Everything is run by consensus decision-making, which – given sufficient structure – generally works better than many people would give it credit for. In meetings, points and counter-points are raised, with a facilitator trying make sure that people wait for their turn to speak. ‘Jazz hands’ are waved to indicate active agreement; ‘Not me’ open hands are held up to indicate that someone wishes to distance themselves from a proposal, but won’t directly stand against it; in principle, a closed fist indicates a ‘block’ to say that someone absolutely disagrees and will not give their consent to something. I have yet to see a block in action – what usually happens is that the discussion goes back and forth until it reaches a point that everyone is willing to go along with. Sometimes this takes a long time, especially in big groups with many people who are not used to doing things this way.

The consensus decision-making reflects the anarchist roots of the movement, as does the focus on direct action – that is, acting directly to disrupt activities that people feel need to be stopped, rather than waiting and hoping for the government or the parties involved to put a stop to them. After New Labour and the ConDem coalition, huge numbers of people broadly on the ‘left wing’ of British politics feel deeply disenfranchised by the electoral system. Meanwhile many feel pessimistic about the usefulness of mass demonstrations after the government of the time freely ignored two million people marching against the Iraq War, with the weight of public opinion behind them. Direct action looks more and more like one of the only expressions of dissent that still remains useful in today’s political climate. and it is unsurprising that it has been rising to greater prominence in recent years.

Since Climate Camp is explicitly non-hierarchical, it lends itself to splintering, and much of the direct action takes place in small affinity groups with their own small-scale consensus decisions. There is therefore no mechanism to ensure that everybody attending agrees with the specifics of everything that gets done in the name of Climate Camp, and opinions vary widely about things like the degree of fluffiness that should be expected on actions. For the most part everything falls squarely within the tradition of non-violent direct action, but it struck me a couple of weeks ago that Climate Camp spokespeople are apparently careful to avoid advertising it as an explicitly non-violent movement.

This year’s camp at the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters just outside Edinburgh apparently saw windows getting smashed, paint thrown, and people rushing at police to try to get past them. This could all still be plausibly described as non-violent, but it’s arguable, and such spikiness alienates many participants and more members of the public and media. The flip-side, I suppose, is that property damage might be justifiable in certain circumstances – to stop greater damage elsewhere, for example – and allowing the police to stop you by just standing there gives them a good deal more power than they would otherwise have, power we have often seen them abuse in the past. The strict adherence to non-violence has often been a bone of contention in protest movements, and while I would be much more comfortable with a consistently non-violent movement, it is not altogether surprising that there is not a sufficiently strong consensus to keep it that way.

That said, it is overwhelmingly non-violent, and other actions included jumping up on the RBS-sponsored Fringe stage on the Royal Mile to sing a song about tar sands to the tune of Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’, and several blockades of individual RBS buildings as well as actions against Cairn Energy and Forth Energy, two RBS-bankrolled companies involved in particularly dubious energy-generation projects.

The media and public response to Climate Camp has always been mixed; many people are sympathetic with the aims of the movement, but the whole idea of direct action – non-violent or otherwise – scares a lot of people, and notoriously the merest mention of anarchism has people covering their ears and ducking for cover. It’s also proved rather easy for many writers to dismiss it through broad-brush ad hominem stereotyping – they’re all a bunch of useless hippie layabouts, or just a load of attention-seeking rich kids on their summer holidays, or whatever. In my experience, actually meeting people and talking to them almost always makes such dismissals seem pretty stupid, but obviously a lot of people find it very easy to see them and go ‘oh yeah, those sorts of people, I hate those guys’. However you look at it, the camps have received substantial media attention. Much of it has been negative, and I’ve never been entirely convinced that all publicity is good publicity, but it has also included pieces like this one in the Sunday Herald and several in the Guardian drawing a lot of attention to issues which have too often gone unreported.

The movement goes on evolving, and each year has been interestingly different from the last. There was considerable discussion last year about the importance of its anarchist roots, and its implicit critique of capitalism, which may have been reflected in the decreased fluffiness this time round. This was the first Climate Camp I’ve visited since the 2007 one at Heathrow, and I’ll be curious to know what the post-mortem will look like.

For once I pretty much know how much I used of each of the ingredients, because I followed the risotto essentials from the excellent mushroom risotto recipe (one of the few recipes I’ve ever actually followed as such) in The Vegetable Book, by Colin Spencer (one of my all-time favourite books). This provided a good-sized helping for three people, possibly greedy people. You could probably feed four average-sized stomachs without too much trouble. I would describe this as semi-sweet – enough so that it feels indulgent, but not insane, for this to constitute a main evening meal.

• 2/3 cup of arborio rice
• 2/3 cup of white wine and/or sweet sherry
• 150g of chestnuts (100g dried, reconstituted)
• Loads of cocoa. Um, about 50g maybe?
• 7 tbs of coconut oil, or a mix of oil and butter or whatever, if you’re not vegan – this may be more than is strictly necessary
• Cinnamon
• Cardamom
• 4 pears
• A little salt
• The juice and rind of about half a lemon

Get the chestnuts ready to go, first – I used dried chestnuts that needed boiling for 10 minutes and then draining and clearing of a few bits of brown skin. You can probably get them in tins or cook fresh ones on an open fire, whatever works for you. They need to be in small pieces, so break them or chop it up quite finely. Once they’re ready you need to chop up the pears into smallish chunks, ready to go.

Melt the coconut oil and add the pears together with the chestnuts, lemon, salt and spices, then once they’ve started to soften add the rice and cocoa. Mix well, so the rice starts to take up the flavours around it, then add 1 and a quarter cups of hot water and bring to the boil. Simmer with the lid on for eight minutes, then let it stand for five. Check that the rice is well cooked – if it’s not, you might need to add a little more water and turn the heat back on for a bit.

Then eat.

Note: Although this was off the top of my head, I’m not the first to have invented it. I’m okay with that.

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

My brother, Leo Murray, is an animator as well as an activist. He made this film for his animation master’s degree at the Royal College of Arts, and I was very impressed indeed with the job he did of communicating the science, visually and verbally – beautiful use of animation to convey scientific concepts, and an interesting blackboard-inspired style. The full script includes extensive journal references to back up what he’s saying.

I maintain the web page for the film, though I didn’t do most of the design. I have also helped to coordinate the translations, which now exist for most of the major European languages, with several Asian versions on their way too. It’s been great to see it get watched online by well over 100,000 people, but this is still not nearly enough – the message is very important indeed, and this film conveys it remarkably well, packing a whole lot of information into a very short time in a very watchable style. At this point it would be particularly valuable if people could spread the word more outside of the English-speaking world.

What this is about is that climate change is probably a much bigger threat than anybody realised even a few years ago. We’ve been hearing more and more about it in the news, but I think it’s still not so clear to most people why – I suspect the increased coverage is often written off as media hype, rather than a reflection of the fact we really ought to be much more worried than we thought we needed to be.

The IPCC’s last report erred very much on the conservative side, as is the nature of reports which must be agreed to by all parties. Newer evidence had trouble getting fitted in, so it did not really even try to assess the importance of positive feedback loops in all of this, which has only recently started to become clear. Essentially, there is good reason to think that some of the changes caused by warming will feed back into themselves to cause more warming, potentially leading to runaway climate change in a frighteningly short time – we’re talking several degrees of warming over just a few decades here, and possibly less than ten years to effect the changes needed to prevent this from happening.

There is of course some uncertainty in all of this, and it may yet turn out that the situation is not nearly as bad as it looks… and that’s really just as well, because if it is as bad as it looks, I don’t much fancy humankind’s chances of doing what we need to before it’s too late. It’s not too late yet though…

I have two theories about the sort of sideways icicles we sometimes see. Either they come from ice that has cracked and water has seeped through and refrozen, or they are caused by fingers of ice crystal which get a head start on the rest of the puddle for some reason – most likely, some facet of the surface they’re growing on just happens to provide a perfect nucleation point, and the crystals grow out from there because there’s nowhere else for them to get a foothold. Even though this starts at the level of water molecules forming neat little piles too tiny for any microscope to pick apart, in the right conditions these minuscule fingers of crystal just grow bigger and bigger…

Some bubbles usually form in ice as it’s freezing. These are due to the presence of dissolved air in the water, which is no longer able to stay dissolved when it gets colder, so it migrates into pockets as the water freezes around it. Bubbles like these, trapped in the Antarctic ice core, tell us what the air on Earth has been like over hundreds of thousands of years, providing the strongest evidence that the temperature on Earth varies in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. We know, for instance, that levels of carbon dioxide and methane are higher, and rising faster, than they have been in 800,000 years.

Larger bubbles also form under ice when it starts to melt from beneath, forming a space between the frozen layer and the water underneath. This process is dominated by the formation of liquid water, dripping and surface tension coming to the fore, so rather than the complex, angular crystals associated with freezing, we see the air forming in great bubbles and voluptuous curves.

The patterns formed by frost depend on a number of factors – the relative temperature of the air and the ground and how much they vary, the speed of the wind and the level of moisture, and so on. Another factor is the nature of the surface the frost forms on – sometimes frost closely follows the lines of the surface, and sometimes it forms much more quickly in some spots than others, where imperfections in a smooth surface get the crystallisation process started. The patterns formed can give us insight into hidden features of the surface below, the subtleties we see speaking of deeper subtleties beyond our perception…

a quickr pickr post

I think that’s as far as their plan went – they didn’t have a camera to record the moment for posterity, or anything like that, so it was probably quite lucky that I was wandering past at that moment.

On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever put the picture online until now – and though I’m pretty sure I gave them my email address, they never did get in touch to ask for a copy.

For my part I found the Gyokuro delicious, with a particularly deep flavour and very little bitterness to it. It stands up well to multiple brewings, at least as many as I could fit in on my visit.

Gyokuro is made from tea that is shaded for the last few weeks of growing, deepening both colour and flavour, adding to the theanine and caffeine content. This is also how they make Matcha, the powdered tea used in the tea ceremony cha-no-yu, although the drying process differs.

Gyokuro should be brewed with cooler water than most green teas, only 50-60°C, and far more tea per cup – two tablespoons for just a quarter-pint of tea! The taste and the rebrewability should make up for the apparent lack of economy.

With thanks to O-Cha and Wikipedia for some details.

We get up early in the morning to meet Sunayana and Kenji from Calcutta Walks, at Shovabazar¹ Metro station² in North Calcutta³. They are to show us around some of the old houses and narrow streets of this part of the city. It’s uncomfortably early for me, but it’s worth it to be able to walk around in the mild heat of the morning, rather than the scorching sun of mid-day.

This is where the richer Bengalis mostly made their homes in the time of the Raj, and thanks to this it is one of the few parts of Calcutta with a visible history of secular Indian architecture, going back more than a century or so. From the street itself upwards, everything man-made here looks and feels more Indian than most of Calcutta, where nearly all the public buildings (temples aside) are obvious Colonial hangovers, and newer developments are so often so obviously modelled after their Western equivalents.

Here we see why Kolkata was known as the ‘City of Palaces’ – an unlikely number of spectacularly grand old palatial homes are clustered here, built by rajas and nawabs to show off their status and house their families for centuries to come. Their wide courtyards are surrounded by beautiful arches with expansive rooms beyond, and since we are there in the lead-up to Durga Puja, most of them also have particularly impressive shrines set up in them, each in the house style of the family that owns them. Although many of their proud residents are quite happy for us to pop in and look around in wonder, very few of them allow photography.

We briefly visit a very small press, printing packaging on letterpress machines older than independent India. Many such tiny industries exist here, where the old families often find themselves with more property than money, and rent out the odd room to make ends meet.

Our guides buy us some ludicrously cheap, very tasty and reasonably safe fried street food, served in disposable little bowls made of leaves, and take us to see traditional sweets being made. It is fascinating to watch these vast pans of curds and syrup being skilfully manipulated into tiny confectionery treats, but preferring to avoid dairy, I only allow myself a taste.

Another highlight is the maze of narrow, twisty streets of Shovabazar, where dacoits and resistance fighters alike could vanish as required. The sheer number of available alleyways would fox pursuers, and the tiny space between opposing walls would keep out any vehicles, and in many places it would make it easy for a competent climber to vanish in seconds. With sympathetic residents on your side you could melt away here like nothing, and never be found again.

1. Best pronounced ‘Shobabajar’ – Bengali doesn’t actually have any v or z sounds, but they’re often used in transliteration of words and names out of deference to their Sanskrit or Persian origins
2. I’ve written about my experiences on the Kolkata Metro, here, if you’re interested – and you can follow links from there to more writing about my trip…
3. for no very good reason I’m spelling Kolkata as Calcutta throughout this; both spellings and pronunciations are in widespread use by residents, and I tend to use the other, but our guides use the old-fashioned/English spelling in their name, and ‘North Calcutta’ is an English phrase – if I’m talking about Kolkata, should I call it Uttor Kolkata as well?

Many years later, a friend asked me if I happened to know anything about caustics; I had never heard of them, so she explained that she was talking about the shifting patterns of light made by rippling water, the curves of light you see at the bottom of mugs, and so on. Finally I had a name for these patterns that had enchanted me since my infancy; when I got home I looked up the word, wondering what these things might have to do with caustic soda or holocausts.

Most caustics are quite harmless, but if you have ever used a magnifying glass to focus the light of the sun into a tight point to make smoking holes in things, you have witnessed their potential destructive power; this is where they get their name. Archimedes is famously said to have used a giant parabolic mirror to set fire to Roman ships using reflected sunlight, during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC. In modern times, the Olympic Torch is similarly lit by a large parabolic mirror focusing the sun’s rays on a single point.

Caustics can occur whenever light leaves a curved surface; most often that means they have been reflected or refracted. Refraction caustics, caused when light rays are bent by passing through something, tend to show less extreme distortion than reflection caustics, but often show subtle colour variations like light from a prism, because shorter wavelengths of light are refracted more than longer ones.

Either kind of caustic can hugely amplify tiny imperfections or very subtle curvature into striking patterns, the effect increasing with distance from the surface. For example, very few windows are truly flat, and it is common to see cross-like shapes or mottles reflected on the walls opposite, when the sun is low in the sky.

Strictly speaking a caustic is the entire envelope of light which leaves a curved surface; the patterns of illumination we usually see are just the intersection of that three-dimensional structure with another surface. Something of the 3D nature of caustics comes out when the distance to the illuminated surface varies, with some features getting washed out with distance while others become ever more prominent. See this short video clip for an example; there’s a much longer film, with music, linked here.

We’d notice very quickly if they weren’t there – simulating realistic caustics is an important issue in computer graphics mainly for this reason, and an otherwise convincing scene will seem oddly flat and unreal if it is missing caustics that should be there. Mostly, though, caustics are one of those kinds of things which quietly make life that much more pretty while they just sit in the background, beneath our threshold of conscious attention – but which often reveal truly striking beauty when we pay them a bit of attention.

Additional photos courtesy of Reciprocity, SEngstrom and suchstuff; see more in the Caustics pool on Flickr. You might also like to play about with my interactive caustics-simulation animation, Zoobie.

Flavour perception is a deceptively complex thing. Human taste buds are capable of sensing salty, sweet, sour and bitter (the four classical elements of human taste) plus umami (the savoury taste of glutamates such as MSG, found in things like mushrooms, soy sauce and meat) and probably fat (the jury is still out on this one, but the evidence is strong). However, none of those play a central role in tasting something like most good tea or wine!

Most of the flavour of the most interesting drinks comes instead from their aromas. Our sense of smell is easily the most elaborate of all our senses – unlike the five or so basic tastes detected by our tongues, or the three basic colours detected by our eyes, our noses are capable of distinguishing thousands of different molecules.

Complicating matters further is the interaction between olfaction (the sense of smell) and gustation (the sense of taste provided by the taste buds); sometimes we won’t be aware of an aroma until we taste something with our tongues, and sometimes a particular taste becomes obvious only when we smell something associated with it. The two are bound up together so tightly that most of the time, people are not even aware that they are ‘tasting’ things with their noses, not just their tongues. For this reason it is always worthwhile to be conscious of the smell of fine teas, wines, whiskies and so on before tasting them, but also aware that the depths of their flavour cannot be judged until they reach the tongue and the palate.

There’s more: Add to the gustation and olfactory components the trigeminal sensations of pain and heat triggered by both physically hot and spicy hot food; the effects of texture, known in the business as ‘mouthfeel’; and astringency – the quality of tea, red wine and some fruits which makes us pucker our mouths, regardless of how they actually taste.

On Teas

So, to tea: What can we say about how tea tastes, and why? For a start, the overwhelming majority of true teas are at least a little bitter, and all are astringent to a greater or lesser extent. The tiny fragments of blended black tea used to make your basic tea bag for English tea are extremely bitter, and so astringent that the infusion is almost impossible to drink straight. Thankfully though, the molecules that give it these properties bind to the proteins in milk just as readily as they will to our tongues. They can also be more fully dissolved into the tea by adding lemon or some other mild acid – one of the few times when adding lemon makes something much less bitter. You will also notice that strong black tea clears and brightens almost immediately when lemon is stirred in, for exactly the same reason.

Lighter black teas like Darjeelings and Chinese black teas (Keemun, Yunnan and so on) tend to be much lesser bitter than their cousins, but this is largely because they are standardly brewed weaker. These teas have a depth of flavour coming from their subtle aromas, and many people feel that this goes to waste when they are made with milk, which has its own not-so-subtle smell. It might be argued, though, that a little milk is not offensive in a cup of the more robust light black teas, allowing for a stronger brew without totally overpowering the flavour.

Good green tea is usually not more than slightly bitter, as long as it is drunk while hot, and not brewed too strong. However, green tea bags are usually made with far too much tea, low-grade and broken up, and in my experience almost always make a bitter brew. Brewing temperature is absolutely crucial with green tea, which should never be made with boiling water; scalding the leaves that way not only removes much of their pleasant flavour, but gives them a new acrid flavour, which puts many people off the tea entirely. Many green teas have a flavour dominated by vegetative tones. This might be accompanied by a gentle smokiness, as in gunpowder tea and chun mee; rich, slightly flowery depths, as in pi lo chun (bi luo chun); or a sort of sea-sidey almost-fishiness in the case of most Japanese green teas, which sounds like it would be horrible but is actually oddly pleasant.

Oolong tea is tea which has been partially oxidised, placing it between green tea (which is plucked and dried quickly before the leaves can blacken) and black tea (in which the leaves are rolled or cut, and carefully oxidised over the course of several hours before drying). In general, it tends to have richer aromas than any other unflavoured tea, and most varieties are notably much less bitter than any black tea. There is enormous variety in the range of oolong flavours, and also extraordinary depth to them. Some are sweet, some flowery, some toasty, some autumnal, some have flavours which the English language is quite at a loss to describe. Good Chinese tea sets designed for oolong sometimes include separate ‘scent cups’, into which the tea is poured before it gets to the tiny drinking cup, just to give the tea drinker an opportunity to savour the aroma more deeply.

Like green teas, oolongs can generally be brewed several times, and each brew will often bring out different flavours from the last. Temperature is again important; though oolongs are not so thoroughly ruined by too-hot water, much of their taste will go to waste.

White tea is the lightest of all the true teas, made from young leaves plucked while they still have the baby-hairs on them and dried at once to preserve them in almost the same state they came off the bush. They have gentle flavours, never more than a tiny bit bitter when brewed correctly, often with a sweet aroma somewhat reminiscent of honey. Despite the softness of their flavours, there is a depth to them which should be lingered on. White teas must be brewed with water well below boiling point, and can be steeped repeatedly.

Pu-erhs, sometimes described as ‘post-fermented’, are a whole world of tea to themselves, despite being a relatively tiny niche market. Their musty aroma often borders on mouldy, which puts many people off, but they do have a pleasant, earthy richness to their taste which belies their smell. Pu-erh fans tend to be extremely enthusiastic about it, often to the puzzlement of the rest of the world. Pu-erh tastes like it must be good for you, and according to Chinese tradition and some scientific studies, it really is.

Some of the best-known of Chinese teas are flavoured, and derive most of their character not from the tea itself but from things added to it. Proper jasmine tea is flavoured by being left with drying jasmine flowers to absorb their flavour; lapsang souchong is smoked, traditionally over pine wood, to obtain its intense, tarry aroma; Earl Grey is scented with oil of bergamot, obtained from a particular kind of orange. Genmaicha, popular in Japan and Korea (where it is called hyun mi nok cha), is made of green tea with roasted rice, and it is the toasty flavour of the rice that dominates its taste.

Another toasty tea is hojicha, a rich brown tea made by roasting green tea. It has an unusually savoury taste, with a slightly nutty aroma; although it is not yet well-known in the West, it is generally extremely popular with those who have tried it. It is low in caffeine, and can be drunk hot or cold – for my money, it makes the most refreshing iced tea there is.

All photos are by the author except ‘Think in Pictures‘ by munded and ‘Pu-erh tea‘ by shop boy.
Links in the text are to further tea writing by the author.

Pretor-Pinney also designed the Guide, typeset it and put together the diagrams, and in every case he has done a beautiful job. This volume is gorgeously produced, with a delightful, atmospheric woodcut opening each chapter, plentiful photography throughout (mainly contributed by members of the Society) and the old iconic cloud symbol from the BBC’s weather forecasts serving as a vignette between each section. All in all, the design gives the book a dreamy, flighty air, in keeping with both the subject matter and the style of the prose.

The writing is fluid and un-self-consciously eloquent, rambling without ever getting tedious, educational without ever getting lecturey. The author skips amiably from topic to topic, interweaving personal and historical anecdotes, scientific observations and poetic ruminations on the beauty and vitality of the skies.

Each of the major classes of cloud has a chapter dedicated to it, always going into some depth about what characterises the clouds in question and talking a little about the meteorology of it, but often spending more time talking about other things – clouds in history and art, say, or various phenomena that come along with the clouds themselves (most of the Cirrostratus chapter is devoted to discussing ice haloes, for example; much of Nimbostratus is about rain from all sorts of different clouds).

The beginning of each of these chapters features a summary table for the clouds that are its nominal subject, giving a few illustrative photos, telling you where they form, in what species and varieties they appear, how to distinguish them from any superficially similar clouds, and so on.

The scientific details are substantial enough to satisfy the amateur meteorologist in me, but never so technical as to bog down the flow of the writing; where the author has had to simplify to make it comprehensible to the general reader, he is not afraid to say so, and the insatiably curious can always follow his pointers to more in-depth work.

After the ten chapters for the main cloud groups, the last section of the book (‘not forgetting…‘) goes onto things which couldn’t quite be fitted in elsewhere. First, there is a chapter on The Other Clouds – accessory clouds such as the pileus (‘like a cloud haircut’) and pannus (‘dark shreds of condensation, which form like ghostly apparitions in the saturated air of rainfall’) which only appear alongside other clouds; supplementary features such as the incus (anvil) that often extends from the top of a Cumulonimbus cloud, or the breast-like mamma clouds that occasionally blob from the bottom of that; and the high, high clouds that form way above more common clouds, up in the mesosphere or the stratosphere – nacreous and noctilucent clouds respectively.

Chapter Twelve’s subject is contrails, the trails of condensation that form behind high-altitude aeroplanes.These streaks may provide an interesting glimpse into the process of cloud development, but they are also strongly implicated in climate change; it is largely thanks to them that the contribution of aeroplanes to the greenhouse effect is almost three times as large as it would be if CO2 was the only thing we needed to worry about. Much of the chapter is spent exploring the threat of global warming as it relates to aeroplane exhaust, with a substantial portion also given over to the history and science of cloud seeding – a technology which can be surprisingly effective in inducing rainfall (albeit only when the conditions are right), and which gets discussed oddly rarely considering the power of it.

In the final chapter, the author goes into journalist mode to recount in detail his mission to visit the Morning Glory, a spectacular and near-unique cloud formation in northern Australia, where rolls of cloud can be seen stretching from horizon to horizon as they make their way over the outback. Glider pilots come from all over the world to surf on its extraordinary, visibly roiling updrafts, and witness one of the world’s most awesome clouds. Despite the stylistic departure, the story provides a surprisingly elegant close to the book, as the author soars alongside a few of this planet’s most devoted cloud-lovers.