The Lowly Potato

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the Smithsonian magazine about the potato:

Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.) More than that, as the historian William H. McNeill has argued, the potato led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.” The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.

Equally important, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture—the so-called agro-industrial complex. Not only did the Columbian Exchange carry the potato across the Atlantic, it also brought the world’s first intensive fertilizer: Peruvian guano. And when potatoes fell to the attack of another import, the Colorado potato beetle, panicked farmers turned to the first artificial pesticide: a form of arsenic. Competition to produce ever-more-potent arsenic blends launched the modern pesticide industry. In the 1940s and 1950s, improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers and chemical pesticides created the Green Revolution, the explosion of agricultural productivity that transformed farms from Illinois to Indonesia—and set off a political argument about the food supply that grows more intense by the day.

...

Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria and human beings. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat. In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.

...

Continental farmers regarded this alien food with fascinated suspicion; some believed it an aphrodisiac, others a cause of fever or leprosy. The philosopher-critic Denis Diderot took a middle stance in his Encyclopedia (1751-65), Europe’s first general compendium of Enlightenment thought. “No matter how you prepare it, the root is tasteless and starchy,” he wrote. “It cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but it provides abundant, reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing but sustenance.” Diderot viewed the potato as “windy.” (It caused gas.) Still, he gave it the thumbs up. “What is windiness,” he asked, “to the strong bodies of peasants and laborers?”

With such halfhearted endorsements, the potato spread slowly. When Prussia was hit by famine in 1744, King Frederick the Great, a potato enthusiast, had to order the peasantry to eat the tubers. In England, 18th-century farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an election slogan in 1765. France was especially slow to adopt the spud. Into the fray stepped Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the potato’s Johnny Appleseed.

Trained as a pharmacist, Parmentier served in the army during the Seven Years’ War and was captured by the Prussians—five times. During his multiple prison stints he ate little but potatoes, a diet that kept him in good health. His surprise at this outcome led Parmentier to become a pioneering nutritional chemist after the war ended, in 1763; he devoted the rest of his life to promulgating S. tuberosum.

Parmentier’s timing was good. After Louis XVI was crowned in 1775, he lifted price controls on grain. Bread prices shot up, sparking what became known as the Flour War: more than 300 civil disturbances in 82 towns. Parmentier tirelessly proclaimed that France would stop fighting over bread if only her citizens would eat potatoes. Meanwhile, he set up one publicity stunt after another: presenting an all-potato dinner to high-society guests (the story goes that Thomas Jefferson, one of the guests, was so delighted he introduced French fries to America); supposedly persuading the king and queen to wear potato blossoms; and planting 40 acres of potatoes at the edge of Paris, knowing that famished commoners would steal them.

In exalting the potato, Parmentier unwittingly changed it. All of Europe’s potatoes descended from a few tubers sent across the ocean by curious Spaniards. When farmers plant pieces of tuber, rather than seeds, the resultant sprouts are clones. By urging potato cultivation on a massive scale, Parmentier was unknowingly promoting the notion of planting huge areas with clones—a true monoculture.

The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored. Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries carefully monitored, but country people teetered on a precipice. France, the historian Fernand Braudel once calculated, had 40 nationwide famines between 1500 and 1800, more than one per decade. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, “because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines.” France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. The continent simply could not reliably feed itself.

The potato changed all that. Every year, many farmers left fallow as much as half of their grain land, to rest the soil and fight weeds (which were plowed under in summer). Now smallholders could grow potatoes on the fallow land, controlling weeds by hoeing. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe’s food supply.

It is a fascinating story. Go read the whole thing.

Arizona Scenes

I have a weakness for Arizona landscapes. Here is a panorama from the Sedona area:



And here's an Arizona desert landscape with some Teddy Bear Cholla in the foreground:



From Dustin Farrell on Vimeo.

Nothing is Obvious

I love the complexity of the natural world. It is utterly amazing to me that scientists ever decoded anything. I remember as a kid "deciding" that I would be a great chemist. But I had no chemicals, so I mixed things that were around me. Mostly I got mud. No brilliant insights, no atomic theory of matter, no complexity about valence electrons. The real world is very complex and very opaque. It takes lots of hard thinking, experimentation, and clever theorizing to make any sense of anything.

Here's a simple example of how counter-intuitive the world is:

The orbit of the Earth’s around the sun is slightly eccentric. The closest point is called the perihelion. On January 4th the Earth is just 147,098,291 km away from the sun. Aphelion occurs July 4th when the Earth is 152,098,233 km away from the sun, a difference of +3.3%. Naturally the power of the sun falls away with distance. Its radiation is 7% weaker in July than in January. Strangely, near surface air temperature for the Earth as a whole is 3.3°C warmer in July than in January. Yes, the surface is warmest when the Earth is furthest from the sun!

I find it funny that the "global warming" crowd is convinced there is a very tight relationship between CO2 and air temperatures. They think CO2 can drive up temperatures. Actually the evidence is mostly the other way around: warmer climate releases more CO2. But don't let such facts cloud the mind of an ideologue!

Climatologists have long wondered why a 1°C increase in temperature at the sea surface relates to as much as a 3° increase in temperature of the upper troposphere. They call this phenomenon ‘amplification’ as if the temperature of the upper troposphere in some way depended on the temperature at the surface and there was a transistor circuit between the two. Hey guys, its the other way round. Turn the telescope round. The presence of a long wave absorber namely ozone, is responsible for this phenomenon. The warming of the upper troposphere results in cloud loss and then, after a little time lag, the surface temperature increases.

In the mid and high zone, cloud is present as highly reflective interlacing micro-crystals of ice that we describe as cirrus and stratus. When the air warms these crystals sublimate. Ice cloud is the dominant cloud of the subtropical region. In IPCC climate science high altitude ice cloud is supposed to warm the surface by enhancing back radiation. But when radiation from the atmosphere increases in winter relative humidity falls. This radiation it is not bounced back by the cloud, the cloud disappears and lets the sun shine through. The surface temperature response is due to the disappearance of the cloud, not back radiation. Oops.

...

The $164,000 question is what is causing cloud cover to rise and fall on decadal and centennial time scales.

The answer to both questions lies in the activity of the coupled circulation of the stratosphere and the troposphere at the poles that feeds ozone into the troposphere. The upper troposphere warms or cools depending upon the feed rate of ozone. The feed rate changes over time.

The ozone content and temperature of the upper stratosphere depends in the first instance upon the activity of the night jet at the poles that introduces NOx from the mesosphere. Less NOx means more ozone. The activity of the night jet depends upon surface pressure and the concentration of NOx in the jet depends upon solar activity. In Antarctica, surface pressure has been falling for sixty years indicating a continuous increase in the ozone feed into the troposphere, the second major influence upon the ozone content of the polar stratosphere.

In that the coupled circulation of the stratosphere and the troposphere over Antarctica changes surface pressure at 60-70° south it changes the strength of the westerly winds in the southern hemisphere, cloud cover and surface temperature on all time scales. Stratospheric ozone is wasted above and below the stratosphere, processes referred to as ‘unknown dynamical influences’ in the more respectable polar ozone studies.

These phenomena are the very essence of the Southern Annular Mode, arguably the fundamental mode of global climate variation on all time scales.

One thing is plain. High altitude ice cloud in the southern hemisphere is plainly a reflector of solar radiation. It does not promote warming (positive feedback). It promotes cooling (negative feedback). It’s presence depends upon the flux in ozone in the upper troposphere as governed by processes in the stratosphere. So the UNIPCC climate models are 180° out of whack.

The above snippets are from an article by Erl Happ, a wine maker:

I am a winemaker and grape-grower with a strong interest in climate. I was interested enough to try and discover the common thermal characteristics that are seen in great vineyard locations and did a lot of work with hourly temperature data from around the world. Climate sets the limit on what can be achieved in the vineyard. I became interested in climate change when I noticed the growing season temperature falling in our part of the world, the south west of Western Australia. That set me on a quest to work out why. Soon, it became apparent that parts of the Southern Hemisphere like Antarctica and Southern Chile had been cooling for fifty years or more. My experience in analyzing temperature dynamics for vine sites and working out just how much heat these plants need to bring their fruit to maturity gave me a focus on sourcing data and figuring out what has been happening on a regional scale, both at the surface and in the upper atmosphere. I think there is room for a subject called historical climatology. We can learn a lot just by looking at what has happened over long periods of time. Good data sets are readily available on the net. All one needs is a little curiosity, a facility with spreadsheets and a lot of determination.

Erl Happ's real "job" is wine...

Cephalopod Tricks

I love the ability of cephalopods to do camouflage as well as mesmerize predators and prey. My favourite is the cuttlefish.

Here's a scientist explaining an octopus:



Go read the original post and/or watch the bigger video.

How the Natural World Really Works

Everybody "just knows" that what is natural is better than the artificial man-made stuff. Everybody "knows" that before Western society brought their brutal colonizing ways to the rest of the world, the primitives and other cultures lived in a natural harmony because nature is good and kind. Like the Bible says: in the natural world the lion lies down with the lamb.

But scientists didn't get the memo. They go out and look at the "natural" world and bring back some real horror stories. Here's a blog post by Robert Lamb on Tor.com that helps dissolve the illusion that "natural is better, natural is good, natural is beautiful"...

To quote esteemed mad scientist Seth Brundle, “Insects don’t have politics.” Theirs is a world of intricate brutality and wasps have been excelling in it for more than a hundred million years.

This latest example comes to us in this paper from France’s CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) and it concerns a wasp that not only hatches from its egg inside the belly of a ladybug, but upon emerging forces its eviscerated host to guard its cocoon while it transitions from larva to full-grown horror wasp.

Dinocampus coccinellae is its name and one can only imagine that Zombie author Joyce Carol Oates keeps a few of them as pets.

To recap, parasitism runs big in the wasp world. As I explain in How Wasps Work, the ancient wasps of the Cretaceous period were predatory and carnivorous. They ate arachnids and other insects and they LOVED it. But then the rise of the angiosperms introduced an even better food source: nectar and pollen. So the wasps of old largely abandoned their flesh-eating ways, except for the carnivorous feasts required by their squirming young. Some wasps abandoned this practice all together (and became bees), but you’ll still find countless varieties of wasps that either deposit their eggs inside a living host (that’s what the stinger evolved for) or who fill larval chambers in their nest with stunned meals.

So the fact that that Dinocampus coccinellae hatches inside the belly of a host bug following some makeshift, catastrophic surgery by its parent is nothing out of the ordinary. But when it celebrates its Chest-Burst Mitzvah, that’s when it gets all weird and noteworthy. Normally, the host organism mercifully dies at this point, but DC’s ladybug is not so lucky. Not only does it live, but a little behavior modification forces it to hang around and “guard” its parasite-baby as it grows into adulthood beneath its protective bulk. Scientists believe that secretions left by the larva when it bursts out might play a role in reprograming the host.

But then the ladybug dies right? Surely once the wasp reaches adulthood, our long-suffering host can at last rest in peace. No such luck. This is the insect world, after all. The researchers found that 25 percent of the manipulated ladybugs recovered normal behavior following their ordeal.

I’m really hoping this makes it into the next PIXAR A Bug’s Life movie.

I get a chuckle out of people who believe that "natural" cures are better than scientifically developed drugs. They are so deluded. But the joke is on me. This kind of anti-science and looney thinking is spreading. A hundred and fifty years ago you could have destroyed science and the world would have trudged on to miserable future compared to what we live in, but it would have struggled on without a mass die off. But if you removed science today, something like 80% of the population would die within a few years. We can't feed or clothe ourselves without modern science. Despite this, a rising majority shun science and hold tight to a warm-and-fuzzy lie that "natural is best".

People buy "organic" groceries not realizing that (1) everything is "organic" unless you redefine it from its original meaning of "from organisms" and (2) all plants are loaded with poisons to try to protect themselves from grazers and modern chemicals are really just more of the same (sure some of them are really bad for you, but that's why we have government and regulations to protect us from bad stuff like that).

Nothing is more "natural" than to be parasitized (or at least co-habited by other organisms). Right now I'm host to 100 trillion bacteria and only 10 trillion human cells. I'm ten times more bacteria than I am "human". Bacteria are only one of a range of "natural" organisms that live in and on me. This includes fungi and arachnea. This is the human microbiome.

Haboob

Yesterday Phoenix Arizona experienced a "haboob", a big dust storm associated with the monsoon season in the American southwest.

Here is a nice video of the storm at it hits the south end of Phoenix and envelops the airport:



Here is a video from The Weather Channel with pictures but also with some expert analysis to explain the phenomenon:



The monsoon season hits Arizona in early July when the heat has built up enough to allow the colder air from the ocean off to the southwest to pour in and create thunderstorms. It makes for exciting heavy rainstorms and spectacular lightning shows.

Starry Starry Sky

Living in cities we fail to remember the glorious night sky that our ancestors enjoyed. This is a bit "too real" because it depends on light capture over time, but it does bring back the wonder of the night sky:



More great videos by Randy Halverson here.

Dog Eat Dog World

After watching the following, I think we need to change the adage...


Native snails in NZ are big, mean and carnivorous. They hunt their prey by stealth. When the attack comes, it is sudden, ruthless and fatal.
I think the saying should be "snail eat worm world".

Long Lost Cousins

I've just discovered my long lost cousins...



That is, evolutionarily speaking.

The above sort of reminds me of this much closer relative of mine, a long-necked Karen with neck rings.

Chile's Puyehue Volcano

Watching an eruption reminds you of how tiny humans are in the scheme of things. We love to think that we are "changing the planet" but an eruption shows us that our influence is still small compared to natural processes:



Here are some nice pictures of the volcano in The Atlantic magazine.

Update 2011jun15: Here is a video of the eruption:



And here is a video of ash on Lake Nahuel Huapi:



From the Montreal Gazette:

Chilean experts said Puyehue's "plume" had almost made a complete circuit of Earth, with the circumference of the planet being some 24,900 miles (40,000 kilometers).

The ash cloud belching out over the past 12 days, and carried eastward by winds of up to 100 kilometers (60 miles) per hour was expected to reach Chile again by the end of this week.

"The plume is already at (Easter Island's capital) Rapa Nui and should be tapping us on the back on Saturday," said Pablo Ortega, the secretary general of Chile's civil aviation agency.

Easter Island is in the Pacific Ocean, 3,500 kilometers from the coast of mainland Chile.

Chile's National Geology and Mining Service said the volcano was showing "instability" as measured by seismic readings and the height of the ash cloud, which initially reached nine kilometers into the troposphere but now floated at seven kilometers.

That meant "it is possible there will be a return to increased eruptive activity," it said in its last bulletin.

Sally Cutter, from Australia's Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, said the lower level of the ash near Perth did pose a risk.

"Volcanic ash makes it dangerous to fly, particularly for jet engines, due to the fact it can cause the engines to stop, so it's really up to each individual airlines to assess the risk they're prepared to take," she told reporters.

Update 2011jul06: The Boston Globe newspapers site The Big Picture has some very nice pictures from the previous month's ash fallout.

Know Your Sea Creatures

Here's a beautiful and informative video on the variety of sea creatures without backbones. This is a provocative video claiming "there is no such thing as a jellyfish":

By all accounts, jellyfish are creatures that kill people, eat microbes, grow to tens of meters, filter phytoplankton, take over ecosystems, and live forever. Because of the immense diversity of gelatinous plankton, jelly-like creatures can individually have each of these properties. However this way of looking at them both overstates and underestimates their true diversity. Taxonomically, they are far more varied than a handful of exemplars that are used to represent jellyfish or especially the so-called "true" jellyfish. Ecologically, they are even more adaptable than one would expect by looking only at the conspicuous bloom forming families and species that draw most of the attention. In reality, the most abundant and diverse gelatinous groups in the ocean are not the ones that anyone ever sees.

The above is from the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Disappearing Dinosaurs

Hard to believe, but a 65 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct, there are many, many dinosaurs that are "disappearing". Here is Jack Horner explaining how this can be...



I've lived long enough to see all kinds of "revolutions" in dinosaur science: hot-blooded dinosaurs, birds rediscovered as dinosaur descendants, and now the culling of duplicates. Amazing.

Putting Tornadoes into Perspective

From a summary of data by Anthony Watts on his blog Watts Up With That?. These numbers help show that these are not "off the chart" events. They are part of a long history of devastating storms:

Deadliest Tornado Years in US History

(Official NOAA-NWS Record: 1950 – present; Research by Grazulis: 1875-1949)

Year Fatalities
1925 794
1936 552
1917 551
1927 540
1896 537
1953 519
1920 499
1908 477
2011 481 (365 + 116 estimated Joplin fatalities as of May 23)
1909 404
1932 394
1942 384
1924 376
1974 366

Deadliest Single Tornadoes in NOAA-NWS Official Record

(1950 – present)

Tornado	Fatalities	Date
Flint, Michigan	116	June 8, 1953
Joplin, Missouri	116 (est.)	May 22, 2011
Waco, Texas	114	May 11, 1953
Worcester, Massachusetts	90	June 9, 1953
Udall, Kansas	80	May 25, 1955
Hackleburg, Alabama	78	April 27, 2011
Tuscaloosa-Birmingham, Alabama	61	April 27, 2011
“Candlestick Park,” Mississippi & Alabama	58	March 3, 1966
Cary, Mississippi	58	February 21, 1971
Judsonia, Arkansas	50	February 21, 1952

The main reason why storms have bigger tolls today than 100 years ago is that the population in the US is 3 times that of 100 years ago. It isn't "global warming". It is more people in the path of a storm.

Update 2011may24: Here is a good post by Roy Spencer that corrects some misperceptions about the trend in tornadoes. The key bit:

The bottom panel of following graphic shows what most meteorologists already know: there has been a downward trend in strong (F3) to violent (F5) tornadoes in the U.S. since statistics began in the 1950s. As seen in the top panel, this has also been a period of general warming. For those statistics buffs, the correlation coefficient is -0.31. Obviously, the conclusion should be that warming causes fewer strong tornadoes, not more. (Or, maybe a lack of tornadoes causes global warming!)

Go read the post to see the data graphed that shows this trend.

Grímsvötn

Here is a nice video of the lightning strikes generated by the Grímsvötn volcano:



And here is a video that gives you a sense of the size of the ash cloud:



Here is an article in the UK Independent that explains that despite being bigger than last year's Eyjafjallajökull eruption, the Grímsvötn eruption is not expected to cause air travel chaos.

I found this bit on Wikipedia to be interesting:

On 21 May 2011 at 19:25 UTC, an eruption began, with 12 km (7.5 mi) high plumes accompanied by multiple earthquakes. The ash cloud from the eruption rose to 20km/12 miles, and is so far 10 times larger than the 2004 eruption, and the strongest in Grímsvötn for 100 years.

During 22 May the ash plume fell to around 10 km altitude, rising occasionally to 15 km.

As of writing, the eruption has been releasing about 2000 tons of ash per second, making it 120 million tons in the first 48 hours. This makes the 2011 eruption of Grimsvotn a confortable VEI4 in the scale of volcanic explosive index (VEI), releasing more ash in the first 48 hours than Eyjafjallajokull during its entire 2010 eruption.

Update 2011may24: There is a set of excellent photos of Grímsvötn on the Boston Globe newspaper's site The Big Picture.

Holy Cow Batman!

These are real bats...



The above is from northern California's KQED public education TV channel.

Watching the Landscape Slide By

This is a fun bit of video on a landslide at Snake River Canyon, Wyoming. Watch until the DOT workers show up with their orange coats to give you a better sense of the speed of the mudslide:



This flow of dirt is moving down a hillside and across a highway at a rate of 50 centimeters per hour, says Dave Petley on the American Geophysical Union's Landslide blog.

The Snake River Canyon landslide is slow enough that Wyoming Department of Transportation workers can climb around on it, as it's moving. In fact, they took a video of themselves doing this. When the film is sped up, you can see the landslide in action—and see that it is actually two separate landslides moving alongside each other!

The final result...

A Call for Hardy Pioneers to Step Forward

Time to get into your space suit and head out to the new frontier. A place of natural unsullied beauty not yet marred by man's greed. From AGI News:

The first planet almost inhabitable with liguid water has been discovered 20 light years from Earth and astronomers belief is is almost as inhabitable as earth. The planet is called Gliese 581d and orbits around a red dward star. Gliese appears to be a lucky planet situated on the edge of the so-calle 'Goldilocks zone' or Green Belt of space where condisitions favour the presence of life. A study published by the Astrophysical Journals Letters reports that this planet has a mass six times that of Earth and is double it's size...

I'm wondering if I can just strap on my jet pack and blast off today. Let's see. It's only 20 light years away... if I pack some extra bottle of oxygen and a couple more power bars, I should be all set.

Dale Peterson's "The Moral Lives of Animals"

I quite enjoyed this book. The author has an excellent style and peppers his points with interesting commentary and results from scientific research.

His purpose in writing this book is to get us to recognize our in-built prejudice, what he calls Darwinian narcissism, our view that nature is out there for us to exploit. Also, he wants us to understand our deep evolutionary connection with the rest of life and, in particular, with animals that share similar brain structures. He argues for not just similar emotions and thoughts across species lines, but an incipient morality shared by us and animals. I love the bits about altruism.

He is not one of these authors with a soapbox and the accusatory rant of a preacher. He isn't beating the reader about the head with some "revelation" he has about the place of animals in the world. His style is more lyrical and seductive. He wins the reader over by laying out a feast of story, anecdote, scientific research, and personal experience. This is like sitting with a friend on the front porch and sharing insights and experience. It is very pleasant.

I love the bit where he argues that morality has two sides: rules and empathy. I enjoy his honesty in pointing out that men and women share an understanding of both sides to morality but that there is a deep divide between them. Men go off the deep end with their rules and their Bible-thumping, verse citing, hard legal case arguing. Women go off the deep end with their sympathetic relationships and understanding of the need for special pleading for each instance. I really like the fact that he points out that morality is a crazy mix of rules and empathy and he doesn't get boxed in by trying to spell out in some absolutist sense exactly which of what makes up morality. Instead he paints pictures and opens your eyes and gets you to wondering.

I do recommend this book.

Meet Your Cousin

Since all life traces back to an origin some three billion years ago, we are all related. So you are a "cousin" to this Cirrate octopus. See the resemblance?



I feel I can fly as I watch this critter dance as a denizen deep in the ocean.

If you look at the following picture you see that Mammals and Molusca (which Cirrate belong to) are on the right hand side. Practically kissing cousins!


Click to Enlarge

Why Disasters Seem More Numerous Now

I got a chuckle out of this review of technology by Anthony Watts on his blog Watts Up With That?. These advances mean information comes more timely, more reliably, to a larger audience, and persists longer than ever before:

Using this Wikipedia timeline as a start, I’ve created a timeline that tracks the earliest communications to the present, adding also severe weather events of note and weather and news technology improvements for context.

• Prior to 3500BC – Communication was carried out through paintings of indigenous tribes.


• 3500s BC – The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing


• 16th century BC – The Phoenicians develop an alphabet


• AD 26-37 – Roman Emperor Tiberius rules the empire from island of Capri by signaling messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun


• 105 – Tsai Lun invents paper


• 7th century – Hindu-Malayan empires write legal documents on copper plate scrolls, and write other documents on more perishable media


• 751 – Paper is introduced to the Muslim world after the Battle of Talas


• 1305 – The Chinese develop wooden block movable type printing


• 1450 – Johannes Gutenberg finishes a printing press with metal movable type


• 1520 – Ships on Ferdinand Magellan‘s voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising flags.


• 1776 The Pointe-à-Pitre hurricane was at one point the deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record. At least 6,000 fatalities occurred on Guadeloupe, which was a higher death toll than any known hurricane before it. It also struck Louisiana, but there was no warning nor knowledge of the deaths on Guadeloupe when it did. It also affected Antigua and Martinique early in its duration.


• 1780 – The Great Hurricane of 1780, also known as Hurricane San Calixto is considered the deadliest Atlantic tropical cyclone of all time. About 22,000 people died when the storm swept over Martinique, St. Eustatius and Barbados between October 10 and October 16. Thousands of deaths also occurred offshore. Reports of this hurricane took weeks to reach US newspapers of the era.


• 1793 – Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line


• 1812 – The Aug. 19, 1812 New Orleans Hurricane that didn’t appear in the Daily National Intelligencer/(Washington, DC) until later September. Daily National Intelligencer. Sept. 22, 1812, p. 3. Dreadful Hurricane. The following letters present an account of the ravages of one of those terrific storms to which the Southern extreme of our continent is so subject. Extract of a letter from Gen. Wilkinson, dated New Orleans, August 22.


• 1831 – Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph


• 1835 – Samuel Morse develops the Morse code


• 1843 – Samuel Morse builds the first long distance electric telegraph line


• 1844 – Charles Fenerty produces paper from a wood pulp, eliminating rag paper which was in limited supply


• 1849 – Associated Press organizes Nova Scotia pony express to carry latest European news for New York newspapers


• 1851 – The New York Times newspaper founded


• 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson exhibit an electric telephone in Boston


• 1877 – Thomas Edison patents the phonograph


• 1889 – Almon Strowger patents the direct dial telephone


• 1901 – Guglielmo Marconi transmits radio signals from Cornwall to Newfoundland


• 1906 – Reginald Fessenden used a synchronous rotary-spark transmitter for the first radio program broadcast, from Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible.


• 1914 – teletype intrduced as a news tool The Associated Press introduced the “telegraph typewriter” or teletype into newsrooms in 1914, making transmission of entire ready to read news stories available worldwide.


• 1920 – The first radio news program was broadcast August 31, 1920 by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan, which survives today as all-news format station WWJ under ownership of the CBS network.


• 1925 – John Logie Baird transmits the first television signal


• 1928 – NBC completed the first permanent coast-to-coast radio network in the United States, linked by telephone circuits


• 1935 – Associated Press launched the Wirephoto network, which allowed transmission of news photographs over telephone lines on the day they were taken.


• 1942 – Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread spectrum communication technique


• 1946 – The DuMont Television Network, which had begun experimental broadcasts before the war, launched what Newsweek called “the country’s first permanent commercial television network” on August 15, 1946


• 1947 – Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs proposed a cell-based approach which lead to “cellular phones“


• 1947 – July 27th. The WSR-1 weather surveillance radar, cobbled together from spare parts of the Navy AN/APS-2F radar was put into service in Norfolk, NE. It was later replaced by improved models WSR-3 and WSR-4


• 1948 – Network TV news begins. Launched in February 1948 by NBC, Camel Newsreel Theatre was a 10-minute program anchored by John Cameron Swayze, and featured newsreels from Movietone News. CBS soon followed suit in May 1948 with a 15-minute program, CBS-TV News, anchored by Douglas Edwards and subsequently renamed Douglas Edwards with the News.


• 1948 – The first successful “tornado forecast” issued, and successfully predicted the 1948 Tinker Air Force Base tornadoes which were two tornadoes which struck Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on March 20 and March 25.


• In 1953, Donald Staggs, an electrical engineer working for the Illinois State Water Survey, made the first recorded radar observation of a “hook echo” associated with a tornadic thunderstorm.


• 1957 the WSR-57 the first ‘modern’ weather radar, is commissioned by the U.S. Weather Bureau


• 1958 – Chester Carlson presents the first photocopier suitable for office use


• 1960 – TIROS-1 the first successful weather satellite, and the first of a series of Television Infrared Observation Satellites, was launched at 6:40 AM EST[1] on April 1, 1960 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.


• 1962 – The first satellite television signal was relayed from Europe to the Telstar satellite over North America.


• 1963 – First geosynchronous communications satellite is launched, 17 years after Arthur C. Clarke‘s article


• 1963 CBS Evening News establishes the standard 30 minute network news broadcast. On September 2, 1963, the show expanded from 15 to 30 minutes.


• 1966 – Charles Kao realizes that silica-based optical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit light via total internal reflection


• 1967 – The National Hurricane Center is established in the Miami, FL National Weather Service Forecast Office.


• 1969 – The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet‘s ancestor, are connected.


• 1969 – August 14-22 Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, gets widespread network news coverage from correspondents “on the scene”.


• 1969 – Compuserve, and early dialup text based bulletin board system is launched in Columbus, Ohio, serving just that city


• 1971 – Erna Schneider Hoover invented a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.


• 1971 – Ray Tomlinson is generally credited as having sent the first email across a network, initiating the use of the “@” sign to separate the names of the user and the user’s machine.


• 1972 – Radio Shack stores introduce “The Weather Cube”, the first mass marketed weather alert radio. (page 77 here) allowing citizens to get weather forecasts and bulletins in their home for only $14.95


• 1974 April 3rd – WCPO-TV in Cincinnati carries the “Sayler Park Tornado” live on television as it was crossing the Ohio river. It was part of the biggest tornado super outbreak in history. It is the largest tornado outbreak on record for a single 24-hour period. From April 3 to April 4, 1974, there were 148 tornadoes confirmed in 13 US states. Lack of timely warnings demonstrated the need for an expanded NOAA weather radio warning system.


• 1974 – The first Synchronous Meteorological Satellite SMS-1 was launched May 17, followed later by GOES-1 in 1975.


• 1974 the WSR-74 the second modern radar system is put into service at selected National Weather Service office in the United States and exported to other countries.


• 1975 – The Altair 8800, the world’s first home computer kit was introduced in the January edition of popular electronics


• 1975-1976 NOAA Weather Radio network expanded from about 50 transmitters to 330 with a goal of reaching 70 percent of the populace with storm warning broadcasts.


• 1977 – Radio Shack introduces a weather radio with built in automatic alerting that will sound off when the National Weather Service issues an alert on the new expanded NOAA Weather Radio network with over 100 stations. Page 145 here


• 1977 – The Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced home microcomputers was introduced.


• 1978 – NOAA Weather Radio receivers with automatic audio insertion capabilities for radio and TV audio began to become widely installed.


• 1979 – The first commercially automated cellular network (the 1G) was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979, initially in the metropolitan area of Tokyo. Within five years, the NTT network had been expanded to cover the whole population of Japan and became the first nationwide 1G network.


• 1980 – Cable News Network (CNN) is founded by Ted Turner.Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States.


• 1980 - A heatwave hit much of the United States, killing as many as 1,250 people in one of the deadliest heat waves in history.


• 1981 – Home satellite dishes and receivers on C-band start to become widely available.


• 1981 – The IBM Personal Computer aka IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981, it set a standard for x86 systems still in use today.


• 1982, May 2nd – The Weather Channel (TWC) is launched by John Coleman and Joe D’Aleo with 24 hour broadcasts of computerized weather forecasts and weather-related news.


• 1983 – Sony released the first consumer camcorder—the Betamovie BMC-100P


• 1983 America Online (then as Control Video Corporation, Vienna, Virginia) debuts as a nationwide bulletin board system featuring email.


• 1983 – The first 1G cellular telephone network launched in the USA was Chicago-based Ameritech using the Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone.


• 1984 – The Apple Macintosh computer, with a built in graphical interface, was announced. The Macintosh was introduced by the now famous US$1.5 million Ridley Scott television commercial, “1984“. The commercial most notably aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984 and is now considered a “watershed event”.


• 1985 – Panasonic, RCA, and Hitachi began producing camcorders that recorded to full-sized VHS cassette and offered up to 3 hours of record time. TV news soon began to have video of news and weather events submitted from members of the public.


• 1986 July 18th, KARE-TV in Minneapolis dispatches a news helicopter to catch live video of a tornado in progress, live at 5:13 PM during their news broadcast.


• 1988 – Doppler Radar goes national – the construction of a network consisting of 10 cm (4 in) wavelength radars, called NEXRAD or WSR-88D (Weather Service Radar 1988 Doppler), was started.


• 1989 – Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN


• 1989 – August Sony announced the Sony ProMavica (Magnetic Video Camera) electronic still camera, considered the first widely available electronic camera able to load images to a computer via floppy disk.


• 1991 – Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second.


• 1991 – The 1991 Perfect Storm hits New England as a Category 1 hurricane and causes $1 billion dollars in damage. Covered widely in TV and print, it later becomes a movie starring George Clooney.


• 1992 – Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text message).


• 1992 – August 16-28 Hurricane Andrew, spotted at sea with weather satellites, is given nearly continuous coverage on CNN and other network news outlets as it approaches Florida. Live TV news via satellite coverage as well as some Internet coverage is offered. It was the first Category 5 hurricane imaged on NEXRAD.


• 1993 – The Great Mississippi Flood was carried on network television as levees breached, millions of viewers watched the flood in real-time and near real-time.


• 1994 – Internet2 organization created


• 1994 – Home satellite service DirecTV launched on June 17th


• 1994 – An initiative by Vice President Gore raised the NOAA Weather Radio warning coverage to 95 percent of the US populace.


• 1995 – The Weather Underground website was launched


• 1995 – DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) began to be implemented in the USA


• 1996 – Home satellite service Dish Network launched on March 4th


• 1996 – Fox News Channel was launched on October 7, 1996 with 24 hour news coverage


• 1996 – The Movie “Twister” was released on May 10, showing the drama and science of severe weather chasing in the USA midwest.


• 1999 – Dr. Kevin Trenberth posts a report and web essay titled The Extreme Weather Events of 1997 and 1998 citing “global greenhouse warming” as a cause. Trenberth recognizes “wider coverage” but dismisses it saying: “While we are indeed exposed to more and ever-wider coverage of the weather, the nature of some of the records being broken suggests a deeper explanation: that real changes are under way.”


• 2002 – Google News page was launched in March. It was later updated to so that users can request e-mail “alerts” on various keyword topics by subscribing to Google News Alerts.


• 2004 – December: A freak snowstorm hits the southernmost parts of Texas and Louisiana, dumping snow into regions that do not normally witness winter snowfall during the hours leading up to December 25 in what is called the 2004 Christmas Eve Snowstorm.


• 2004 – DSL began to become widely accepted in the USA, making broadband Internet connections affordable to most homes.


• 2004 – On November 19, the Website “Real Climate” was introduced, backed by Fenton communications, to sell the idea of climate change from “real scientists”.


• 2004 – December The website “Climate Audit” was launched.


• 2005 – August, Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic damage along the Gulf Coast of the United States, forcing the effective abandonment of southeastern Louisiana (including New Orleans) for up to 2 months and damaging oil wells that sent gas prices in the U.S. to an all-time record high. Katrina killed at least 1,836 people and caused at least $75 billion US in damages, making it one of the costliest natural disasters of all time. TV viewers worldwide watched the storm strike in real time, Internet coverage was also timely and widespread.


• 2006 – Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and opening in New York City and Los Angeles on May 24. It went on to limited theater release and home view DVD. It was the first entertainment film about global warming as a “crisis”, with hurricane Katrina prominently featured as “result” of global warming.


• 2006 – The short instant message service Twitter was launched July 15, 2006


• 2006 – November 17th, Watts Up With That was launched.


• 2007 – The iPhone, with graphics and Twitter instant messaging capabilities was released on June 29, 2007.


• 2007 – The reality show “Storm Chasers” debuts on the Discovery channel on October 17, 2007, showing severe weather pursuit as entertainment.


• 2007 – On October 10th, in Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills Al Gore’s AIT movie was challenged in a UK court, and found to have nine factual errors. It was the first time “science as movie” had been legally challenged.


• The 2008 Super Tuesday tornado outbreak was a deadly tornado outbreak affecting the Southern United States and the lower Ohio Valley from February 5 to February 6, 2008. With more than 80 confirmed tornados and 58 deaths, the outbreak was the deadliest in the U.S. since the May 31, 1985 outbreak that killed 76 across Ohio and Pennsylvania. It was widely covered live on US media.


• 2010 – A heat wave in Russia was widely reported by global media as being directly a result of “global warming”. Scientific research from NOAA released later in 2010 and 2011 showed that to be a false claim.


• 2011 – On January 4th, the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that Internet had surpassed television as the preferred source for news, especially among younger people.


• 2011 – March, notice of an Earthquake off the coast of Japan was blogged near real-time thanks to a USGS email message alert before TV news media picked up the story, followed by A Tsunami warning. A Japanese TV news helicopter with live feed was dispatched and showed the Tsunami live as it approached the coast of Japan and hit the beaches. Carried by every major global news outlet lus live streamed on the Internet, it was the first time a Tsunami of this magnitude was seen live on global television before it impacted land.

Compare the reach and speed of communications and news reporting at the beginning of this timeline to the reach and speed of communications and news reporting technology around the beginning of the 20th century. Then compare that to the beginning of the 21st century. Compare again to what we’ve seen in the last 10 years.

Go read the original article to get the embedded links and other relevant material.