Lightning

Inter-cloud lightning over Toulouse (France)
Creative Commons image.

I love storms. I especially like seeing lightning fork down from the sky and hearing the thunder boom a few seconds afterword. Lately with all the rainy weather we’ve been having I started wondering: Why does lightning strike? How does thunder make its signature rumbling sound? What happens if you get hit by lightning?

Lightning happens because of electrical tension between the ground and storm clouds. Warm air currents in the bottom of a cloud rises to the top half of the cloud and freezes into ice crystals. The heavy ice then crashes down to the bottom of the cloud, bringing a downdraft of cold air with it. Air currents circulating throughout the cloud smash ice and water particles together, generating electricity. That electricity charges ice and water particles. Positive particles float to the top of the cloud, and the heavier negative particles, known as graupel, sink to the bottom.

Author's diagram of a lightning strike.

During the storm, especially during a violent windy storm, clouds move around. The movement of the clouds over the ground makes the ground positively charged. A tense electrical field develops between the earth and sky.

Once the tension becomes strong enough, the cloud sends out a “stepped ladder” of invisible negative charge that reaches for a good conductor to the ground, usually something tall like a tree. At the same time, the ground sends up a “streamer” of positive charge. When the stepped ladder meets the positive streamer the charges neutralize in a flash, that’s lightning. Lightning bolts tend to be only two inches in diameter, but the air around them reaches a shocking 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s five times hotter than the surface of the sun.

Air isn’t used to being this hot. When heated by the lightning, it compresses faster than the speed of sound, and then expands to send out shock waves that’s thunder. Thunder rumbles because lightning occurs in a series of short bursts. Since light travels faster than sound we see lightning before we hear thunder.

Lightning is, extremely hot, extremely powerful. What happens when you are hit by such heat and power? Immediate effects can include death, cardiac arrest, and severe burns caused by water on the body quickly turning to steam. Sometimes victims of lightning strikes will be tattooed with branching marks known as Lichtenberg figures caused by high voltage electrical discharges that pass on the surface or through insulating materials. In lightning strike victims, figures are formed by ruptured capillaries and generally disappear after a few months. Some people will show no visible signs of injury after being hit by lightning, but the trauma inside their bodies is huge. Long-term effects of a lightning strike can include hearing loss, chest pains, seizures, nausea, amnesia, and headaches. Lightning can cause brain damage with strange effects, though not necessarily adverse ones.

Lichtenberg Figures
Creative Commons image. Copyright holder: Bert Hickman

Being hit by lightning is traumatic and emotional, resulting in a huge release of neurotransmitters. The high voltage electricity coursing the strike victim’s brain has effects we don’t know the full volume of. After being hit by lightning, some people experience a change in values or interests, but we don’t know why.

View of lightning system from above.
Creative Commons image.

One lightning strike victim struggled with addiction before she was hit and felt that the lightning strike helped turn her life around.

A more famous example is Tony Cicoria’s lightning strike story. Cicoria was hit by lightning in his 40s, and though he was knocked unconscious and had a near death, and out-of-body experience, he didn’t even go to the hospital. His doctor, who saw him soon after the hit, didn’t find anything wrong with Cicoria aside from occasional memory lapses which only lasted a few months.

The lightning must have effected Cicoria’s brain more than he or his doctor thought because after the memory lapses ended, Cicoria began to feel an overwhelming desire to listen to classical piano music, especially Chopin. Before the strike he’d preferred rock music. He immediately began to teach himself to play and spent every moment he could at the piano.

Soon he started to hear classical piano music in his head, not musical hallucinations, but as he described it, a flow of musical inspiration. Cicoria longed to notate and perfect this music in his head, and he began to painstakingly teach himself to compose. Cicoria doubts he would have ever done this if it weren’t for the lightning strike. You can listen to one of Cicoria’s compositions, fittingly called the lightning sonata, here.

Sources.

Obesity and Climate Change

Obesity and climate change. They may seem worlds apart, just two separate issues we happen to be dealing with at the same time. But, maybe they are not separate issues. Can a case be made that obesity and climate change are intertwined, each feeding off the other? Let’s find out.

Author's own image.

The cycle starts with hungry people living in our modern, hectic world. These people, like all hungry people, want to feed themselves and their families with the best food possible, but they are busy and preparing a meal takes time. Time they can’t afford to spend in the store and over the stove. The fast food place around the corner is more convenient - it takes thirty minutes or less to buy and eat dinner and leaves no kitchen mess to clean up. Perfect for busy days when a home-cooked meal is not an option. Weeks full of busy days pass, and fast food becomes a habit.

Author's own image.

Meanwhile, the fast food companies prosper, providing their customers cheap food served in a minute or two. All that matters is speed, who cares about production that wastes resources and energy? Disposable plates and plastic cups, bowls and utensils make clean up easy. How convenient!

What is the cost of that the convenience? How often do we question where this plastic comes from or wonder where it goes? Raising livestock in green pastures takes too long, so instead, the animals are crammed in small lots and pumped full of grain and drugs until they’re fat enough to be slaughtered for food. The food is prepped in factories, chemists manufacture its aroma and flavor, and the product of this manipulation, the “food,” is pumped full of preservatives to keep it fresh for the long journey from factory to restaurant.

Author's own image.

The low cost of fast food, the speed at which it is produced - these benefits aren’t free. The food quality is lowered, resulting in food that is bad for us, the consumers. We’ve heard about the many ways fast food harms our bodies, but we tend to forget is that fast food is equally bad for the earth.

Author's own image.

Let’s start at the essence of fast food, cheap meat. Producing this meat contributes to global warming. Livestock are big polluters, their flatulence releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. All animals have flatulence and the atmosphere can handle it, but the quantities of livestock needed to sustain our fast-food habit is the problem. In addition, raising this multitude of cattle requires room. A huge amount of room on land. That land often comes from cleared forest, including the Amazon rainforest.

Once the meat, and other fast food ingredients, are produced they need to be shipped to a factory that will transform them into fast food. After the fast food is restaurant ready, it needs to be shipped from the factory to a fast food restaurant. All this shipping uses up fossil fuels. Use of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, into the environment, as well as sulfur dioxide, a major pollutant.

Despite the harm they are doing, fast food companies have not significantly reduced their impact on the environment.

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Author's own image.

This is just the food’s side of the story, what about all the disposable plastic fast food is packaged in and served on? All that has to come from somewhere and it has to go somewhere too. Plastic is made from fossil fuels in a process that releases countless pollutants into the environment. Once plastic is made, it never biodegrades. Some plastic can be recycled, but plastic wrap, bottle caps, and straws can’t. Styrofoam, another packaging option used in fast food, can’t be recycled. In addition, all plastic used in mass food production has to be absolutely new. Recycled plastic is poor in quality and doesn’t meet the qualifications of food grade plastic. We have to produce new plastic just so we can use it once and throw it away.

Author's own image.

Plastic can only be reused if it’s put in a recycling bin, and often it is not. Just on a short walk around my neighborhood I saw large amounts of fast food waste littering street corners and a vacant lot. Maybe this plastic will end up in the river, and from there get swept out to sea to become part of the great Pacific garbage patch. Maybe it will be eaten by an animal, and then the plastic could get stuck in its digestive system. Plastic eaten by animals often prevents them from digesting and absorbing actual food and they die from malnutrition. If someone does pick up the litter, it will be put in a plastic bag and shipped off to a landfill, which isn’t much better since it won’t biodegrade there any more than it will in the ocean or in an animal. Plastic in landfills can leech chemicals into the soil resulting in soil and groundwater pollution.

Author's own image.

Author's own image.

Author's own image.

While all this pollution is going on, the hungry people have gotten even busier. Most people have to drive everywhere, using oil and releasing greenhouse gases as they go. It’s hard to find time for exercise anymore. Most cities and towns are designed around cars, and people who do want to walk to work can’t because highways are in the way. Fast food and sedentary lifestyle is messing with our systems. As people gain weight, physical movement becomes harder and driving becomes even more of a necessity.

Author's own image.

It seems easy to stop eating fast food, just head to the grocery store, pick up some food and cook. But there’s a problem. Fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and dairy products often are expensive when compared to fast food. Far more expensive than anyone expected. Why is this? What happened?

Author's own image.

Now, the supply of good food is low and pricey. The hungry people buy what they can, but they can’t spend all their money on food. Gas is expensive, rent costs money, taxes need to be done, winter clothes are a must. Back in the car, back to Burger King.

Some of the hungry people have enough money to budget and buy produce, grains, dairy and meat. They can afford to spend time cooking. Not everyone has this option. In some areas grocery stores are disappearing, and fast food chains spring up in their place. People who have spent their whole lives eating ready-cooked meals, may not know how to cook their own, and they may not have a store nearby where they can buy healthy groceries. This sort of situation is known as food insecurity and is becoming common.

The world’s population is increasing year after year which means we’ll be producing more fast food. All the environmental havoc produced by fast food will just become more catastrophic if we keep producing food in the same way we do now.

Author's own image.

The cycle doesn’t seem to end.

Author's own image.

What is the answer? How do we end the cycle? Maybe it’s as simple as starting to be aware of how our actions effect the earth and ourselves.

Making a decision to be aware can make a big difference in itself. Once you’re aware, questions will pop up and hopefully, so will solutions.

It may seem like eating an apple instead of a burger from a fast food chain, or avoiding plastic utensils doesn’t change much. But these little steps are the important because they will start to change our minds and attitudes.

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