Small farms take centre stage in European push to bolster local food trade



Amid international supply-chain disruptions, the EU is stepping up efforts to ensure the European food system benefits family farmers, Europe’s regions and its consumers.

By ALEX WHITING

August 5, 2023

 Newsroom

Small farms can bring food-supply chains closer to consumers and strengthen local areas. Image credit: CC0 via Pixabay

When Paolo Colzi left his job in an Italian textile company 23 years ago to take over the family wheat farm, he decided to turn it organic.

Colzi says it was big risk that paid off. Now 57 years old, he is running a successful business growing wheat, tomatoes, cucumbers and aubergines on 50 hectares of land near the city of Prato in the Tuscany region.

Consumer connection

Like many small-scale agricultural producers, Colzi might have failed in his venture had he been unable to sell to local customers.

‘The only way I can get a fair price is to sell directly to people,’ he said.

More than three quarters of farms in the EU are small – under 10 hectares – and they may be central to ensuring that Europe’s food supplies are plentiful, healthy and crisis-proof.

Local production of food has become a higher priority in Europe and elsewhere in response to supply-chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years later.

Yet the combination of an economic squeeze, land-access difficulties and weather extremes has led to the disappearance of many small agricultural holdings in Europe in recent decades.

In its Farm to Fork strategy in 2020, the EU said food systems need to be redesigned to allow fair economic returns for all actors, in particular primary producers.

A lot of food lands on supermarket shelves via long supply chains that can span the globe and entail multiple packaging and processing steps.

Farmers themselves may receive only a fraction of the price consumers pay in shops.

Going local

Support for small-scale farmers like Colzi has come from a European research project called COACH, which is wrapping up in October 2023 after three years.

The project received EU funding to spur cooperation among farmers, consumers, local authorities and other players in 12 European countries including Belgium, Denmark and Italy.

A prime goal has been to increase the amount of food that reaches markets through short supply chains and ensure farmers get a fair price for their produce.

Colzi is president of an association of wheat farmers, bakers, shops, restaurants and a mill in the Prato area. Called GranPrato, it was created to boost local agriculture.

Farmers sell a portion of their wheat directly to GranPrato at a price agreed at the start of each year.

In the arrangement’s first year – 2013 – GranPrato’s price was more than double the standard market one.

As it happens, the global price of wheat then soared and, in 2023, it remains higher. Even so, the farmers still sell to the association, highlighting a benefit of the agreement for consumers that Colzi says also suits him.

‘It means I don’t have to deal with sudden changes in prices, which are stressful,’ he said.

Public purses

Still, GranPrato is unable to buy all the wheat produced by the association’s 10 farmers. To do that, it would need more of its own customers by expanding the local market.

What could make a big difference is if local authorities would let GranPrato supply school meals, according to Colzi.

In the view of Moya Kneafsey, professor of food and local development at Coventry University in the UK, city authorities in general could offer a big helping hand to small local farms through contracts for meals for schools, hospitals and other public-sector catering.

‘They have the buying power to drive change,’ said Kneafsey, who coordinates COACH.

While cities work with tight budgets and usually award contracts to the cheapest suppliers, some local officials have found that prioritising sustainability isn’t more expensive. Plus interest is generally growing in the nutritional content of food in schools and hospitals.

In a separate initiative, a group of 16 cities worldwide is seeking to reduce the environmental impact of their public canteens by using organic suppliers where possible. The participants include Barcelona, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo and Toronto.

Copenhagen’s school meals now consist of mainly organic food and the city is working on ways to source more from small local farms.

Ghent in Belgium is also seeking to rely more on local suppliers for its school meals. If those suppliers are organic, the results could be better nutrition, healthier people, prosperous local farmers, thriving rural economies and environmental gains, according to Kneafsey.

‘Of all the different initiatives, public procurement may have the biggest potential to raise small local farmers’ incomes,’ she said.

Juicy, smoothie processes

Another way for small farms to make more money is by processing their produce before selling it. That includes turning it into bread or oil, juicing fruit or drying it.

An EU-funded project called FOX has brought together researchers and food scientists from nine European countries, including the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovenia, to help small farms process their produce on-site or nearby.

The project, which began in mid-2019 and runs through November 2023, has built mobile units that can act as mini processing centres. Each one is about the size of a large lorry container.

‘Small-scale units could give small producers opportunities to gain value,’ said Kerstin Pasch, who coordinates FOX and heads the German Institute of Food Technologies’ office in Brussels.

One unit, which makes juices and smoothies, is being tested in small apple orchards in southern Germany.

Pasch said that, while the apple farmers were happy with the finished juices, they were concerned about the costs of buying and running the unit. Operating the units requires someone with technical training.

Economic, health benefits

FOX uses a new fruit-processing technology called pulsed electric field. By sending short electric pulses of high voltage into the juice, the technique kills microbes without reducing vitamin content.

The project has also used the technology to dry fruit and mushrooms, finding it shortens the drying time and, by extension, reduces energy costs.

Each unit costs the researchers about €400 000 to make. They say the price would likely drop if the units were produced commercially.

The team is exploring opportunities for commercialisation of the units.

‘It’s exciting thinking about these mobile small-scale solutions,’ said Pasch. ‘People now realise that a large, globalised food-supply chain can be suddenly disrupted because of a virus outbreak or a war.’

This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.

LIKE THE RED ARMY 1919-1923
The role of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army during the Korean War

By Dr.Nadia Helmy
July 29, 2023


The Chinese celebration comes every year to commemorate the victory in the Korean War and the cessation of the American-South Korean aggression against North Korea, China’s ally, and because of the importance of this event for the Chinese, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army held a large military exhibition in the Chinese capital “Beijing” and opened it and delivered a speech in it, Comrade Chinese President “Xi Jinping”. There is an annual Chinese keenness, specifically from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, to re-celebrate and remind of this Chinese victory over the American aggression on their borders and how to achieve the Chinese victory over that American aggressive attack on the territory of the Chinese state. The Chinese celebration of this anniversary comes differently in recent years, following the escalation of tension with the United States of America and between the two Koreas, after North Korea accused the American intelligence Agency “CIA” of bombing (the joint liaison office with its neighbor South Korea), which is located in North Korean territory, near the (Border town of Kaesong), with South Korean officials denying the Americans’ responsibility for this bombing and blaming their northern neighbor. The site of the “Inter-Korean Liaison Office”, which is located in the territory of North Korea, was opened in 2018, to help the two Koreas communicate. The liaison office remained empty without employees for a while due to the mutual tensions between the two sides.

Tensions have escalated between North and South Korea in the recent period, due to the presence of a group of defected Koreans living in the south, i.e. South Korea, and used to send propaganda to the North. Therefore, the two countries (North Korea and its southern counterpart) established a political liaison office between them, in the wake of the talks that took place between the North Korean leader, “Kim Jong-un”, and his southern counterpart, President “Moon Ji-in” with the push and encouragement of the administration of former US President “Trump”. This came after the start of unprecedented talks between the leaders of the two Koreas, China and the United States of America, regarding the signing of a permanent peace treaty, but the relations between them have deteriorated in recent years.

The American officials were looking at that Korean War, which began in 1950 between the two Koreas, as a (war with the global communist powers), namely North Korea and China. However, the Chinese expressed their concern about what they described as “armed aggression on Chinese territory”, when the Americans crossed the border separating North Korea and China and headed to the “Yalu River”, which represents the border line between North Korea and China, and the Chinese leader “Mao Zedong” at that time sent his forces to North Korea and warned the United States of the need to stay away from the “Yalu River” unless it wanted to wage an all-out war. In October 1950, Chinese forces crossed the “Yalu River” and entered the war on the side of North Korea against the South Koreans and Americans. This Chinese intervention led to the retreat of the Americans, which continued until 1951. In 1953, the Korean War ended with an armistice that was not followed by a peace treaty, which led to the dispersal of millions of families in the northern and southern parts of the peninsula, which are separated by a demilitarized zone.

Here, we find that the Chinese Air Force played an important and decisive role in the battles of the Korean War. For the first time, after World War II, military aircraft with engines were used by the Chinese army, and China’s power emerged in the field of air attack. It had 1,400 military aircraft, half of which were Soviet MiG/15s, which at that time were the best military aircraft in the world.

The Chinese victory in the war to resist American aggression during the Korean War and to help North Korea ensured the security of the new China and brought stability to the Chinese people and the whole world.

In this Korean War, China and North Korea jointly resisted the aggression and expansion of US imperialism and hegemony, guaranteed the “security of the new China”, and ensured the stability of the Chinese people’s lives. Therefore, when celebrating the anniversary of the victory in that Korean War, we must remember well this date and its significance for China and the world, and cherish the hard-won peace with China’s help in confronting the brutal US hegemonic policies.

China has always pursued a defensive policy, just as the Chinese army has always been steadfast in protecting world peace, just as the Chinese, unlike the United States of America, never seek hegemony and expansion like the Americans, but China refuses to stand idly by and allow damage to national sovereignty, security and interests, or expose Chinese lands to violation by the Americans and their dominant imperial policies.

The Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950. On July 27, 1953, the North and South Korean sides signed the “Korean Military Armistice Agreement between the Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, the Commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, and the Commander-in-Chief of the United Nations Forces” in the Demilitarized Zone at Panmunjom.

We find here that China, its Ministry of Defense and its great army celebrate every year China’s great role in victory during this Korean war to end the policies of American hegemony and imperialism over the Chinese.

Therefore, China is keen every year to commemorate the Korean War and its role in it, and always describes it as (an important chapter in its modern history). On this occasion, Chinese President “Xi Jinping” is always keen to visit the Korean War Exhibition in Beijing to commemorate this important date for the Chinese.

On the occasion of the commemoration of the Korean War and the strong role of the Chinese army in it, so the words of the Chinese President, Comrade “Xi Jinping”, in his capacity as Secretary-General of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Communist Party of China, to the masses of the entire Chinese people, to remember “the spirit of toughness, courage and sacrifice shaped by China’s experience in this war”, which President “Xi Jinping” and the people and the Chinese army consider that it was within the efforts aimed at the renaissance of the modern Chinese nation, and affirming China’s role in protecting the security and stability of North Korea and the world in the face of intervention policies American expansionist hegemony.

Therefore, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army held an exhibition to commemorate the Korean War and the memory of China’s victory in it, under the title: “Remembering the Great History and Preserving Peace and Justice”.

Dr.Nadia Helmy
Associate Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Politics and Economics / Beni Suef University- Egypt. An Expert in Chinese Politics, Sino-Israeli relationships, and Asian affairs- Visiting Senior Researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES)/ Lund University, Sweden- Director of the South and East Asia Studies Unit

Should PVC Be Phased Out?


 July 30, 2023
By Dr. Arshad M. Khan and Meena Miriam Yust

Six months ago (February 14, 2023), a 150-car freight train with 11 cars carrying hazardous chemicals including 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride, derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Fearing the worst, the experts on the scene, in their wisdom, decide to burn and release some of the chemicals into the air through a controlled explosion. Carried in five cars, the vinyl chloride gas remnants thus escaped into the air. Reported ill effects on close-by residents included rashes and headaches.

Inhaling such a gas is of course a risk but it can also convert to highly toxic phosgene, a gas causing an estimated 85 percent of the 91,000 gas deaths in WWI. So why is it being transported all the way from Deer Park, Texas to Ohio and beyond? Very simply because that is where some of the chemical plants producing PVC (polyvinyl chloride) plastic are located — in this case Fredericktown, New Jersey.

Production of vinyl chloride requires combining, at high temperature, chlorine with ethylene, obtained from oil. This is then polymerized to form PVC resin. The major producers of vinyl chloride are Occidental Chemical, Shintech, Westlake Chemical, Formosa Plastics and Orbia. Of these Oxy Vinyl, an Occidental Chemical subsidiary, produced the vinyl chloride in three of the rail cars that derailed and Shintech the PVC in another three.

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) considers vinyl chloride a known carcinogen. Thus the fact that the community downwind was black adds a racial component to the tragedy.

Occidental Chemical reported releasing 59,679 pounds of vinyl chloride into the air from its plants in Texas, Niagara Falls (Canada) and New Jersey in 2021. In the same year, Shintech released 45,250 pounds from its plants in Louisiana and Texas. Thus many communities are being exposed daily to a deadly chemical that is a known carcinogen. All of which prompts the question, should PVC, a recognized poison plastic be banned?

If the community downwind from the train derailment was black, it is also a fact that local residents are predominantly low-income black people alongside vinyl chloride production facilities in Texas, Kentucky and along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Cancer rates in the latter corridor are so much higher than the rest of the US that it is often called “Cancer Alley”.

The accident should also have brought some focus on a poorly maintained rail system where a train derails without any immediate cause. Judith Enck, president of ‘Beyond Plastics,’ an advocacy group, and a former regional administrator for the EPA, asks why toxic vinyl chloride should be transported at all across half the country on an obviously ‘rickety rail system.’ Profits appear to have priority over safety.

Another problem with PVC is that dioxins are formed when chlorine is burned during its production. These compounds can accumulate in human bodies and in the environment for years. They have been linked to heart disease, diabetes, nervous system disorders, and can also be endocrine disrupters interfering with the body’s hormones. Moreover, disposal of PVC waste in incinerators (20 million pounds in 2021) is highly suspect.

PVC plastic also contains toxic additives like lead, cadmium and phthalates, not just in pipes but, believe it or not, in credit cards and even in the quintessential children’s bath toy, the yellow rubber duck. Growing children are particularly vulnerable to toxic chemical exposure be it lead or something else.

At the very least, one is obliged to ask, is it simply time for an exhaustive study of PVC and its uses? And secondly, should stringent rules be enforced against its disposal in incinerators?


YUST

The Willow Project Threatens Alaska Bird Breeding Paradise

Dr. Arshad M. Khans a former Professor based in the US. Educated at King's College London, OSU and The University of Chicago, he has a multidisciplinary background that has frequently informed his research. Thus he headed the analysis of an innovation survey of Norway, and his work on SMEs published in major journals has been widely cited. He has for several decades also written for the press: These articles and occasional comments have appeared in print media such as The Dallas Morning News, Dawn (Pakistan), The Fort Worth Star Telegram, The Monitor, The Wall Street Journal and others. On the internet, he has written for Antiwar.com, Asia Times, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, Eurasia Review and Modern Diplomacy among many. His work has been quoted in the U.S. Congress and published in its Congressional Record.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Realizing SDGs: Efforts to Overcome Ecological and Environmental Barriers

on August 7, 2023
By Munif Arif Ranti


Sustainable development is a global momentum to realize human welfare using a triple bottom line approach that includes economic development, environmental improvement and preservation, and social inclusion (Sachs, 2012). Unfortunately, sustainable development practice is still hampered by the lack of consensus in strengthening cross-sectoral synergies and attention to environmental issues that are still sidelined. Ecological and environmental issues are the main obstacles that will continue to shackle the realization of sustainable development, regardless of the extent to which environmental sustainability targets can be set. The SDGs will only be achieved if the meaning of ecological sustainability is limited to the commitment to real action that can represent environmental concerns. In addition, synergy in realizing sustainable development is hampered by the transformation of policies relevant to environmental issues that are not carried out using a climate approach, coupled with the emergence of the practice of “ecological colonization,” which maps the interests of the Global North and Global South. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the commitment of international actors accompanied by concrete actions in mainstreaming environmental interests, strengthening development transformation with climate-based considerations, and strengthening the collaboration of developed and developing countries to minimize the environmental impact of ongoing development.

Strengthening the commitment and concrete actions of various international actors to realize environmental conservation is a major responsibility if sustainable development is to be fully realized. This is based on the fact that the development carried out by humans today depends on the environment. It cannot be denied that humans always need nature or the environment, so various development practices must consider ecological conditions so as not to cause losses in the long run. The country’s commitment to the synergy between climate action and sustainable development is increasingly significant. Unfortunately, this commitment has not been accompanied by strengthening climate action relevant to current environmental problems. Actions taken by states in realizing sustainable development tend to only strengthen synergies without considering trade-offs that can undermine effective policy implementation (Dzebo et al., 2018). This means that environmental considerations are often sacrificed to fulfill development. If the actions taken in sustainable development continue to be carried out like that, the triple bottom line approach cannot be realized because environmental aspects are often marginalized.

In realizing sustainable development, at least two main things include inclusive development and environmental sustainability to strengthen the resulting policies. The meaning can be recognized by opening space for all parties to actively participate in an inclusive and environmentally friendly development process (Silva, 2021). Suppose it is related to the SDG principle that every person and country is responsible for realizing universal, safe, just, and sustainable development. In that case, there is no exception to support the SDGs’ fulfillment actively. Regardless, the issue of environmental sustainability and environmental injustice that illustrates the segregation of environmental access and risks among broad social groups needs to be more focused (Filho et al., 2019). The aim is none other than to develop collective action of global actors who are more sensitive to the problem of environmental degradation. Thus, environmental concerns will be strengthened and become a momentum that can provide great significance in realizing sustainable development that is fully ecologically responsible.

At the domestic level of the country, to maximize commitment and concrete actions that support environmental preservation in sustainable development, it is necessary to integrate global, national, and sub-national policies. The intended integration aims to maximize the desired results of the development process that implements environmental values through the climate spectrum (Dzebo et al., 2018). In other words, the policies produced by the state not only show a commitment that the development carried out is minimal risk to the environment but has considered the extent of the impacts that can occur and can overcome these impacts significantly. This means that in the development process, the value of the environment should not be a marginalized aspect but rather the main aspect directly related to the development and determines whether a development will be effective.

In addition to strengthening the commitment and concrete actions of various actors to answer the obstacles in the sustainable development process, it is necessary to strengthen the transformation of climate-based development. The consideration is based on the current development conditions that are on two spectrums. First, a development that runs quickly tends to harm the environment. Second, a development with minimal environmental impact needs to be faster in its fulfillment. Therefore, the main key that can be carried out to support SDGs that are committed to the environment is through climate-based development transformation. One of the important transformations to be carried out is the development of the eco-environment, which is an important aspect of supporting human survival (Wei et al., 2022). Through the transformation of development based on the eco-environment, it is expected that development can go hand in hand with environmental sustainability so that it is no longer the main cause of degradation.

Eco-environment refers to the combination of people, resources, and various natural factors, including climate, water, soil, and vegetation, that play an important role in human development. In the view of eco-environment, economic and population growth leads to global warming and environmental degradation, which are the main challenges in achieving eco-development. Therefore, the priority is to emphasize the importance of environmental protection in development policies (Wei et al., 2022). The intended development transformation through the eco-environment is the appropriate use of biological resources without overexploiting them. Eco-environment also emphasizes the use of other environmentally friendly alternatives in supporting development. For example, the transformation to the use of renewable energy. Given that economic growth is also one of the three main approaches to be realized through the SDGs, it is inevitable that economic growth often has environmental implications. Therefore, through climate-based transformation, economic growth can be encouraged by shifting to renewable energy sources so that industrial and economic growth can continue to develop without climate implications (Ahmed et al., 2022).

In addition to the eco-environment approach, climate-based sustainable development transformation can be realized through several relevant practices. For example, the implementation of smart cities, whose mechanisms are carried out to improve industrial structures and technological advances in reducing pollution and realizing greening or green space coverage (Su et al., 2023). By implementing an environment-based smart city, sustainable development goals may be closer to achieving. Furthermore, the concept of environment-based smart cities can also adopt internet integration to encourage an innovative and greener economy in today’s digital era. China is one of the countries developing such innovations to minimize environmental pollution through technology and green economic development (Ren et al., 2022). If this transformation continues to be developed, its significance in realizing the SDGs will become more apparent. It can directly maximize the fulfillment of the triple bottom line, which includes economic development, environmental improvement and preservation, and social inclusion through environmentally friendly digital transformation. In its development, it is also important to pay attention to the transformation of the water and food sector, given its direct implications on public health (Filho et al., 2019). The key lies in sustainable development and environmental justice that takes climate change mitigation into account.

In order to overcome obstacles in the SDGs caused by ecological and environmental problems, it is necessary to strengthen collaboration between developed and developing countries. We understand that the SDGs encourage developed countries to assist developing countries in meeting the specified targets jointly. Nevertheless, there often needs to be more alignment between developed and developing countries in interpreting the SDGs. Developed countries are generally more significant in fulfilling the three pillars of the SDGs while developing countries focus on the economic and social pillars (Swain & Yang-Wallentin, 2020). This is certainly not without reason; on the one hand, developed countries are economically established, so they are more likely to adopt policies related to the environment. On the other hand, developing countries still in the economic development stage will need help to adopt the same environmental policies as developed countries. This problem is one of the main obstacles to realizing the SDGs because, despite developed countries’ commitment to assisting developing countries, there will always be a gap for both parties in the conflict.

When looking at the material footprint of environmental utilization from 1970 to 2017, high-income countries representing 16% of the global population were responsible for 74% of the resource use that led to environmental degradation. This fact indicates the existence of “ecological colonization” that harms developing countries both ecologically and economically (Richards, 2023). To avoid further inequality and disagreement between North and South countries, implementing the SDGs must strengthen coherent collaboration. North-South cooperation must be carried out non-discriminately and fairly under the SDGs agenda so that all parties are not excluded from the development stage. To realize the strengthening of North-South collaboration, it is important to pay attention to the gaps that may arise so that the partnership can be more transparent and provide mutual support (Blicharska et al., 2021). If North-South countries can maximize their collaboration, the fulfillment of sustainable development goals will be more realized.

From the explanation above, ecological and environmental problems are the main obstacles that will continue to shackle the realization of sustainable development. For this reason, it is necessary to strengthen three aspects to realize effective and efficient sustainable development. First, strengthening international actors’ commitment and real action to realize environmental conservation. Second, through strengthening the transformation of ecology-based development. The intended transformation is very relevant to the eco-environment approach, which emphasizes the use of environmentally friendly alternatives in supporting development and through various other transformations whose main consideration is environmental preservation. Third, through strengthening North-South collaboration in realizing sustainable development, previously hampered by the presence of “ecological colonization.” By strengthening these three aspects, obstacles caused by ecology and the environment can be minimized so that realizing the three main pillars of the SDGs, which include economic development, environmental improvement and preservation, and social inclusion, will be maximally realized.
RELATED TOPICS:ENVIRONMENTSUSTAINABILITY

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Munif Arif Ranti



Graduate student of International Relations, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia.

 

Tree Rings Reveal: It Has Never Been This Warm In Past 1200 Years

 August 7, 2023 

By Eurasia Review

A new 1200 year-long time series based on tree rings shows that the current warming is unprecedented during this period. This is reported by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL in the scientific journal “Nature”.

The Middle Ages and the centuries that followed were turbulent, also climatically: not only was there a “Little Ice Age”, but also its opposite: the “Medieval Climate Anomaly”, during which it may have been unusually warm. The latter can clearly be seen in reconstructed temperatures from annual tree rings. In fact, reconstructed Medieval temperatures are often portrayed as higher than today’s temperatures. This has long been a puzzle because there is no known physical explanation for such exceptional Medieval warmth. Climate models are therefore unable to simulate it and instead show only moderately warm temperatures for the Medieval Climate Anomaly.

Support for climate models

“Previous reconstructions are based on the width or density of the annual tree rings,” explains Georg von Arx from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL. “Both are very much dependent on temperature, but sometimes other factors play a role in how wide or dense a tree ring gets”.

Together with other researchers, the head of the Dendrosciences research group has created a new reconstruction based on a particularly precise method to extract temperature information from trees. In contrast to previous work, the new results lead to the same conclusion as the climate models: the Medieval Climate Anomaly was cooler than previously thought, at least in Scandinavia, where the wood studied originated. Today’s warming is thus likely outside the range of natural fluctuations in temperatures over the past 1200 years, the researchers conclude.

50 million cells measured

For their study they used a new method optimized at WSL to directly measure the cell wall thickness of the wood cells in the annual tree rings. “Each individual cell in each tree ring records climatic information under which it was formed. By analyzing hundreds, sometimes thousands of cells per ring, extraordinary pure climate information can be obtained”, explains the first author of the study and WSL researcher Jesper Björklund.

For their new time series, the researchers measured the cell walls of 50 million cells. These come from 188 living and dead Swedish and Finnish Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris), whose annual rings together cover a period of 1170 years. Based on these measurements, the researchers then reconstructed the summer temperatures in this region and compared them both with model simulations of the regional climate and with previous reconstructions based on the density of the annual rings.

Unprecedented warming

The result was clear: the temperatures of the models and the new time series align.

“This means that there are now two independent accounts of the regional climate that both find lower temperatures during the Medieval, providing new evidence that this phase was not as warm as previously thought,” says Björklund. “Instead, both show that the current warming is unprecedented, at least in the past millennium, and emphasize the role of greenhouse gas emissions on Scandinavian temperature variability.”

The previous reconstructions based on tree ring density, in contrast, indicated significantly higher temperatures for the Medieval Climate Anomaly and lower temperatures for the current warming.

“This is critical because such reconstructions are considered when evaluating the accuracy of climate models. If the previous reconstructions were used as a benchmark, this would significantly downplay the human influence on current climate warming and reduce confidence in model projections”, warns von Arx.

The researchers used subfossil wood from trees preserved in mountain lakes. (Photo: Håkan Grudd)

 

God’s Cricketer – OpEd

 August 7, 2023 

By Acton Institute

By Christopher Sandford

With a passion for social justice, ending Apartheid in South Africa, and cricket, David Sheppard is perhaps the best batsman-bishop you’ve never heard of.

You’re facing the Cy Young Award–winning pitcher Justin Verlander from a distance of 22 yards, armed only with a three-foot long, paddle-shaped club and your own nerve. To enliven the proceedings, Verlander interacts with you not from the traditional essentially static crouch, but after a headlong sprint from the outfield to the pitcher’s mound, at the climax of which he hurls a cherry-red leather ball in the general direction of your ankles. In most cases the ball will hit the turf, deviate sharply left or right, and rear up like a skipping rock somewhere toward your unprotected midriff. Other than avoiding serious injury, your job is to score runs—the currency of the game—by striking the ball to the field boundary, or far enough from the 11 fielders to allow you, the batsman, to run to the other end of the infield before the ball can be returned. Due to certain quirks of the game’s rules, the man with the bat can sometimes remain in situ for hours on end, and the contest itself (there are varying formats involved) can last up to five days, with players and spectators going home at around six each evening and returning the following morning.

There, in a nutshell, is cricket, which despite or because of its fabled idiosyncrasies remains the world’s second most popular spectator sport, after only the ubiquitous soccer.

Bishop David Sheppard. Photo Credit: Illustrated London News, Wikipedia Commons

Cricket may appear strange to Americans, but even stranger, perhaps, is the fact of modern American life that the unashamedly Christian athlete who refuses to compromise on—in fact proudly avows—his or her faith can expect a certain amount of disdain at the hands of the mainstream media of a sort it’s somehow hard to imagine being extended to those of other beliefs. To give just a few of the many available examples: the Olympic gold-medal-winning gymnast Simone Biles was ridiculed for being “so, so into Jesus,” as well as for the shocking revelation that she prayed on a daily basis. In a similar vein, the New York Times saw fit to write about the Olympic hurdler and bobsledder Lolo Jones in a piece published just before a major race, mocking her for being “whatever anyone wants her to be—vixen, virgin, victim.”

And then of course there’s the NFL’s Tim Tebow, whose unembarrassed Christianity earned him the cover story in GQ magazine entitled “Have You Accepted Tebow as Your QB and Sunday Savior?” complete with a picture of the Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback altered to make him seem to be in a crucifixion pose. Even that shameless manipulation qualified as mere routine secular bigotry, unexceptional in today’s media, compared to the vitriol of the popular Chicago sportswriter Dan Bernstein, who called Tebow “little more than an affable simpleton” and his admirers “lunatic-fringe cultists” and “batspit crazy fanatics.”

Which all somehow brings us to the life story of the English-born David Sheppard (1929–2005), who enriched the international cricket world of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Sheppard was the only son of a lawyer father and a homemaking mother and related through them respectively to the Victorian illustrator William James Sheppard and the Reverend Thomas “Tubby” Clayton, founder of the Toc H global Christian movement. Broadly speaking, one side of the family had artistic leanings, while the other was noted for its entrepreneurial flair and spiritual piety. The boy David was precociously gifted at sports and remembered both for his striking appearance, with crisp, center-parted dark hair and a smile like that of a young model in a toothpaste advertisement, and academic prowess. Boarding school was followed by two years of mandatory army service and then, belatedly, by Cambridge University.

Sheppard quickly began breaking existing batting records on the college cricket field. In August 1950, the game’s mysterious national selection panel, as arcane in its deliberations as those of a papal conclave, invited him to represent England in an international, or “Test,” match against a visiting team from the West Indies. Readers familiar with baseball’s annual All-Star Game need only think of a 20-year-old rookie being invited to participate and then in short order becoming its star performer to get some of the flavor.

It’s not necessary to dwell at any length on Sheppard’s subsequent career as a professional cricketer. But it touched the very heights of the sport. In 1952 it was the turn of the Indian team to visit Great Britain. At that level, a batsman (one makes another imaginative leap here from baseball) scoring 40 or 50 individual runs is considered eminently respectable, even distinguished. If you’re lucky you might even reach 70 or 80. The still only 22-year-old Sheppard went out to bat for his country against India in a game at The Oval ground in London and scored 119. Making runs in cricket is often less about brute power than it is about delicately placing the ball where no fieldsman is present. One venerable critic exclaimed when watching Sheppard bat: “Poetry!” An England teammate named Godfrey Evans said simply: “I always regarded David as the most graceful player who ever lived.”

In 1953, Sheppard was duly appointed captain of his professional club side, and the following year he achieved the sport’s ultimate accolade by being asked to lead England. It was both a popular and yet not uncontroversial decision by the team’s selectors. The leading alternative candidate, Len Hutton, was widely regarded as a superbly efficient but somewhat dour artisan, while Sheppard’s image was more that of the merry swashbuckler. At that time in English society, there was still a lingering preference for leaders drawn from the ancient universities. It seems almost satirically quaint now, but the received wisdom was that the needs of the England captaincy of the 1950s were better met by a dapper, Cambridge-bred swell than by an honest yeoman.

In any event, Sheppard soon resolved the selectors’ dilemma by announcing his decision to return to his old university to study theology, with a view to taking holy orders. Although he continued to intermittently play cricket until 1963, the sport now took second place to his clerical duties. In September 1955, Sheppard was ordained by the Anglican bishop of London in a ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and he served his first curacy in Islington, north London, at a time when the area was still a byword for urban decay rather than the spiritual home of Britain’s left-wing intelligentsia. He faced other challenges of a personal nature, too, when his young wife, Grace, collapsed with a serious nervous breakdown. For many years afterward, Grace, with her husband’s help, struggled to fight against agoraphobia.

Sheppard’s first order of business in Islington was to take over a derelict factory building and rename it the Mayflower Family Centre, where among other things volunteers offered addiction and counseling services long before these became fashionable. His passion for social justice spread to his cricketing life. When in 1960 the selectors asked Sheppard to return to play for England against the touring South Africans, he declined the honor in order to protest the system of racial segregation known as apartheid—a scandalous decision to many cricket traditionalists, and one that led to an angry summons by the selectors. On his way to the meeting, Sheppard stopped his car at a traffic light and, as was his habit, picked up the Bible he kept on the passenger seat to read a few verses. The book fell open at Isaiah 58:1: “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression.” Thirty minutes later, Sheppard politely informed his hosts in the committee room that he would never again dignify the all-white South African team by playing cricket against them. The affair did a good deal to convince the government in Pretoria of the strength of worldwide anti-apartheid feeling.

Though hardly a single-minded professional sportsman, Sheppard was fully capable of holding his own amid the horseplay and banter, not all of it elevated, of the typical male locker room of the day. He wasn’t just a great cricketer. He was also a character. Among other eccentricities, he sometimes liked to act as his own announcer while on the field. Having swung at and missed a ball, he’d be heard to mutter: “In the match yesterday Sheppard was below form; his footwork was slow, and his strokes were slovenly.” Or, conversely, when smiting the ball out of the park for cricket’s equivalent of a home run (and this necessarily later in the 1950s): “Elvis has left the building.” In addition to his technical brilliance with the bat, he was known for his bravery, keenness, and gentle satirical humor. He once remarked of a particularly flamboyant cricket teammate that “One always expects a chorus of naked ladies to suddenly appear and start dancing around behind him.” He never took offense at the inevitable ribbing about his higher calling in life. Nor did he ever object to a post-match drink with his colleagues. To the best of anyone’s recollection, in the course of a long career he only once protested at an exasperated teammate’s choice of language. “Perhaps best to restrict that particular name to one’s prayer,” Sheppard remarked mildly at the blasphemous outburst. His England colleague Godfrey Evans said of him: “Every teammate liked David, and every opponent respected him.”

Sheppard played his last professional cricket match in March 1963. He became the Anglican bishop of Woolwich in 1969 and bishop of Liverpool six years later. Then aged 45, he was the youngest diocesan bishop in England. He remained an outspoken social campaigner both at home and abroad and continued to vocally oppose the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the early 1980s, he personally lobbied the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, for increased government funding for a wide range of social programs and would later remember a sticky meeting at No. 10 Downing Street when he was on the receiving end of Thatcher’s tart comments and frequent interruptions. “My mouth went dry as I remembered it doing once or twice when facing a hostile bowler on the cricket field,” he told me. “But I kept going.”

Sheppard’s name was on the short list for the archbishopric of Canterbury when the post fell vacant in 1991. By then Thatcher had been replaced by the cricket fanatic John Major, and several of the British tabloid newspapers got behind “Reverend Dave” for the top job. It wasn’t to be, but in 1997 Sheppard finally retired, he insisted, a happy and fulfilled man.

Perhaps Sheppard could have risen even higher than he did in the Church or in sport. A critic once remarked of him that he had “ambitions rather than ambition.” He was simply too various for the single aim and lacked the ruthlessness of the true careerist. Nonetheless, he played the game he loved to the highest level. He gave and received unbounded affection. And he lived by the belief that only personal friendship, “doing ordinary things together,” rather than lofty abstract principles could truly communicate the gospel. In every sense of the phrase, Sheppard was a robustly muscular Christian who brought distinction on the Church and himself, and in the end you can’t help but wonder if that wasn’t success enough

About the author: Christopher Sandford is a British-born writer who now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest. He’s the author of many books, including Union Jack, a bestselling account of John F. Kennedy’s special relationship with the United Kingdom.

Source: This article was published by the Acton Institute

The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is named after the great English historian, Lord John Acton (1834-1902). He is best known for his famous remark: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Inspired by his work on the relation between liberty and morality, the Acton Institute seeks to articulate a vision of society that is both free and virtuous, the end of which is human flourishing. To clarify this relationship, the Institute holds seminars and publishes various books, monographs, periodicals, and articles

THEY ARE A RIGHT WING CALVINIST ORG WITH LINKS TO THE REFORMED CHURCH OF SOUTH AFRICA

 

HALO Research Aircraft To Analyze Transport Of Greenhouses Gases And Aerosols Over Pacific

 August 7, 2023

By Eurasia Review

The extreme precipitation that occurs during the Asiatic monsoon season repeatedly causes catastrophic devastation in Southeast Asia. The same weather systems which cause these extreme events also affect the altitude region of 12 to 20 kilometers.

Strong convection transports partly heavily polluted air masses from the ground-level atmosphere in Southeast Asia into this altitude region, the so-called upper troposphere/lower stratosphere, and from the northern Pacific subsequently to Europe. This transport will be investigated over the next two months by a team of atmospheric researchers during the PHILEAS (Probing High Latitude Export of Air from the Asian Summer Monsoon) mission. Forschungszentrum Jülich and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) are coordinating the project. Airborne measurement flights using the high altitude HALO aircraft will be taking off from Oberpfaffenhofen in Bavaria starting on Sunday and from Anchorage in Alaska in about two weeks.

One key objective of the two-month campaign is to obtain insight into the transport and mixing processes that occur in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere influencing the global climate and weather. A second focus will be on the severe wildfires in Canada.

“The information we collect will allow us to look at the long-range transport of contaminants from the monsoon regions. Furthermore, we will concentrate on the impact of the disastrous forest fires in Canada and their consequences for the stratosphere. The heat of the fires can result in powerful convection currents that bring aerosols and pollutants to elevations of 12 kilometers or more. The innovative payload configuration used for PHILEAS provides us with the opportunity to investigate the effects and development of the smoke plumes on the corresponding composition and their impact on the environment,” explained Professor Peter Hoor, head of the Airborne Measurements group at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at Mainz University. The PHILEAS data are also a central element for transport and aerosol studies within CRC TRR-301 “TPChange”, which is headed by the Professor Peter Hoor at Mainz University.

Especially during summer, both local fires and also the long-range transport from Asia contribute to the pollution in the lower stratosphere. During the summer, the Asian monsoon distributes aerosols and greenhouse gases throughout the entire Northern Hemisphere. Its extensive convective transport carries contaminated near-surface air layers in Southeast Asia up to a height of some 16 kilometers. Here the polluted air accumulates in the so-called monsoon anticyclone, a gigantic high-pressure zone in the upper troposphere over East Asia. The monsoon anticyclone can, at times, stretch all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the Pacific coast of Asia. During summer and early autumn, air masses containing increased levels of greenhouse gases and aerosols frequently split off from this high-pressure zone. These then move northeast over the Pacific and are subsequently mixed into the lower stratosphere. In addition to the pollutants, water vapor is also conveyed into the lower stratosphere, which is climate-relevant in this high-altitude region.

“In the initial phase of PHILEAS, we will be assessing the westward transport of polluted air masses originating from the monsoon anticyclone flying from Oberpfaffenhofen towards the Arabian Peninsula. The eastward transport of the polluted air masses over the Pacific to high altitudes and their incorporation in the lower stratosphere will be examined in a second campaign phase by flights from Anchorage,” said Professor Martin Riese, Director of the Stratosphere section at the Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK) at Forschungszentrum Jülich.

The aircraft carries a novel combination of highly sophisticated instruments. These combine state-of-the-art remote sensing technologies with high-precision local in-situ measurements. To be able to adapt the flights ideally to the respective meteorological conditions, a large forecast group will be present in Oberpfaffenhofen and Anchorage. Mainz University provides the meteorological forecast data, which are generated by the European Center of Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF), to the science team. Chemical information will be generated by the Chemical Lagrangian Model of the Stratosphere (CLaMs) system developed at Jülich.

The key pollution markers such as carbon monoxide, methane, and ethane, which can be used to identify different sources of pollution, are measured by the group headed by Professor Peter Hoor from JGU. Aerosol composition will be measured with the novel ERICA instrument jointly developed by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Mainz University. A core instrument on board HALO is the infrared spectrometer GLORIA (Gimballed Limb Observer for Radiance Imaging of the Atmosphere), which allows 3D tomographic mapping of temperatures, cloud parameters, and the levels of numerous trace gases in the atmosphere.

The PHILEAS mission will conclude in early October 2023 with a measurement phase at its base in Oberpfaffenhofen. Comparison of the results of this with the early phase will enable the researchers to ascertain the effects that the monsoon system has on the lower stratosphere over Europe.

Preparing the HALO research aircraft in the hangar in Oberpfaffenhofen for the measurement campaign: Clearly visible are inlet openings for the measuring equipment on the upper side of the fuselage of the aircraft. (photo/©: Martin Riese / Forschungszentrum Jülich)