres, the flow is parallel to these contours. These contours are lines of equal height, where the pressure equals 500 millibars, which is a function of temperature. The higher the heights, the warmer overall the airmass is, e.g., the 582 contour = 5820 metres. Note "long-wave" larger ridges offshore of western North America and the UK/France/Spain. "Short-wave" ridges and troughs within these larger scale features are smaller-scale disturbances which move through these "long-waves", which this research shows now are slowing and becoming more persistent. eds.]

“Our dynamical analysis helps to explain the increasing number of novel weather extremes. It complements previous research that already linked such phenomena to climate change, but did not yet identify a mechanism behind it,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of PIK. “This is quite a breakthrough, even though things are not at all simple – the suggested physical process increases the probability of weather extremes, but additional factors certainly play a role as well, including natural variability.”

The project spans a 32-year period, which provides a good indication of the mechanism involved, yet is too short for definite conclusions.

The study significantly advances the understanding of the relation between weather extremes and man made climate change, however, surprising the scientists with how far outside past experience some of the recent extremes have been. The emergence of extraordinary weather is not just a linear response to the mean warming trend, the study shows, suggesting the proposed mechanism could explain that.

So there you have it. Researchers are now able to scientifically describe not just how the global climate system is changing due to the increased heat from higher levels of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, but the actual mechanisms that are acting to transport and re-distribute this increasing warmth.
Meanwhile, as the following article attests,

Arctic Sea Ice is now rapidly collapsing, and we here at the APR expect to see summer ice-free conditions within 5-8 years. Which will mean even further warming in the Arctic, reducing the tropical-polar temperature gradients ever more. Leading to more (and likely stronger) scenarios such as the previous article, and ours we've presented, have described.

Scientists Confirm: Arctic Sea Ice 'Collapse' at Our Door

Warming planet and new evidence portend future of ice-free Arctic

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer
 
The Arctic Sea is experiencing rapid ice loss at a pace so fast that the area will soon be ice-free in warmer months, scientists confirmed in a report this week—showing a collapse in total sea ice volume to one fifth of itArctic sea ice volume in 1000s of cubic kilometers (via Robinson)s level in 1980.
 
The alarming rate of melting was measured by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite, which uses new technology to measure the thickness of the sea ice in addition to how much of the region is covered.

While ice thickness is more difficult to see with the naked eye, its decline in volume is a harbinger of faster and more alarming ice loss, the scientists urged.

"Not only is the area getting smaller, but also its thickness is decreasing and making the ice more vulnerable to more rapid declines in the future," Christian Haas, a geophysicist at York University in Canada, told NBC News.
 
The Arctic sea already hit record lows in 2012 with the lowest amount of ice on record, covering only half the average area covered between 1979 and 2012.

The newly released data confirms earlier reports—which included data from NASA's ICESat satellite between 2003 to 2008—that the Arctic, which normally maintains vast amounts of ice throughout the year, may soon be ice-free during warmer months. Another team of scientists came to the same conclusion in September using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center.

"As the satellite measurements show that not only the area decreases but also its thickness, it is actually becoming more likely that the ice will disappear sooner rather than later," Haas told NBC News.

Researchers published the study online in Geophysical Research Letters. "Other people had argued that 75 to 80 percent ice volume loss was too aggressive," said co-author Axel Schweiger in a press release. "What this new paper shows is that our ice loss estimates may have been too conservative, and that the recent decline is possibly more rapid."
 
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), commented on the new findings in a press release:
Arctic sea ice volume has declined by 36 per cent in the autumn and 9 per cent in the winter between 2003 and 2012, a UK-led team of scientists has discovered….

The findings confirm the continuing decline in Arctic sea-ice volume simulated by the Pan-Arctic Ice-Ocean Modelling & Assimilation System (PIOMAS), which estimates the volume of Arctic sea ice and had been checked using earlier submarine, mooring, and satellite observations until 2008.
BBC News adds more details:
The data gathered so far by Cryosat were compared with information compiled by the US space agency's (Nasa) Icesat spacecraft in the mid-2000s.

For autumn (October/November), the analysis found the Icesat years from 2003 to 2008 to have recorded an average volume of 11,900 cubic km.

But from 2010 to 2012, this average had dropped to 7,600 cu km - a decline of 4,300 cu km - as observed by Cryosat.

For winter (February/March), the 2003 to 2008 period saw an average of 16,300 cu km, dropping to 14,800 cu km between 2010 and 2012 - a difference of 1,500 cu km.

The smaller relative decline in winter volume highlights an interesting "negative feedback".
New record low Arctic sea ice extent, reached in September 2012, compared to the average summer minimum extent for the last 30 years in yellow. Source: NASA Monthly sea ice volume anomalies from 1979 to the present (Axel Schweiger / UW)

Of additional great concern, described in the article below,
is the fact that as the Arctic continues to warm, permafrost melting will release vast amounts of methane and CO2 that are currently locked up in the frozen subsurface layers. Which will be a "positive feedback" mechanism in the coming decades, producing even greater warming. And very likely, much greater melting of glacial ice in Greenland and Antarctica, producing rapid sea level rises.

This future scenario, which would eventually lead to great chaos and possibly the collapse of what we like to think of as "civilisation", as seaports are drowned, and the global transport of food/energy/industrial outputs ends, does not have to occur.
 
As the links below describe, alternative energy research and developments in being able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere are occurring.


What is needed is a crash-program to massively fund and develop on a global scale systems like these. Which would take just a fraction of what the US spends on it's "defense" budget yearly. The choice is ours.
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Thursday, February 14, 2013

WHAT WE NEED


The article linked to above, describes the declining moose population in Minnesota due to global warming and habitat destruction from development. We love our moose here, as they are a regular part of our daily existence, sometimes at our doors, much less on the trails. Kluane is still learning to restrain himself, but is getting better about going after them, the last several months. In all my encounters with them where I was able to talk quietly to them and wait, far enough away so they wouldn't charge, they always slowly left, after I asked them for permission to pass. I feel sorry for those Minnesota moose, they'll have to trickle north into Canada. We are fortunate here in Alaska to have nature and real wilderness as a part of our daily existence. And researchers in Japan, as reported in the article below, from Outside magazine, are actually scientifically quantifying the benefits of spending time and interacting in natural settings. And they're findings match what we've always know here at the APR. Time in nature is therapy, and the best thing for us. In all our travels and places we've lived, we've always found places nearby that restored and soothed us. And no matter where you live, you can always find some place. And if we are to try and maintain a healthy and sustainable planet for current and future generations, more people need to re-connect with their environment. So give this article a read, it's really interesting and enlightening. And reassuring to us, since we've always felt this way. Illustrated with some of our favourite areas we've been in over the past few years.

http://www.outsideonline.com/fitness/wellness/Take-Two-Hours-of-Pine-Forest-and-Call-Me-in-the-Morning.html?page=all
 
Take Two Hours of Pine Forest and Call Me in the Morning
       
These days, screen-addicted Americans are more stressed out and distracted than ever. And nope, there’s no app for that. But there is a radically simple remedy: get outside. Florence Williams travels to the deep woods of Japan, where researchers are backing up the surprising theory that nature can lower your blood pressure, fight off depression, beat back stress—and even prevent cancer.
By:

Photo: Michael Turek/Getty Images

I was supposed to be listening to the cicadas and the sound of a flowing creek when a Mitsubishi van rumbled across a small steel bridge just downstream. It was probably depositing campers at a nearby tent village, where kids were running around with their fishing poles and pink bed pillows. This was nature, Japan style. I was in Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park, a 75-minute train ride northwest of Tokyo, with half a dozen other hikers out for a dose of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. The Japanese go crazy for this practice, which is standard preventive medicine here. It essentially involves hanging out in the woods. It’s not about wilderness; it’s about the nature-civilization hybrid the Japanese have cultivated for thousands of years. You stroll a little, maybe write a haiku, crack open a spicebush twig and inhale its woodsy, sassy scent.

“People come out from the city and literally shower in the greenery,” our guide Kunio explained. “This way they are able to become relaxed.” To help us along, Kunio—a volunteer ranger—had us standing still on a hillside, facing the creek, with our arms at our sides. I glanced around. We looked like earthlings transfixed by the light of the beamship. Or extras in a magical-kingdom movie. Kunio could have been one of the seven dwarves. Elfin, with noticeably large ears, he told us to breathe in for a count of seven, hold for five, release. “Concentrate on your belly,” he said.

We needed this. Most of us were urban desk jockeys, including Tokyo businessman Ito Tatsuya, 41, standing next to me. Like many Japanese day hikers, he was carrying an inordinate amount of gear, much of it dangling from his belt: a cell phone, a camera, a water bottle, and a set of keys. The Japanese would make great Boy Scouts, which is probably why they make such fervent office workers, logging longer hours than almost anyone else in the developed world. They’ve even coined a term, karoshi, meaning death by overwork. Since he began lollygagging in the woods and picnicking on octopus, Ito’s shoulders seemed to be unclenching by the minute.

“When I’m out here, I don’t think about things,” he said.

“What’s the Japanese word for stress?” I asked.
“Stress,” he said.

WITH THE LARGEST CONCENTRATION of broad-leafed evergreens in Japan, mountainous Chichibu-Tama-Kai is an ideal place to put into practice the newest principles of wellness science. In a grove of rod-straight Japanese red pine, Kunio pulled a thermos from his massive daypack and served us some mountain-grown, bark-flavored wasabi-root tea. The idea with shinrin-yoku, a term coined by the government in 1982 but inspired by ancient Shinto and Buddhist practices, is to let nature enter your body through all five senses, and this was the taste part. I stretched out across the top of a cool, mossy boulder. A duck quacked. I was feeling pretty mellow, and tests would soon validate this: between the beginning and the end of the two-hour hike, my blood pressure had dropped a couple of points. Ito’s had dropped even more.
[Outer Point, Douglas Island, near Juneau, Alaska]
We knew this because we were on one of Japan’s 48 official Forest Therapy trails, designated for shinrin-yoku by Japan’s Forestry Agency. In an effort to benefit the Japanese and find nonextractive ways to use forests, which cover 67 percent of the country’s landmass, the government has funded about $4 million in forest-bathing research since 2004. It intends to designate a total of 100 Forest Therapy sites within 10 years. Visitors here are routinely hauled off to a cabin where rangers measure their blood pressure, part of an effort to provide ever more data to support the project.

The Japanese have good reason to require unwinding: In addition to those long workdays, pressure and competition for schools and jobs have helped Japan achieve the third-highest suicide rate in the developed world (after South Korea and Hungary). Ten percent of the country’s 128 million residents live in greater Tokyo, where rush hour is so crowded that white-gloved workers shove people onto Metro trains, leading to another coinage, tsukin-jigoku—commuter hell. On top of all that, the small island nation trembles and yaws with more than 1,500 earthquakes a year. The tsunami that hit in 2011 killed 20,000 people, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant suffered a triple meltdown, and now some of the country’s prized rice has radioactive cesium in it.
[Coast Range, near Lincoln City, Oregon]

So it makes sense that Japan’s scientists are in the vanguard of knowing how green spaces soothe the body and brain. While a small but impressive shelf of psychological research in recent decades suggests that spending time in nature improves cognition, relieves anxiety and depression, and even boosts empathy, scientists in Japan are measuring what’s actually happening to our cells and neurons. Led by Yoshifumi Miyazaki from the University of Chiba and Qing Li from the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, they’re using field tests, hormone analysis, and new brain-imaging technology to uncover how the magic works on a molecular level. Once we know that, it’s news we can use.

“The Japanese work is essential, a Rosetta stone,” says Alan C. Logan, co-author of the recent book Your Brain on Nature. “We have to validate the ideas scientifically, through stress physiology, or we’re still stuck at Walden Pond.” Americans have often relegated nature to the romantic realm of Thoreau and Abbey. Viewing it as medicine is still largely foreign. “Studying the impact of the natural world on the brain is actually a scandalously new idea,” says Richard Louv, author of the 2008 bestseller Last Child in the Woods—the book that minted the term nature deficit disorder—and The Nature Principle, his 2010 follow-up about adults. “It should’ve been studied 30 to 50 years ago.”
[Blue Mountains NP, New South Wales, Australia]

But the Japanese evidence is appearing at a good time. Books like Louv’s, combined with an explosion in new digital distractions and malaises, are helping to define a cultural moment, what might be called a new slow-nature movement. We are rediscovering our inherent biophilia—what Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson and Yale social ecologist Stephen Kellert defined as humanity’s affinity for nature. And we see now that we have become what John Muir described as “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people.”

Indeed, in 2008, the world reached a curious milestone: more people lived in urban areas than outside of them. In the U.S., urban areas grew faster in 2010 and 2011 than suburban regions for the first time since the 1920s. According to Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book The Shallows, the average American spends at least eight hours a day looking at some sort of electronic screen. Then we try to relax by watching TV. Bad idea. Research shows that this only makes us crabbier. Logan asserts that, since the age of the Internet, North Americans have become more aggressive, more narcissistic, more distracted, more depressed, and less cognitively nimble. Oh yeah, and fatter.

And don’t think you’re off the hook if you exercise outdoors. You are quite likely still tethered to civilization. Perhaps you’re strapped to a heart monitor or headset. Admit it: Have you brought your phone? Are you clocking wind sprints? Sure, you are deriving some mental and physical benefits, but evidence is mounting that to get the most out of nature, you really need to be present in it, not distracted by your own great story of self.
[1300 metres above Anchorage, on Konoya Point trail]

I reflect most of these trends. I spend too much time sitting inside. I maintain multiple social-media platforms, and I’ve recently moved from idyllic Boulder, Colorado, to Washington, D.C. Now my morning walk takes place directly under the flight path of Reagan National Airport. I dodge surly bike commuters and professional dog walkers, then cross a car-clogged parkway that sets me grumbling and obsessing over my fate, my relationships, and my kids’ new schedules, which require military precision and Euclidean traffic calculations. When I walk under a bridge to get to something resembling a trail, I pass graffiti that reads PUSSY FUDGE. I’m feeling a bit. On. Edge.
[San Juan de Lipez, Bolivia, elev 4200 metres]
IF THE JAPANESE EMBRACE of forest therapy can be attributed to one man, it’s Miyazaki, a physiological anthropologist and vice director of Chiba University’s Center for Environment, Health, and Field Sciences, located just outside Tokyo. Miyazaki believes that because humans evolved in nature, it’s where we feel most comfortable, even if we don’t always know it. “Throughout our evolution, we’ve spent 99.9 percent of our time in natural environments,” he says. “Our physiological functions are still adapted to it. During everyday life, a feeling of comfort can be achieved if our rhythms are synchronized with those of the environment.”

To prove it, Miyazaki has taken more than 600 research subjects into the woods since 2004. He and his colleague Juyoung Lee, also of Chiba University, have found that leisurely forest walks, compared with urban walks, yield a 12.4 percent decrease in the stress hormone cortisol, a seven percent decrease in sympathetic nerve activity, a 1.4 percent decrease in blood pressure, and a 5.8 percent decrease in heart rate. On subjective tests, study participants also report better moods and lower anxiety.
[Our former and greatly missed research assistant Homer, looking extra wolfy coming out of the Delta River, in the Alaska Range, 9/2009]

As Miyazaki concludes in a 2011 paper, “This shows that stressful states can be relieved by forest therapy.” And the Japanese eat it up, with nearly a quarter of the population partaking in some way. Between 2.5 million and five million visitors walk the Forest Therapy trails each year.
The science is so convincing that other countries are following Japan’s lead in studying and promoting nature as a cure. Lee just got hired away by the South Korean government, which is pouring more than $140 million into a new National Forest Therapy Center, expected to be completed in 2014. Finland, an empire of boreal spruce and pine, is also funding numerous studies. “Japan showed us that there could be cooperation between forestry and medical fields,” says Liisa Tyrvainen of the Finnish Forest Research Institute. “Now we are conducting similar research.”
I met up with Miyazaki at the country’s newest proposed therapy site, Juniko, a leafy network of trails and lakes near northern Japan’s Shirakami Mountains. The scientist was swatting mosquitoes from his face and neatly trimmed gray hair. In fact, he wasn’t looking relaxed at all. He was worried that the trail might be too muddy for his latest experiment, which would inaugurate the new field version of a brain-oxygen measuring, near-infrared spectrometer. He was kicking rocks out of the way and overseeing the setup of a netted, canopied mini-lab. The next morning, he and Lee would bring 12 male college students here, to measure their brain activity and vital signs after walking and sitting and generally forest bathing. They’d repeat the experiment in downtown Hirosaki, a city of 175,000 about two hours away. I would serve as one of Miyazaki’s stressed guinea pigs.

With the details worked out, several of us retired to a quiet restaurant across from Hirosaki’s Dormy Inn. We removed our shoes and sat cross-legged on the floor while Miyazaki distributed a baffling array of dishes involving runny eggs, seaweed, and gelatinous balls.
[Eagle River canyon, Chugach Mountains, Alaska]

“Why do the Japanese think about nature so much?” I asked Miyazaki, who was preparing to eat his modest slab of manta ray.


“Don’t Americans think about nature?” he asked me.
I considered. “Some do and some don’t.”

“Well,” he mused, “in our culture, nature is part of our minds and bodies and philosophy. In our tradition, all things are relative to something else. In Western thought, all things are absolute.”
Maybe it was the sake, but he was starting to lose me.


“The difference is in language,” he continued. “If I ask you, ‘A human is not a dog, is it?’ you say, ‘No, a human is not a dog.’ In Japan, we say, ‘Yes, a human is not a dog.’” The great sensei of nature studies peered at me over his chopsticks. I was reminded of the story of the Zen student who asks his teacher, “How do you see so much?” and the teacher responds, “I close my eyes.”
Miyazaki, I understood, was like a koan, impenetrable. But you had to trust that the guy was onto something.

ON THE MORNING OF the forest experiment, the college kids and I took turns sitting in the mobile lab at the trailhead. The boys were skinny, sleepy-eyed, and unfailingly polite. As if we were receiving sacrament, we placed hard cotton cylinders under our tongues for two minutes, then spit them out into test tubes. Once analyzed in a lab, these samples would reveal our levels of salivary cortisol, a stress hormone made in the adrenal cortex and sent to the brain. Lee, exuding calm and efficiency, hooked us up to other electrodes and devices that would track changes in blood pressure, pulse rate, and heart rate, gauging our physiological responses to the forest and the city.

[Assistant editor Mattie at Ship Creek Pass, Chugach Mountains, Alaska, elev. 1250 metres]

These are standard measurements the team has used for years. But today they also pulled out the new battery powered spectrometer, which, when deployed, gave me a sensation of leeches sticking to my forehead. It’s designed to measure hemoglobin levels (a proxy for blood and oxygen) in the prefrontal cortex. This is the brain geography that deals with cognitive and executive functions, such as planning, problem solving, and decision making. When aggregated, these metrics paint a picture of our bifurcated nervous system.

The researchers want to know if being in nature gives these frontal lobes a much needed rest. When we are relaxed and at ease in our environment, our parasympathetic system—sometimes called the rest-and-digest branch—kicks in, stimulating appetite. This is why food tastes better in the outdoors, explained Miyazaki. But the constant stimulus of modern life triggers our sympathetic nervous system, which governs fight-or-flight behaviors. And triggers it, and triggers it. A long trail of research dating back to the 1930s shows that people with chronically high cortisol levels and blood pressure are more prone to heart disease and depression.

When it was my turn to wander through the forest for 15 minutes, I was happy to break free from the wires. The loud pulse of cicadas echoed through the woods. Light filtered gently through the beeches and Japanese horse chestnuts, and the earth smelled like, well, earth. An elderly couple ambled by, assisted by walking sticks and a bear bell. I was briefly mesmerized by a yellow butterfly. I could see why Juniko is a candidate for the country’s next forest-therapy station. Local and park officials are seeking the designation because, where there’s forest therapy, there are tourists and their yen. Miyazaki may have a mystical side, but what drives him is the data he gets from these parks. It’s a convenient arrangement.

This isn’t an entirely new idea. Beginning in the 1970s, researchers at the University of Michigan, led by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, noticed that psychological distress was often related to mental fatigue. Modern life demands what the Kaplans call sustained directed attention on tasks both important and mundane—checking email, working a desk job, finding a parking spot. What leads to resting our brains’ directed-attention function? “Soft fascination,” explains Rachel Kaplan from her plant-filled university office. This is what happens when you watch a butterfly or the sunset or rain. You can’t help but stop multitasking or kvetching. That’s why Kaplan recommends a decidedly nonathletic approach to the outdoors, at least at times.

“When you’re pursuing a sport, you get cardiac points, but you’re not necessarily getting nature points,” she says. Research by her colleague Jason Duvall suggests that when you are distracted outside—running with an iPod, say—you may be more irritable and impatient later, less able to stay on task, focus, and plan than your nature-engaged peers.

Studies by the Kaplans and others show that after short walks in greenery, or even spells of looking at nature images in a lab, subjects’ directed-attention capabilities at least partly recover—people perform significantly better on cognitive tests and report feeling happier. They behave less selfishly when playing computer games. Turning down the front-brain disco ball also seems to improve creativity. And the more time in nature, the better. A recent pilot study by psychologists Paul and Ruth Ann Atchley of the University of Kansas and David Strayer of the University of Utah found that after three days of hiking and camping in the wilderness, participants in an Outward Bound course improved their scores on tests of creativity by 50 percent. “I’ll admit I’m a believer that there’s something profound going on,” says Strayer.

[Eduardo Avorroa N.P., Bolivia, lake at 4400 metres]
Yet, it’s been hard to see inside the brain to observe these processes at work. Neuroscientists want quantitative visuals. That’s starting to happen, mostly in labs in South Korea and the U.S. Studies have shown that when subjects look at pictures of nature, hemoglobin levels drop in the prefrontal cortex, meaning that the home base of executive function has switched a few lights off. (Similar effects have been seen in the brains of Tibetan monks, who appear to dim their brain wattage through meditation.)

Where’s the action going instead? To other parts of the brain, like the insula and the basal ganglia, says Kaplan protégé Marc Berman, now at the University of Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute. These are areas sometimes associated with emotion, pleasure, and empathy.
[Crow Pass, Chugach Mountains, Alaska, 1100 metres]
Berman has recently begun using functional MRI to watch people’s brains as they look at images of nature through virtual-reality glasses. “What we’re trying to find out is, what does a restored brain look like, and what does it look like as it’s getting restored?” says Berman. In the real world, filled with real nature, he would expect the effects to be even more pronounced. Miyazaki and Lee, with their hemoglobin-measuring spectrometer, intend to find out.

TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR experiments at Juniko and Hirosaki, Lee sent me preliminary results from my brain spectroscopy. Brightly colored squiggly lines on a graph show that my oxyhemoglobin concentrations indeed appeared lower in the forest than in the city. Lee said that results from me and the college boys would require more analysis, but for first-time field work he was optimistic. “I am very excited,” he said.
[Williwaw Lake, Chugach Mtns., Alaska]
The results didn’t surprise me. My urban peregrination hadn’t been nearly as pleasant as the soft green trails of Juniko. Downtown Hirosaki is, like a lot of midsize cities, more functional than attractive. Walking on the hot asphalt, I passed four parking lots, two taxi stands, a bus station, and two loudly idling buses belching fumes. The results showed that my nervous system had responded. My systolic blood pressure had dropped six points after walking in the forest; obligingly, it went up six points after walking in the city.

But how long do the feel-good effects of nature last? Are they simply wiped out by the first traffic jam or cell-phone ditty?

One of Miyazaki’s collaborators, Qing Li, an immunologist in the department of hygiene and public health at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, had the same question. The chairman of the Society of Forest Medicine, a small but growing international group of academics, Li is interested in nature’s effect on the human immune system. A person’s natural killer immune cells (NK cells for short) can, like cortisol and hemoglobin, be reliably measured in a lab. A type of white blood cell, NK cells are handy to have around, since they send self-destruct messages to tumors and virus-infected cells. It’s been known for a long time that factors like stress, aging, and pesticides can reduce your NK count, at least temporarily. So, Li wondered, if nature reduces stress, could it also increase your NK cells and thereby help you fight infections and cancer?
[Crow Pass, Chugach Mountains, Alaska]
In 2005 and 2006, Li brought a group of middle-aged Tokyo businessmen into the woods. For three days, they hiked in the morning and again in the afternoon. By the end, blood tests showed that their NK cells had increased 40 percent. A month later, their NK count was still 15 percent higher than when they started. By contrast, during urban walking trips, NK levels didn’t change.

Since most of us can’t spend three days a week walking in the woods, Li was curious to know if a one-day trip to a suburban park would have a similar effect. It did, boosting the levels of both NK cells and anticancer proteins for at least seven days afterward.
Turnagain Arm, Alaska from Bird Ridge, 1100 metres]

What was going on? Li suspected that trees were important. Specifically, he wondered if NK cells are affected by “aromatic volatile substances,” otherwise known as scents, sometimes called phytoncides. These are the pinenes, limonenes, and other aerosols emitted by evergreens and many other trees. Scientists have identified 50 to 100 of these phytoncides in the Japanese countryside and virtually none in city air that’s not directly above a park.

This wasn’t a totally left-field idea. Studies have attributed healthful properties to soil compounds like actinomycetes, which the human nose can detect at concentrations of 10 parts per trillion. And since the mid-1990s, researchers have been studying pinene for its antimicrobial properties and limonene, which is given off by citrus and other trees, as a possible tumor suppressor in cancer patients.

To test the phytoncide theory, Li sequestered 12 subjects in hotel rooms. In some rooms, he rigged a humidifier to vaporize stem oil from common Hinoki cypress trees; other rooms got nothing. The results? The cypress dwellers had a 20 percent increase in NK cells during their three-night stay and reported feeling less fatigued. The control group saw almost no changes.
“It’s like a miracle drug,” said Li.
[Summit of 5011 metre Mt. Blackburn, Wrangell Mtns., Alaska]
It sounds hokey that evergreen scents—the kind of thing given off by those cardboard trees dangling from the rearview mirrors of taxicabs—could help us live longer. But Li found similar results with NK cells in a petri dish: they increased in the presence of aromatic cypress molecules. So did anti-cancer proteins and proteases called granulysin, granzymes A and B, and perforin, which act by causing tumor cells to self-destruct. Li’s olfaction theory is unconventional, but it contains some of that Zen five-sense wisdom. While American researchers are mostly showing people pictures of nature, the Japanese are pouring it into every orifice.

Li invited me to his lab to have a sniff. The building was practically empty—the medical students were on break—and eerily dark, the result of power shortages in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

[Research Assistant Kluane in Hanging Valley, Chugach Mountains, Alaska]

He held up a small cinnamon-colored glass bottle filled with oil. “This is very toxic!” he said, giggling. “It’s very good but very toxic.” Phytoncides, from the Greek and Latin for “plant” and “killer,” are antimicrobial compounds that ward off pests. At low levels, though, we find them pleasant, and sometimes we don’t consciously detect them at all. Li believes that, while being around big trees in forests offers us the greatest benefit, flora from other landscapes, and possibly even houseplants, release these substances, too.

Before taking a drag, I stuffed my right arm into yet another blood-pressure machine. Then we unscrewed the cap of the forest elixir and I inhaled. The oil gave off a nice pitchy, vaguely turpentine scent. We put the cap back on and read my blood pressure again. It had dropped 12 points.

I looked at Li, who nodded delightedly. “This is a very big effect, bigger than people get with pharmaceuticals,” he said. “In fact, I use a humidifier with cypress oil almost every night in the winter.” You don’t need to harvest your own, Li said. Standard health-store aromatherapy oils work fine.

“What else do you do?” I asked the middle-aged man with the bowl haircut.
Clearly, Li gets asked this a lot. He had a small list. “If you have time for a vacation, don’t go to a city. Go to a natural area. Try to go one weekend a month. Visit a park at least once a week.
[3955 metre Mt. Robson, highest point in the Canadian Rockies, British Columbia, Canada]
Gardening is good. On urban walks, try to walk under trees, not across fields. Go to a quiet place. Near water is also good.”

My morning walk back in D.C. was transforming before my eyes.

WE DON’T NEED A scientist to tell us that flowers and chirping birds make us feel good. But if the benefits of getting outside are so intuitive, why don’t more of us do it? Nature-based recreation has declined 35 percent in the U.S. in the past four decades, according to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We underestimate the curative effects, or perhaps we’re just too readily beguiled by the easy entertainments of technology. But will having more data about how nature works on our bodies lure us into the woods? We know we’re supposed to eat more leafy greens, but most of us don’t.

The kale analogy is pretty apt, because it turns out that even when we don’t enjoy spending time in nature, like during lousy winter conditions, we benefit from it just the same. At least that’s what Toronto’s Berman found when research subjects took walks in an arboretum on a blustery winter day. The walkers didn’t really enjoy themselves, but they still performed much better on tests measuring short-term memory and attention.

Japanese researchers understand our draw to nature, but American researchers understand our pull away from it—our distractions, inertia, and addictions. They want to help motivate us, to make our doses of nature so palatable and efficient that we hardly notice them. This is the next frontier in forest-therapy science, all aided by brain imaging.
[Looking east from Ship Creek Pass, Chugach Mtns., Alaska]

Berman, for example, wants to figure out exactly which features (ponds, trees, biodiversity) yield the biggest bang in the brain. The idea is that once researchers know more about what makes our brains happy, that information can be fed into public-policy decisions, urban planning, and architectural design. The research has profound implications for schools, hospitals, prisons, and public housing. Imagine bigger windows, more trees in cities, and mandatory lie-on-the-grass breaks.

This approach, of course, is classically Western. Manipulate the environment; feel nature without even trying. As for me, I’m going to be looking for a more East-meets-West approach. I’ll try harder to quit checking my text messages and instead watch for rock bass jumping in the C & O Canal. Scratch and sniff some pine cones. Run my hands through the moss. Maybe even drink a little bark tea.

After all—yes, I am not a dog. 

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