The flu in the first person

We've written at RaisingIslands.com about the H1N1 flu virus in a somewhat detached way, but now it's gotten personal.

I'm just off of what could have been- (by some symptom-reading systems—more on that later) the virus formerly known as Swine Flu.

If it is, let me just say, about that business about it being a “mild” flu? Harumph!

I felt like someone had tenderized me top to toe with a baseball bat, and overdoses of pain killers didn't do a lot of good.

I am old enough to be in that group that's statistically less likely to get it. That didn't help me.

Parenthetically, there is a level of weirdness about being infected by a bug that's a direct descendant of a bug that may have been inside a Mexican pig less than a year ago.

I've had a few flus and to be clear, this one stands out.

Actually, three things stood out.

One was pain. Body aches, headaches, skin aches, joint aches. Lot of aches, and Aleve barely made a dent.

Another was the sensation that someone on speed was messing with the temperature controls. There were fevers and chills, and chills during fevers, and sweats, and covers on and covers off, ad nauseum. That an pretty significant fatigue—didn't get out of the sack much for the first three days.

Finally there was, to put it as pleasantly as possible, significant intestinal distress.

There were not in my case—and I give thanks for this—significant nasal congestion, coughing or other upper respiratory issues. I had a mild dry cough. I had no appetite.

From what I read, and my doctor reported, you can't really tell which flu you have without a blood test, and in the middle of both flu season and the H1N1 event, there are so many people getting sick that they're not testing for it any more.

According to some sources, H1N1 has a reputation of sneaking up on you and hitting hard, although other flus will do that, too.

In my case, at 7 a.m., I was out on the ocean, paddling a canoe and feeling great. At 9 a.m. I was wondering who'd wrapped me in a blanket and pounded on me with lead pipes. It was rapid.

I managed to get in to see a doctor at the end of the day, with a temperature of 101 degrees Fahrenheit and a fraction, and he prescribed Tamiflu, which I started taking immediately. It comes in 10-capsule packets, and you take one morning and one at night. For me, the five-day dose coincided with the worst of the symptoms.

They say Tamiflu will take a day or two off the symptoms. On day five I was feeling reasonably human, weak but okay. On day seven I was ready to go paddling in the ocean again.

During the process, I was very uncomfortable, but alert enough to read. For some reason television was far more annoying to me than normal, so I ploughed through books. My librarian wife brought me a tall stack of paperbacks, and I needed the whole stack. I was feeling ornery enough that I wouldn't put up with authors who cheated, digressed or got silly. Half the books, even by well-known authors, didn't make the cut. I gave them 20 or 30 pages, and if they started wasting my time, on to the next volume.

Saving all my patience, I suppose, for getting through the disease.

The pain lasted about three days. The severe fatigue four days, with moderate fatigue beyond that. The feverishness and/or sweats also four days. The intestinal stuff started about halfway in and then outlasted everything else.

Can I say for sure it's H1N1? No.

There's tons of credible information at the government flu site, www.flu.gov, and lots of interesting information elsewhere on the web—some of it credible and some less so.

Some resources say you can tell the difference by symptoms. Others disagree.

Some assert, for instance, that very rapid onset (bingo!) is a factor in H1N1, and that body aches and tiredness are more severe with H1N1 than seasonal flu. Most reputable sources, though, say you can't distinguish a particular case accurately by these or other symptoms, and that rapid onset isn't exclusive to H1N1.

Here's a site that argues they're pretty much the same, except that H1N1 has more respiratory/sore throat symptoms, which of course mine didn't. The federal government flu site notes that the respiratory issues only occur in a few of the cases.

The upshot, of course, is that even in laboratory-confirmed cases, the symptoms are different in different people. Because of courses, it's not just about the flu, it's also about you.

As for me, if a flu shot appears on my radar, I'm taking it. I may now be immune this particular strain of influenza, whatever it was, but I don't want to go through anything like this experience again anytime soon.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

Sisyphean climate battles--Can we just move along?

A few letters to editors in recent weeks recalled for us Sisyphus, and long-ago battles that need continually to be refought.

Sisyphus, you'll recall, was the Greek mythical figure who shoved a giant boulder to the near the top of a hill each day, only to see if roll back down. For all eternity he was forced daily to push it back up.

The letters, all angry, assert that climate change is not happening, that it's a fraud.

From my perspective, that's a little like the guy who stands up to his knees in water, claiming it's not even a little wet.

Set aside the issue of human involvement in warming. If you choose to believe it's about cosmic radiation, about solar activity or some other natural cycle, fine. There is indeed a class of narrowly focused papers that suggest a role for such things--and even then, the authors mostly say it's a limited role. But most reputable scientists, and most nations, agree that human activity—like fossil fuel consumption and forest clearing—are the primary culprits.

Warming itself is well established. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that 95 percent of glaciers are melting. Plants in temperate zones around the world are blooming earlier in the spring. Animals are migrating earlier. Snow melt in California Sierras is occurring two weeks earlier over the past century.

It's even affecting our beer. The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute, in the Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, reported recently on a decline in the quality of Saaz hops, a delicate variety used to make the finest pilsner beer. They blame rising temperatures.

A friend of mine who denies warming says he's a gauge-reader and mistrusts calculated evidence and computer models. Well, sea levels are measurably rising. Oceans are measurably warming. These are not theories. They don't rely on computer models or guesswork. These are things we can measure directly.

The conservative columnist George Will recently and loudly discovered that in February, there was as much ice in the Arctic Ocean as there was in February 20 years ago. What he either ignored or intentionally failed to report is that that ice was dramatically thinner than it was 20 years ago; or that in summer, there was far, far less ice than there was in summers 20 years ago. Less than at any time since we've been able to measure it.

Whether George Will is embarrassed or mule-headed or just plain doesn't care, I don't know. But to my knowledge, he has not fessed up that he mistook ice coverage for ice volume.

If we want some interesting observations, let's set aside both the journalists and the scientists. Who really knows what's going on up there in the icy north?

Business does. The oil companies, mining companies and the nations that border the Arctic know the ice is melting. They're actively arguing about access to the oil and minerals that are under where the ice used to be.

Captain Cook discovered Hawai'i for Europe while he was on his way to find the Northwest Passage. It was not there to be found in the 1770s. It was iced in, as it has been for most of the time since.

But in 2007, the Northwest Passage was clear for the first time in memory—and shipping companies are looking at it as an alternative to the clogged Panama Canal for getting from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Shipping companies are already taking advantage of the reduced ice cover over the northern side of Asia and Europe. This fall, two German cargo ships became the first commercial vessels ever to cross from east to west, NORTH of Russia, through the Arctic Ocean. These German ships, which were accompanied by an ice breaker just in case, were headed from South Korea to Rotterdam, in Holland.

China Daily columnist Liu Shinan decried the event, not because he doesn't believe it, but because shipping in the Arctic Ocean could threaten the health of Arctic ecosystems.


The point is that climate change is not something we need to worry about in the future. It's here, now. The folks at this maple syrup farm are worried. They're tapping their trees two weeks earlier each year than they did forty years ago. And it's affecting maple sugar production.

The prospect of no maple syrup on your hotcakes not enough to worry you? How about losing that glass of wine before dinner. Stanford researchers say warming weather has already increased temperatures in the West Coast wine growing regions by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit from 1948 to 2002, and that the continued warming will make many current wine areas unsuitable for commercial vineyards.


Now that's serious.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

Rare native forest bird holding its own; maybe recovering

The Maui Parrotbill, a critically endangered insect-eating forest bird, appears to be holding its own within The Nature Conservancy's actively managed Waikamoi Preserve in the forested uplands of East Maui.

(Image: Maui parrotbill. Source: The Nature Conservancy.)

Scientists are quick to caution that the information is limited to a two-week survey conducted in September of this year, but results suggest that the chunky yellowish bird's numbers are as strong or even stronger than in previous counts.

“The typical storyline with endangered forest birds is one of decline. To have an endangered bird maintain its population and perhaps even show signs of increasing is very encouraging and cause for celebration,” said Dr. Sam Gon, the Conservancy's senior scientist and cultural advisor.

It is a big deal in a world in which the primary direction of many Hawaiian native forest birds is toward extinction. The rarest of them, the po‘ouli, may be extinct. Its last two members have not been seen since 2004 (Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project).

“For populations of an endangered forest bird to remain somewhat stable for nearly 30 years is encouraging,” said the Conservancy’s Maui program director Mark White.

The rare bird survey was led by Dr. Dusti Becker, an ornithologist and project coordinator for the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project. Her team estimated that there are about 20 parrotbills per square kilometer of forest between Waikamoi Stream and the Ko‘olau Gap, on the windward slope of Haleakalā.

“I didn't expect that there would be that many birds there,” Becker said. A previous survey had placed the density at less than half that number.

The 5 to 6-inch long birds are olive green on top, yellowish beneath and have a distinctive yellow stripe over their eyes. Their name comes from their short, powerful beaks, which they use to pry open bark and twigs to reach insects and grubs. They are now found at elevations about a mile above sea level, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that only around 500 individual birds survive.

The birds, once more widespread on Maui and also on Moloka‘i, are now only found on Maui, and only within a range of 19 square miles on the high windward slopes of Haleakalā. More than a quarter of the known habitat for the parrotbills is within Waikamoi Preserve. Much of the rest is within the state's Hanawi Natural Area Reserve, where parrotbills occur at a density of about 40 per square kilometer.

The iconic crested honeycreeper, which is also endangered but is more numerous than the parrotbill, was also frequently seen during the bird population study at Waikamoi, Becker said.

In the survey, two-person teams walked numerous trails over a two-week period, stopping at regular intervals to watch for birds and listen for their calls within the 400-acre survey area. They saw or heard dozens of parrotbills, including at least three juveniles.

“We can say with confidence that Waikamoi hosts a breeding population,” White said.

The latest survey suggests a density double that of an earlier count, but the paper warned that the previous count was limited in scope, and may not have accurately represented the actual population. Still, it is possible that removal of pigs and improvement of the understory vegetation growth—which parrotbills use for feeding habitat—has increased population size at Waikamoi.

The Nature Conservancy has been actively managing the 5,230-acre Waikamoi Preserve since acquiring a permanent conservation easement to the property in 1983, from Haleakalā Ranch.

Since that time, the Conservancy has fenced out pigs, removed alien plants and increased native plants that forest birds and other species depend on. A recent vegetation survey in another portion of the preserve found a three-fold increase in native shrub cover over the past 15 years.

That's a good thing for parrotbills, for whom more native shrubs means more food. Their main feeding technique is prying insects and grubs out of dead branches and fruit and the bark of native shrubs and trees.

Becker said their preferred food sources appear to be grubs from the fruit of the native shrub kanawao, and insects and grubs from the dead branches of ‘ōhelo and ‘ākala. They also pull insects and grubs from the bark of ‘ōhi‘a and koa trees, lichen and any woody, rotting surface.

“At Waikamoi, my sense is that it's a growing population, fundamentally because of forest recovery,” Becker said.

If the population is growing, there is some hope of continued increase, since the recovery of the Waikamoi undergrowth is not complete. The forest understory is still more open than in the prime parrotbill habitat at Hanawi.

For more information:

The Nature Conservancy's Waikamoi Preserve: http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/hawaii/preserves/art2358.html

On the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project: www.mauiforestbirds.org

© The Nature Conservancy

Electric cars provide grid storage in two different ways

Changes in technology create problems, and solve them.

The electric car, interestingly, could inadvertently resolve one of the troubling issues in Hawai'i's utility-scale energy picture—in two different ways.

(Image: The all-electric Tesla Roadster. Credit: Tesla Motors.)

Both of them address the issue—important in Hawai'i—of how to blend intermittent power sources into a grid that has a need for reliable, constant energy.

Electric vehicles are viewed by many as the future of personal transportation. Even if fueled from the oil-fired utility's plug, they use far less fossil fuel than a gas-powered car. In large part, that's because big utility-scale powerplants are dramatically more efficient than hundreds of little car engines.

Many visionaries have posited an energy future in which these electric cars serve the community in another way. While they are plugged in, a smart utility grid might draw power from the battery cars to make up for temporary shortages in generation capacity.

You could set your car to always keep enough of a charge for your daily driving, but to allow the utility access to some of your power. You'd get paid for this, of course.

This works nicely if there's a big intermittent utility power source. Example: If the wind stops blowing, the utility can turn to electric cars to keep the grid up in the minutes or hours it takes to bring other generators online.

That's emergency energy storage.

But there's another role for electric cars.

What happens to those vehicle's big battery packs 8 or 10 years and a couple of thousand charges down the road, when they won't hold a full charge any more, and you want to replace them.

They don't need to be recycled yet. They're still capable of holding 80 percent of a charge, and may still handle thousands more recharge cycles. They're just too weak to run your car as far as you need to go.

Those old batteries could be converted to direct utility use. They could become massive battery banks that would, for example, store photovoltaic power for use when the sun isn't shining.

Project Better Place, which has been discussing an electric car future for Hawai'i, said one of their visions for older batteries is for this application.

Now Nissan is suggesting a similar use.

Each company—Better Place and Nissan—has developed a business model to ease the concerns of motorists about battery life cycle.

Better Place would retain ownership of the battery packs, and their system would even allow you to accomplish a quick charge by simply swapping depleted batteries for a fully charged battery pack. Nissan is proposing a battery lease system for its LEAF car, with the batteries available as utility battery banks when they come off lease.

So, waiting in the wings with the electric vehicle future, is one resolution to the problem of intermittent power supply.

This isn't pie in the sky stuff. Some utilities already have battery farms. And others are planning them. Some battery makers are already converting their automotive lithium-ion batteries to utility storage configurations.

The government is putting quite a bit of energy (sorry!) into the concept of utility scale battery storage: This one, from the Sandia National Laboratories, is already couple of years old.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

UH climate collaboration uses raw computing power

Atmospheric and ocean scientists working with one of the world's most powerful computers anticipate that new modeling research will lead to much better predictions of things like the paths and progress of hurricanes.

As well as predictions of climate events that have a less immediate impact on our lives.

One of the issues with computerized climate models is that the models in the past have use such a big grid that it can be difficult to get quality results. If a modeling program is only able to deal with blocks on a map that are 120 miles wide, then fine features smaller than that can get missed.

“In the real world, things occur on much smaller scales,” said Kevin Hamilton, interim director of the University of Hawai'i's International Pacific Research Center (IPRC).

The limitation has been the raw computing power needed to create fine resolution. So along comes Earth Simulator, one of the most powerful computers in the world, to help resolve the issue. Earth Simulator 1 was in 2002 the most powerful computer on the globe, and Earth Simulator 2 is even smarter.

Earth Simulator is operated by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), which collaborates with the IPRC on climate research. The latest IPRC newsletter reviews some of the work they're doing.

With that kind of power, researchers have been able to shrink the grid to two miles or so. At that scale you can almost pick out individual clouds.

For climate scientists, that kind of power is exciting.

“We can run these really high resolution models for hundreds of years,” Hamilton said. “We're on the leading edge of what things you can model.”

The system can also be used to model ocean circulation at finer scales than ever before, including the movement of water through ocean canyons and narrow straits that simply would have been invisible on less powerful computers.

More interesting, perhaps, for Hawai'i residents, is the system's ability to model hurricanes. With the fine scale available, researchers have been able to use the model to compare the behavior of an actual hurricane with the development of a virtual hurricane based on the weather information available when it was just starting out.

“It was very exciting. We can actually see the storm in the model,” Hamilton said.

“We're not saying that all tropical systems are predictable,” but this kind of research is likely to lead to dramatically improved weather forecasting on the scale of a week to a couple of months out.

IPRC and JAMSTEC have been collaborating since 1997, and recently expanded their partnership through 2014. Officials of both agencies met in Honolulu last week to discuss their work.

“It was really to review where we are,” Hamilton said.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009