Here gets into ancient innovations that allowed bananas to be grown outside of their native habitat in Papua New Guinea.
If you haven't seen his content, and you get sucked in, then settle in without distractions - this is the opposite end of spectrum of TikTok, etc. Also, don't watch his "History of Sugar" documentary if you are feeling depressed. Instead watch the "History of Curry".
If you like this long format style of video, you might enjoy Asianometry, "video essays on business, economics, and history." [0] Here is a video on the banana also, "The Wildly Infectious Banana Plague." [1]
Didn't expect to see this on HN, but it's definitely one of my favorite YouTube channels. Most food history content online feels like straight up readings from Wikipedia, but OTR does actual research and interviews. The Golden Triangle episode where they interviewed the anti-CCP rebel veteran who was like 90 years old was pretty neat. Doesn't sound like it'd tie into food, but it does.
My favorite is the history of chili pepper. It's something so fundamental to indian cuisine that I assumed chillies were native to India for a long time. His video shows the true history of how that spice travelled from the Americas to all over the globe
Potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkins/zucchinis/most squashes, cassava, the common bean (including pinto, black, kidney, etc), cassava, sunflowers, avocado, etc all didn't exist in European kitchens until the 1500s (and not really widespread until at least the 1600s).
Also, most of these crops were specifically domesticated in the Andes. If you go to the Andes today you can still find traditional potato farmers who take care of hundreds of varieties of potatoes of all different shapes and colors. Some are ornamental, some are edible raw, some are only used in soup, some are even used medicinally
Maybe surprising is that there are no native species of banana to "the New World" despite there being about 100 species and thousands of named cultivars.
Coffee is another interesting example in the other direction, it's so often associated with places like Colombia, Java, etc that people don't realize it's only native to Ethiopia, and that the majority of coffee consumed around the world today descends from one specific genetic lineage that was cultivated for a few centuries in Yemen.
Have you read Charles C. Mann's book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created"? It's all about the global impact of the opening of the New World by the Europeans, and how the global exchange created and is creating the "homogenocene", the age of homogeneity. There's a part about a folk song in the Philippines that lovingly goes over the crops being grown around a village. They're all introduced.
It really transformed Europe too. Europe's basically a story of famine after famine until they got access to the potato. I don't know if any other technology has saved as many European lives as the potato
Pacific island cultures are a bit unique in their relationship to the New World though. Chickens which come from SE Asian jungles have been in South America since at least 1300 AD. And sweet potatoes were grown in Polynesia around 1000 AD.
Yes exactly. We have chicken remains in Chile that are dated between 1304 and 1424. And we even have DNA confirmation from those bones that link them to modern Polynesian chicken populations. The tailless, blue-egged Araucana breed is still around today and is thought to predate Columbus
Is the flesh soft and sweet like a modern cultivated banana? I wonder how different it is to eat one of those compared to something like a tamarind, which is also mostly seeds, covered in a relatively small amount of edible delicious stuff.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. Every banana that has ever existed has been a clone of that one plant. Every so often, a new mutation occurs that gives us a new variety, but they all trace back to that one plant. It is the most extreme type of monoculture and is constantly threatened by parasites like the Panama Disease, because if one plant is vulnerable, they all are.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it.
I don't think so. There are a ton of varieties of banana that are grown from seed. Humans have cultivated them and selectively bred them from seed for thousands of years, just like every other plant. The seedless bananas that dominate western grocery stores are 1 variety, Cavendish, that have been endlessly cloned from cuttings. They weren't the first seedless variety commercially available, they were preceded by Gros Michel. But either way, travel to southeast Asia and you'll find a lot more varieties on sale.
Interestingly, apparently the Gros Michel banana (which you can still get, if you try hard enough) tastes much more like artificial banana flavor, because that was the dominant variety when the flavor was developed.
Its simply a cost thing as the majority of gros michel bannana plants in areas with the fungus will die every few years as infection takes that long, and most areas gained the fungus during the peak of gros miachel cultivation. But at a small scale you can avoid the fungus or just plant new plants when the fungus takes hold, its just more expensive and limited in scale.
Where does this nonsensical urban legend come from? Any South Asian market has various genomes that do not descend from that. It has to be the most widely-spread confidently-incorrect claim.
Similarly, all apple varieties are propagated like this.
Apple cultivars are not genetic. If you plant seeds, you're going to get some random apples, which probably aren't very good. The cultivars are all produced via cuttings.
The UK straddles the 55th parallel North. Due to the jet streams (and formerly, trade winds) carrying warm air from the Caribbean, it has often benefitted from a milder climate than other regions at similar latitudes: Alaska, Siberia, the Baltic states.
But this is wild. I am only in my 40s but I've seen the climate change significantly and it having a major impact on flora and fauna.
When I was a kid, English wine was a joke and now it's winning prizes because we have the same climate French vineyards did when I was a child. The idea of growing olives in the UK was laughable, but now in the South East of England it's starting to look commercially viable. Only 10 years ago I remember days with highs over 30C being rare, but we just had two weeks of them, accompanied by tropical nights (not dropping below 20C), for the first time I remember.
And now... bananas. Which is, pun intended, utterly bananas.
It feels too late to stop the worst of the damage, but the idea of this accelerating and getting worse is just astonishing to me, that within my lifetime I'd witness such a huge swing in climatology.
Last year ours bloomed, too. The problem is that it happens to late in the year and I can’t wrap that 5m high “tree” to protect from the cold. So the bananas were the size of your pinky. Next problem, once they bloom, they die. So yes, climate change is real. For comparison, we are located in south Germany near Stuttgart and we also have a fig tree and an olive tree in our garden.
We have had figs in southern Germany for decades. Not all varieties grow well here of course but just having figs growing doesn't really tell you much.
I have a paw paw tree that has survived 7 years in northern Wisconsin. Unfortunately it is the only one out of five that I planted that has survived and so I'll never get fruit because they reproduce sexually and as far as I know the closest one is 4 hours south in Madison.
Pawpaws are actually hermaphroditic not dioecious. Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination. However, you can save some male pollen until next year.
Alternatively, you could graft the branch of a pawpaw that flowers earlier to try and get the male and female flowers maturing at the same time. You might also be able to just buy some pollen. It's actually quite easy to collect. You can use a brush to sprinkle it on a female flower
Hmm I guess you're right. Most cultivars seem to be self-incompatible. Like most self-incompatible plants though, it's not 100%. Some cultivars like "Sunflower" don't seem to mind at all
> Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination
How does this work in practice? Do other trees from the same species produce male flowers first, and then female? Logically, if all trees produce female flowers in spring and male flowers in the summer then the species can only survive if the seeds can remain viable unfertilized for months (which is probably not that exceptional for plants, I wouldn't know). But if the female seeds are still viable by the time the plant sprouts its male flowers, exactly how does this prevent self-pollination?
Actually I just looked it up and they're more bizarre than I thought. They are actually "protogynous". Meaning all flowers start off as female and as they mature they turn male.
I should've just said "later" instead of "later in the year"
I'm not sure how long pollen stays viable in the environment. Some species can stay viable for many weeks but most are just a few days I think. They can stay viable for years if refrigerated properly however.
In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.
I grow a plantain orchard in South America and while i need to take double care of such spiders, they are not aggressive at all. I find them super cute and let visit my home as well. :)
Reminds me of Cecropia trees which are adapted to use some ant species as self defense. The trees live 20-30 years (the same length as an ant queen) and exudes a protein rich substance to feed the ants called Müllerian bodies. The ants in return aggressively protect the tree.
Phoneutria are interesting animals. Needed to evolve defenses against the gluttony of monkeys. It must be a tasty spider.
It happens that we are monkeys also, so the venom is carefully designed against us.
There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge to grab a banana.
The spider is easily identified because it has four identical small frontal eyes arranged as a perfect square. Is big, bold and it warns before to attack [1] (most tarantulas are shy). And it jumps, of course. Can hide, once in a blue moon, in exported South American banana bunches (European breed bananas are spider free).
[1] If it raise the legs showing the yellow and black rings beneath is a clear warning saying "get lost right now, of I will land on your face"
It turns out that Phoneutria defensive bites are most often "dry" with little if any venom. It's thought that the spiders conserve venom for use on actual prey items.
BTW, the four frontal eyes in a box is not considered a good taxonomic character for IDing them, as spiders in other related genera also have this. They do have a warning posture, but not a "dance" that I am aware of. Also, they are terrestrial and hunt on the forest floor. The stories of them "jumping" are largely exaggerated.
First of all, thanks for your interesting contribution.
Is a good taxonomic character if you are in Europe, as no European spider, big or small, has this eyes.
Also this is a fast way to discard other tropical spiders that could also appear on orders of imported fresh fruit and have a fearsome look but are harmless.
Tarantulas have small eyes arranged like a bowtie. Huntsmans have four eyes in a line. If you are bitten by a spider that is hairy, bigger than 10cm, and does have eyes arranged like those, is just a pinch, painful but safer than a mosquito bite. Just wash it with soap. Same if the eyes are arranged in a square but two are much bigger than the other two. Safe.
Otherwise.
If you are bitten by a cream hairy spider that has only "3 eyes", one central and two laterals (really 6 in 3 pairs) is a Sicariidae, go to a doctor.
If it has four eyes of the same size arranged in a square be cautious. If it has a middle groove in the rear part of the torax is a Ctenidae, so may be dangerous. As Phoneutria is the most common Ctenidae found in banana bunches, and as we can't discard still that every other genus on the family aren't poisonous, play safe and go to an hospital. If is a harmless related species only they can identify it, and if not you are in the correct place. They can evaluate if is a dry bite and can stabilize you and provide treatment if is not.
The other spiders that are really concerning, the Australian Atrax and Mouse spiders and the black widows are much smaller, 1-5cm, not really hairy and glossy black with red or white marks. They are mostly terrestrial.
If you have not crushed yet the spider, you may need to take a good photo from some distance. Is easier if you trap it before on a glass jar, as long as you can do it safely. If in doubt assure to bring the dead spider with you, so the doctor can see it under a microscope.
Wandering spiders do not feed on banana sap. They hunt small invertebrates on the forest floor at night and hide among bananas, or other dark and protected locations during the day. The defensive posture you described is one way to help identify them.
With these heatwaves, many cities in France, Italy and England are at times *hotter* than cities in the tropical SEA! No wonder the bananas are starting to fruit.
> He added that growing banana plants in the UK is not new for a "geek in the plant world", but perhaps still niche to the average person.
Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people?
For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it?
More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.
The population of London isn't much more today than it was in 1930. And the population density is more or less the same too. I think it's unlikely that people's bodies are the cause of heating. Greater London for example would receive about 1572 MW of solar irradiance on a sunny day.
The city burns quite a bit of fossil fuel for heating and transportation every day though. That certainly has effects on microclimates (think vents from the tube, which is getting ever hotter).
Because you never looked. What he's saying is a true and well known problem in climatology. Population increases create an appearance of warming in the dataset.
There are two sources of corruption.
The first is the urban heat island effect. Many weather stations are corrupted because although they were once in fields or other natural sites, over time cities expanded to meet the needs of the growing population and ended up building around the stations. This distorts readings by pushing up the min on the min/max thermometers, as tarmac absorbs heat during the day and re-radiates it at night. If you compute the average temperature for a day by just taking the midpoint between the min and max this makes it appear that the site is warming even if the max doesn't change i.e. there is no actual climate warming.
The second is that a large number of weather stations sit next to runways. It's intentional: pilots need to know runway temperature for takeoff calculations. But climatologists obviously shouldn't use them because not only are they next to tarmac, they're also being blasted with jet exhaust. So as population increases due to immigration (as western countries have below replacement fertility), jet travel goes up and this causes more traffic which warms the air at these weather stations.
In some countries this is a serious problem. For example, the UK is very built up with unusually high population density. The World Meteorological Organization has a classification system for weather stations in which class 1 is the best (lowest uncertainty) and class 4/5 are the worst (uncertainty of 2/5 degrees respectively, which is higher than the 1.5 degrees of warming claimed to have happened since 1850). Unfortunately nearly 90% of all British weather stations are class 4 or class 5, but the Met Office still use them to make claims about record breaking temperatures.
Climatologists have techniques they say correct for these problems, but the algorithms don't actually work. US GHCN uses something called homogenization, a kind of interpolation which spreads warmth from cities and runways into colder rural areas, creating an appearance of global warming across the entire dataset that's not there in the thermometer readings from uncorrupted sites.
Yes, I'm sure the reason the UK had its hottest mean June temperature ever and recorded its highest ever June temperature in the village of Lingwood, Norfolk is all down to how many weather stations are located next to runways.
Some time ago an FOI (Freedom of Information) request to the UK Met Office got the following response:
Background:
Class 1–2 are regarded as excellent or very good exposures,
Class 3 permits uncertainties up to about 1 °C,
Class 4 permits uncertainties up to about 2 °C, and
Class 5 permits uncertainties up to about 5 °C because of nearby artificial heat sources or other exposure problems.
According to analyses of the released data, approximately:
22% of stations were Classes 1–3,
about 49% were Class 4,
about 29% were Class 5.
I guess there must be very good reasons for not ensuring that the majority of stations are Class 1-3.
The Lingwood site is class 5 because it's in some guy's garden and surrounded by trees/hedges that block airflow. Class 5 sites have +/- 5 degrees of uncertainty and shouldn't be used for climatology under any circumstances.
As to the runway point you're being sarcastic about - yes, that can happen. The UK set a record temperature in July 2022, which the BBC reports was set at Coningsby in Lincolnshire:
In fact it was set at RAF Coningsby at the exact moment two Typhoon fighter jets landed, and lasted only for a minute or two i.e. it was recording jet exhaust from the landing.
This fact had to be dug up through FOIA requests, it wasn't advertised by the Met Office or British media anywhere. Brits were led to believe this had occurred in some open field near a village somewhere.
Every time you read about a record breaking temperature in Britain, you aren't being told about the atrocious state of the weather station network there. Almost all the records are being set at weather stations that can't measure change in the climate due to urban corruption or being sited at runways.
OK, got you. Clearly everywhere that recorded record temperatures last month was either next to a runway or in heat islands (which we definitely haven't had for decades) or in someone's garden, whereas all the historical benchmarks exceeded were flawless. The UK recording a temperature of over 40 celsius was actually an anomaly because of the first time a jet ever landed at a British airport.
It was clearly hot last month, but that isn't what anyone is arguing about in this thread. Hot months have happened throughout history. inigyou scoffed at the idea the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration. But they shouldn't have scoffed, because it's one of the primary drivers of data difficulties in climatology. Do you accept this fact?
Your argument for "the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration" is that an individual high temperature was recorded at an RAF base, ironically one of the places in the country you're least likely to find an immigrant. It was one of a number of places to record a temperature over 40 degrees, compared with the previous high point of 38.7 degrees (including all the airports and RAF bases and urban heat islands). Indeed even if we choose to believe Toby Young's tinfoil hat brigade's claims that it was definitely boosted by a jet engine and not the more standard explanation for minute-to-minute temperature rises of the sun coming out, it was still hotter than any previous day ever recorded anywhere in the UK before that supposed jet engine landing, and I'm pretty sure we've landed jets there in summer before.
Nobody honestly believes that the reason the UK is recording hotter temperatures all over the country is because immigration is driving Typhoons to land differently at RAF Coningsby
I mean, it's better faith in the original argument which was a bunch of ludicrous FUD blaming measurement error for climate change, as if thermometers hadn't been located near heat islands and airports for decades and crank blogs had a better idea how to deal with measurement error than meteorologists. The irony is I could actually make a better argument for immigration being a factor in climate change (moving to a more economically developed country really does increase your carbon footprint...) but that would involve actually acknowledging it's an issue and other people cause it too...
If you had an actual answer for what made the temperature higher on that day at that site (and 46 other sites) than it had ever been there or anywhere else (including all the other airports and heat islands) even before aircraft allegedly landed, and what Typhoon operations have to do with immigration anyway, you wouldn't be stuck repeating the unsupported claims of a political blog about the absence of cloud (the Met Office recorded cloud coverage of 1 oktas at 3pm at that site that day, but I guess Chris Morrison who wasn't there and doesn't exactly hide his partisanship is wayyy more reliable than the weather station's lidar)
I'd be happier if you'd thrown in some concession like "I admit data is sometimes bad quality". That wouldn't mean agreeing with your opponent's implicit denial that any warming is happening. Your side doesn't have to be perfect in order to be in the right, and if you claim infallibility it looks less credible, to me. Is it more important to laugh at this guy, than to be scrupulous?
It may spoil an entertaining deliberate confusion, but you know the airports with the jets, and the cities full of immigrants, were clearly stated as separate from the start: "two sources of corruption ... the first ... the second".
I haven't claimed infallibility though, I've even explicitly pointed out that if we choose to take the climate sceptic blog's claims that 3 planes landing some distance away from the weather station added 1.3 degrees to the RAF Coningsby temperature seriously it was still the hottest day ever recorded in that place before the planes landed, and in lots of other places too.
Immigrants were explicitly linked to supposed airport-induced measurement error "as population goes up due to immigration...jet travel goes up and this causes more traffic which warms the air at these weather stations" in the original post and doubled down on by these immigrants supposedly being "a primary driver of data difficulties in climatology". I found it amusing that the example posed was a RAF base...
> Clearly everywhere that recorded record temperatures last month was either next to a runway
I'm not saying he's right but we had here one of the highest temperatures recorded in France these days (not the highest, but we did reach a bit more than 42°C) and there's a runway just a kilometre away or so. QED.
It's used approximately twice a week by Cessnas, but probably on this day the plane had directed its exhaust on the weather station and also straight on our garden.
Not sure if the pilot was French, but there's a good chance it was an English immigrant.
Moreover with 78% of UK Met Office temperature measuring sites failing to meet Class 1 or 2 standards ex FOI request), the reported temperatures are all spot on! Might add that the ~ 2 trillion tons of concrete associated with energy-producing-humans which we've taken from under the earth and dumped on top since 1900 has had zero effect on any local temperatures. As we all know, the storage heater principle only works if you buy those devices you get from home appliance stores.
And if a few dozen weather stations records temperatures a couple of degrees higher than any of them recorded in their previous decades of operation, only an idiot would conclude that the day was actually warmer than previous days, when it could be because those weather stations were within 100m of bodies of water or not as exposed to the wind as parts of the surrounding environment, just like they always had been.
As we all know, meteorologists know nothing about heat islands, which actually work by saving up all the heat from urban areas built last century and discharging it in comparatively rural areas in the 2020s.
You're using the dishonest argument technique of strawmanning. The claim you're sarcastically criticizing is not one that he made. It's one you created yourself just so you could ridicule it. You did this before too with your statement about the Lingwood temperature being due to weather stations at runways. I think what's happened is you've sensed a faint ghost of heresy and were so offended that you neglected to think rationally because fighting your perceived enemies is more important to you than knowledge or understanding.
I didn't create the claim "almost all the records are being set at weather stations that can't measure change in the climate due to urban corruption or being sited at runways", the OP did. When we've had June records for days without rain, duration above temperature thresholds and peak temperatures in rural areas just last month it's.... kind of impossible not to sneer at the insinuation that "almost all" such records are artefacts of insufficient quality monitoring sites.
It was also insinuated that the temperature range here on this day[1] in 2022 wouldn't be abnormal in a country which had previously never experienced more than 38.7 degrees if it wasn't for the jets landing at 3:10 ish which a climate sceptic blog was excited enough to file a FOIA request to find. I don't think the person "neglecting to think rationally" is the one highlighting the absurdity of suggesting the real reason an air base recorded its highest ever temperature was routine landings of aircraft based there...
I think what's happened is you're so determined to defend arguments which are indefensible - whether it's because you don't like the sarcasm or because you actually sympathise with the idea that global warming is just data corruption - you've resorted even to suggesting that even citing counterexamples like Lingwood is an illegitimate approach to debating pseudoscience...
If you look at the raw data for Kew Gardens, that site can see spikes of 2 degrees or more from hour to hour, which isn't natural in origin. It happens because it's right next to a greenhouse that sometimes vents hot air.
This is exactly the kind of urban heat island problem that is so important to avoid.
Wouldn't immigration be a real effect too, not just poor measurement? If a person moves from a low emissions per-capita country to a high emissions per-capita country, the emissions attributable to that person would increase because of their lifestyle changes adapting to the new country.
It looks like Javanese call that banana as Gedhang Kluthuk (Stone Banana, direct translation).
The owner can use it to make a super delicious Rujak Cingur.
I have several banana plants in my garden in Southern England. Musa Sikkimensis and Musa Basjoo, 3+m tall at the moment.
Winters are too cold for them here. So either you heavily mulch them and they start from the roots every spring while the stems die in winter. Or you learn how to wrap the stems to protect them over winter.
It might be possible, or borderline to keep them unprotected within London but outside of there and inland temperatures can drop below -5C even in the South.
On the other hand, I think they have started growing tropical fruits like mangos and bananas in Sicily.
When I used to eat banana-flavored things (milkshakes, chocolate bars, etc), I always thought that the flavor was artifically inflated and tasted nothing like an actual banana...
...until I went to Fiji. Externally, the appearance of the banana would probably render it as waste in Western countries as it doesn't look nice and yellow - and looks close to what an overripe/rotten banana looks like, but gosh they tasted amazing!
Rhubarb isn't native to the UK. Its origins are mysterious (the "barb" is for barbarian) but I think it came over with the Romans. I had a feeling that the Tiber was named after rhubarb, but I'm remembering something wrong there evidently.
According to Gemini, lots of untrue things are true.
More useful to look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/World_Ha... and see if that makes more sense, although seemingly it's changing a bit and that graphic is quite old by now (2012). A plant's survival depends on more than just its hardiness and what zone it's in of course, but it's a useful starting point.
What am I looking at? Switzerland is just a black line mess. The average temperature is lower in Fribourg and you can confirm by looking at actual historical data, which is what Gemini did—correctly.
Only infinitesimally more (most of what that chart is showing is that the growing degree days come earlier in the year), and it also gets colder and has a shorter growing season. I'd expect most plants to like this less.
> "Could bananas be common in British gardens soon?"
Unlikely
> I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Switzerland
1) I believe you. This is not rare. Culturing a banana tree is super easy.
You can easily find one ornamental dwarf banana for your office in Zurich, put it outside in summer and enjoy the sight of the little green bananas. You just need lots of water, a decent sized pot (bananas can produce fruit in pots), some manure and a summer hot. All of this can be found in Switzerland.
Just don't expect fruit.
2) Growing bananas to their harvest time is the impossible part.
Flowers need to mature all winter long, and if they touch just a little chill, commercial banana fruits will stop growing, the stems will wither and collapse to the ground. They need more than 12 months of non-stop warm temperatures to became yellow and tasty. Your banana tree should be treated as an annual herb or kept indoors for many months each year.
But, there are more in this history.
There are around 50 species of banana trees. And lots of hybrids. There are yellow bananas, green bananas, lipstick pink bananas and steel blue bananas.
Some species evolved in mountains of tropical areas. Basically a temperate climate. The trunks that support the fruits can stand much more cold without dying. The problem is that they have small short bluish green bananas that don't worth the effort.
So far, those species are collector oddities or kept for hybridization purposes; but everybody in the field would salivate about breeding a seedless banana of decent quality that stands cold. This creatures are very productive.
Seems like an opportunity to plug the latest video by my favorite YouTube long form documentary maker, OTR:
The History of the Banana
https://youtu.be/YVVD1cYelUE?is=ADLXFR_-mIMdDfom
Here gets into ancient innovations that allowed bananas to be grown outside of their native habitat in Papua New Guinea.
If you haven't seen his content, and you get sucked in, then settle in without distractions - this is the opposite end of spectrum of TikTok, etc. Also, don't watch his "History of Sugar" documentary if you are feeling depressed. Instead watch the "History of Curry".
If you like this long format style of video, you might enjoy Asianometry, "video essays on business, economics, and history." [0] Here is a video on the banana also, "The Wildly Infectious Banana Plague." [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OsiD_s00RQ
Asianometry is one of the rare gems among youtube channels, along with Alexander the ok [0] and Technology Connections [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Alexander-the-ok
[1] https://www.youtube.com/technologyconnections
I'll second this. I'm continually impressed with the breadth of coverage from Asianometry. Great channel.
I wish Jon would post a video on his research methodology.
Didn't expect to see this on HN, but it's definitely one of my favorite YouTube channels. Most food history content online feels like straight up readings from Wikipedia, but OTR does actual research and interviews. The Golden Triangle episode where they interviewed the anti-CCP rebel veteran who was like 90 years old was pretty neat. Doesn't sound like it'd tie into food, but it does.
My favorite is the history of chili pepper. It's something so fundamental to indian cuisine that I assumed chillies were native to India for a long time. His video shows the true history of how that spice travelled from the Americas to all over the globe
Potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkins/zucchinis/most squashes, cassava, the common bean (including pinto, black, kidney, etc), cassava, sunflowers, avocado, etc all didn't exist in European kitchens until the 1500s (and not really widespread until at least the 1600s).
Also, most of these crops were specifically domesticated in the Andes. If you go to the Andes today you can still find traditional potato farmers who take care of hundreds of varieties of potatoes of all different shapes and colors. Some are ornamental, some are edible raw, some are only used in soup, some are even used medicinally
Maybe surprising is that there are no native species of banana to "the New World" despite there being about 100 species and thousands of named cultivars.
Coffee is another interesting example in the other direction, it's so often associated with places like Colombia, Java, etc that people don't realize it's only native to Ethiopia, and that the majority of coffee consumed around the world today descends from one specific genetic lineage that was cultivated for a few centuries in Yemen.
Erstwhile seafaring powers went to war over trade routes for these. Surprising it isn't that well known.
Most of that I knew, but I was surprised at the beans. I thought beans were a standard medieval fare.
It turned out that these were fava beans, which stem from the Old World.
Have you read Charles C. Mann's book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created"? It's all about the global impact of the opening of the New World by the Europeans, and how the global exchange created and is creating the "homogenocene", the age of homogeneity. There's a part about a folk song in the Philippines that lovingly goes over the crops being grown around a village. They're all introduced.
It really transformed Europe too. Europe's basically a story of famine after famine until they got access to the potato. I don't know if any other technology has saved as many European lives as the potato
Pacific island cultures are a bit unique in their relationship to the New World though. Chickens which come from SE Asian jungles have been in South America since at least 1300 AD. And sweet potatoes were grown in Polynesia around 1000 AD.
1300 AD?! Did the Polynesians bring chickens with them? I knew about the sweet potatoes, but the chickens are a whole different manner.
Chickens descend from jungle fowl, which were carried out into the Pacific from SE Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl
Yes exactly. We have chicken remains in Chile that are dated between 1304 and 1424. And we even have DNA confirmation from those bones that link them to modern Polynesian chicken populations. The tailless, blue-egged Araucana breed is still around today and is thought to predate Columbus
Ask a 5yr old. They've watched Moana a dozen times and can name a chicken character.
His other book, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus"¹ is also excellent.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...
When my Korean friends tell me that my cuisine isn't spicy enough: Well... let's talk about that spice.
Sugarcane is also thought to be originally from New Guinea, although it spread widely in prehistory.
> He pointed out that Musa Basjoos are not really for eating.
> He said: "It's basically like having a mouth full of ball bearings with half a teaspoon of banana on them."
Maybe we can iterate on the texture some more here.
Here is a photo of the seeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_wild-type_banana...
Is the flesh soft and sweet like a modern cultivated banana? I wonder how different it is to eat one of those compared to something like a tamarind, which is also mostly seeds, covered in a relatively small amount of edible delicious stuff.
Prior to human intervention, 'bananas' were small with tons of seeds.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. Every banana that has ever existed has been a clone of that one plant. Every so often, a new mutation occurs that gives us a new variety, but they all trace back to that one plant. It is the most extreme type of monoculture and is constantly threatened by parasites like the Panama Disease, because if one plant is vulnerable, they all are.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it.
I don't think so. There are a ton of varieties of banana that are grown from seed. Humans have cultivated them and selectively bred them from seed for thousands of years, just like every other plant. The seedless bananas that dominate western grocery stores are 1 variety, Cavendish, that have been endlessly cloned from cuttings. They weren't the first seedless variety commercially available, they were preceded by Gros Michel. But either way, travel to southeast Asia and you'll find a lot more varieties on sale.
Interestingly, apparently the Gros Michel banana (which you can still get, if you try hard enough) tastes much more like artificial banana flavor, because that was the dominant variety when the flavor was developed.
Its simply a cost thing as the majority of gros michel bannana plants in areas with the fungus will die every few years as infection takes that long, and most areas gained the fungus during the peak of gros miachel cultivation. But at a small scale you can avoid the fungus or just plant new plants when the fungus takes hold, its just more expensive and limited in scale.
Actually, possibly not. https://youtu.be/I9ZtvpBoXzI
It just has more isoamyl acetate, which is what artificial banana flavoring uses.
Which it uses because it bananas at the time had lots of it
I keep on hearing this fact but I haven't tasted Gros Michel so I don't know. Fact or factoid who knows
Indeed, and there are unrelated bananas like the Fe’i which are also seedless, pointing to repeated cultivation to a seedless state by people.
Where does this nonsensical urban legend come from? Any South Asian market has various genomes that do not descend from that. It has to be the most widely-spread confidently-incorrect claim.
Naval oranges are all clones from a single mutant tree too
Navel, This oranges have a "belly button"
Naval is for ships.
Well the oranges might float, making them naval.
Similarly, all apple varieties are propagated like this.
Apple cultivars are not genetic. If you plant seeds, you're going to get some random apples, which probably aren't very good. The cultivars are all produced via cuttings.
The UK straddles the 55th parallel North. Due to the jet streams (and formerly, trade winds) carrying warm air from the Caribbean, it has often benefitted from a milder climate than other regions at similar latitudes: Alaska, Siberia, the Baltic states.
But this is wild. I am only in my 40s but I've seen the climate change significantly and it having a major impact on flora and fauna.
When I was a kid, English wine was a joke and now it's winning prizes because we have the same climate French vineyards did when I was a child. The idea of growing olives in the UK was laughable, but now in the South East of England it's starting to look commercially viable. Only 10 years ago I remember days with highs over 30C being rare, but we just had two weeks of them, accompanied by tropical nights (not dropping below 20C), for the first time I remember.
And now... bananas. Which is, pun intended, utterly bananas.
It feels too late to stop the worst of the damage, but the idea of this accelerating and getting worse is just astonishing to me, that within my lifetime I'd witness such a huge swing in climatology.
People/companies are already testing avocado, banana, and coffee plantations in Italy at scale. Climate change really is insane.
Just wait till the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation halts, then you can grow icicles!
Hopefully we've got at least 10 years until that happens
This reminds me of the stone carvings found in Scotland showing grape vines growing there.
In other words, it used to be MUCH warmer in the northern latitudes.
Last year ours bloomed, too. The problem is that it happens to late in the year and I can’t wrap that 5m high “tree” to protect from the cold. So the bananas were the size of your pinky. Next problem, once they bloom, they die. So yes, climate change is real. For comparison, we are located in south Germany near Stuttgart and we also have a fig tree and an olive tree in our garden.
Are figs rare in central europe climates?
I live in Hungary and they seem to be relatively widespread, if not as much as in southern Europe.
The climate in Hungary is really not quite the same as in Stuttgart...
We have had figs in southern Germany for decades. Not all varieties grow well here of course but just having figs growing doesn't really tell you much.
I have a paw paw tree that has survived 7 years in northern Wisconsin. Unfortunately it is the only one out of five that I planted that has survived and so I'll never get fruit because they reproduce sexually and as far as I know the closest one is 4 hours south in Madison.
Pawpaws are actually hermaphroditic not dioecious. Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination. However, you can save some male pollen until next year.
Alternatively, you could graft the branch of a pawpaw that flowers earlier to try and get the male and female flowers maturing at the same time. You might also be able to just buy some pollen. It's actually quite easy to collect. You can use a brush to sprinkle it on a female flower
Wait would that work? My understanding was that the pollen had to come from a different genome of pawpaw for it to work... But perhaps I'm mistaken?
Hmm I guess you're right. Most cultivars seem to be self-incompatible. Like most self-incompatible plants though, it's not 100%. Some cultivars like "Sunflower" don't seem to mind at all
> Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination
How does this work in practice? Do other trees from the same species produce male flowers first, and then female? Logically, if all trees produce female flowers in spring and male flowers in the summer then the species can only survive if the seeds can remain viable unfertilized for months (which is probably not that exceptional for plants, I wouldn't know). But if the female seeds are still viable by the time the plant sprouts its male flowers, exactly how does this prevent self-pollination?
Actually I just looked it up and they're more bizarre than I thought. They are actually "protogynous". Meaning all flowers start off as female and as they mature they turn male.
I should've just said "later" instead of "later in the year"
I'm not sure how long pollen stays viable in the environment. Some species can stay viable for many weeks but most are just a few days I think. They can stay viable for years if refrigerated properly however.
There are dating sites for dogs. You may create a dating site for trees.
You can order the trees online.
Graft a steam with a different variety and then you will need a lot of flies, or a brush and some artistic strokes in May.
In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.
I grow a plantain orchard in South America and while i need to take double care of such spiders, they are not aggressive at all. I find them super cute and let visit my home as well. :)
We grow bananas at our farm in India and we have never seen this spider ever.
Brazilian wandering spiders are rarely found outside of northern South America.
Maybe they're better named Brazilian Staying-Put Spiders then
Nice one! I agree
Reminds me of Cecropia trees which are adapted to use some ant species as self defense. The trees live 20-30 years (the same length as an ant queen) and exudes a protein rich substance to feed the ants called Müllerian bodies. The ants in return aggressively protect the tree.
Phoneutria are interesting animals. Needed to evolve defenses against the gluttony of monkeys. It must be a tasty spider. It happens that we are monkeys also, so the venom is carefully designed against us.
There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge to grab a banana.
The spider is easily identified because it has four identical small frontal eyes arranged as a perfect square. Is big, bold and it warns before to attack [1] (most tarantulas are shy). And it jumps, of course. Can hide, once in a blue moon, in exported South American banana bunches (European breed bananas are spider free).
[1] If it raise the legs showing the yellow and black rings beneath is a clear warning saying "get lost right now, of I will land on your face"
It turns out that Phoneutria defensive bites are most often "dry" with little if any venom. It's thought that the spiders conserve venom for use on actual prey items.
BTW, the four frontal eyes in a box is not considered a good taxonomic character for IDing them, as spiders in other related genera also have this. They do have a warning posture, but not a "dance" that I am aware of. Also, they are terrestrial and hunt on the forest floor. The stories of them "jumping" are largely exaggerated.
First of all, thanks for your interesting contribution.
Is a good taxonomic character if you are in Europe, as no European spider, big or small, has this eyes.
Also this is a fast way to discard other tropical spiders that could also appear on orders of imported fresh fruit and have a fearsome look but are harmless.
Tarantulas have small eyes arranged like a bowtie. Huntsmans have four eyes in a line. If you are bitten by a spider that is hairy, bigger than 10cm, and does have eyes arranged like those, is just a pinch, painful but safer than a mosquito bite. Just wash it with soap. Same if the eyes are arranged in a square but two are much bigger than the other two. Safe.
Otherwise.
If you are bitten by a cream hairy spider that has only "3 eyes", one central and two laterals (really 6 in 3 pairs) is a Sicariidae, go to a doctor.
If it has four eyes of the same size arranged in a square be cautious. If it has a middle groove in the rear part of the torax is a Ctenidae, so may be dangerous. As Phoneutria is the most common Ctenidae found in banana bunches, and as we can't discard still that every other genus on the family aren't poisonous, play safe and go to an hospital. If is a harmless related species only they can identify it, and if not you are in the correct place. They can evaluate if is a dry bite and can stabilize you and provide treatment if is not.
The other spiders that are really concerning, the Australian Atrax and Mouse spiders and the black widows are much smaller, 1-5cm, not really hairy and glossy black with red or white marks. They are mostly terrestrial.
If you have not crushed yet the spider, you may need to take a good photo from some distance. Is easier if you trap it before on a glass jar, as long as you can do it safely. If in doubt assure to bring the dead spider with you, so the doctor can see it under a microscope.
Lot of excellent information. Thanks. I'm glad someone out there doesn't have arachnophobia. I'm also glad it's not me.
> opened the fridge to grab a banana.
A chef should know better than to keep bananas in a fridge!
The ones I know are completely brown.
They put their four front legs together, two by two, and sort of point at you.
I was told that they are aggressive because they are well fed because they feed on the sap from the bananas whereas most spiders are usually hungry.
Wandering spiders do not feed on banana sap. They hunt small invertebrates on the forest floor at night and hide among bananas, or other dark and protected locations during the day. The defensive posture you described is one way to help identify them.
With these heatwaves, many cities in France, Italy and England are at times *hotter* than cities in the tropical SEA! No wonder the bananas are starting to fruit.
> He added that growing banana plants in the UK is not new for a "geek in the plant world", but perhaps still niche to the average person.
Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people?
For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it?
More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.
The population of London isn't much more today than it was in 1930. And the population density is more or less the same too. I think it's unlikely that people's bodies are the cause of heating. Greater London for example would receive about 1572 MW of solar irradiance on a sunny day.
The city burns quite a bit of fossil fuel for heating and transportation every day though. That certainly has effects on microclimates (think vents from the tube, which is getting ever hotter).
This is the first time I've seen someone blame immigration for climate change.
Because you never looked. What he's saying is a true and well known problem in climatology. Population increases create an appearance of warming in the dataset.
There are two sources of corruption.
The first is the urban heat island effect. Many weather stations are corrupted because although they were once in fields or other natural sites, over time cities expanded to meet the needs of the growing population and ended up building around the stations. This distorts readings by pushing up the min on the min/max thermometers, as tarmac absorbs heat during the day and re-radiates it at night. If you compute the average temperature for a day by just taking the midpoint between the min and max this makes it appear that the site is warming even if the max doesn't change i.e. there is no actual climate warming.
The second is that a large number of weather stations sit next to runways. It's intentional: pilots need to know runway temperature for takeoff calculations. But climatologists obviously shouldn't use them because not only are they next to tarmac, they're also being blasted with jet exhaust. So as population increases due to immigration (as western countries have below replacement fertility), jet travel goes up and this causes more traffic which warms the air at these weather stations.
In some countries this is a serious problem. For example, the UK is very built up with unusually high population density. The World Meteorological Organization has a classification system for weather stations in which class 1 is the best (lowest uncertainty) and class 4/5 are the worst (uncertainty of 2/5 degrees respectively, which is higher than the 1.5 degrees of warming claimed to have happened since 1850). Unfortunately nearly 90% of all British weather stations are class 4 or class 5, but the Met Office still use them to make claims about record breaking temperatures.
Climatologists have techniques they say correct for these problems, but the algorithms don't actually work. US GHCN uses something called homogenization, a kind of interpolation which spreads warmth from cities and runways into colder rural areas, creating an appearance of global warming across the entire dataset that's not there in the thermometer readings from uncorrupted sites.
Yes, I'm sure the reason the UK had its hottest mean June temperature ever and recorded its highest ever June temperature in the village of Lingwood, Norfolk is all down to how many weather stations are located next to runways.
That's the reason the banana trees are growing, too. They read the temperature measurements from next to the airport runways.
Some time ago an FOI (Freedom of Information) request to the UK Met Office got the following response:
Background: Class 1–2 are regarded as excellent or very good exposures, Class 3 permits uncertainties up to about 1 °C, Class 4 permits uncertainties up to about 2 °C, and Class 5 permits uncertainties up to about 5 °C because of nearby artificial heat sources or other exposure problems.
According to analyses of the released data, approximately:
22% of stations were Classes 1–3, about 49% were Class 4, about 29% were Class 5.
I guess there must be very good reasons for not ensuring that the majority of stations are Class 1-3.
What's involved in ensuring a weather station meets class 1 requirements?
The Lingwood site is class 5 because it's in some guy's garden and surrounded by trees/hedges that block airflow. Class 5 sites have +/- 5 degrees of uncertainty and shouldn't be used for climatology under any circumstances.
As to the runway point you're being sarcastic about - yes, that can happen. The UK set a record temperature in July 2022, which the BBC reports was set at Coningsby in Lincolnshire:
https://www.bbc.com/weather/articles/crm04vm30x9o
In fact it was set at RAF Coningsby at the exact moment two Typhoon fighter jets landed, and lasted only for a minute or two i.e. it was recording jet exhaust from the landing.
This fact had to be dug up through FOIA requests, it wasn't advertised by the Met Office or British media anywhere. Brits were led to believe this had occurred in some open field near a village somewhere.
Every time you read about a record breaking temperature in Britain, you aren't being told about the atrocious state of the weather station network there. Almost all the records are being set at weather stations that can't measure change in the climate due to urban corruption or being sited at runways.
OK, got you. Clearly everywhere that recorded record temperatures last month was either next to a runway or in heat islands (which we definitely haven't had for decades) or in someone's garden, whereas all the historical benchmarks exceeded were flawless. The UK recording a temperature of over 40 celsius was actually an anomaly because of the first time a jet ever landed at a British airport.
Also the lack of rain was measurement error too.
It was clearly hot last month, but that isn't what anyone is arguing about in this thread. Hot months have happened throughout history. inigyou scoffed at the idea the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration. But they shouldn't have scoffed, because it's one of the primary drivers of data difficulties in climatology. Do you accept this fact?
Your argument for "the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration" is that an individual high temperature was recorded at an RAF base, ironically one of the places in the country you're least likely to find an immigrant. It was one of a number of places to record a temperature over 40 degrees, compared with the previous high point of 38.7 degrees (including all the airports and RAF bases and urban heat islands). Indeed even if we choose to believe Toby Young's tinfoil hat brigade's claims that it was definitely boosted by a jet engine and not the more standard explanation for minute-to-minute temperature rises of the sun coming out, it was still hotter than any previous day ever recorded anywhere in the UK before that supposed jet engine landing, and I'm pretty sure we've landed jets there in summer before.
Nobody honestly believes that the reason the UK is recording hotter temperatures all over the country is because immigration is driving Typhoons to land differently at RAF Coningsby
You're clearly not arguing in good faith, so I'll just leave it with this:
> and not the more standard explanation for minute-to-minute temperature rises of the sun coming out
It was a cloudless day.
I mean, it's better faith in the original argument which was a bunch of ludicrous FUD blaming measurement error for climate change, as if thermometers hadn't been located near heat islands and airports for decades and crank blogs had a better idea how to deal with measurement error than meteorologists. The irony is I could actually make a better argument for immigration being a factor in climate change (moving to a more economically developed country really does increase your carbon footprint...) but that would involve actually acknowledging it's an issue and other people cause it too...
If you had an actual answer for what made the temperature higher on that day at that site (and 46 other sites) than it had ever been there or anywhere else (including all the other airports and heat islands) even before aircraft allegedly landed, and what Typhoon operations have to do with immigration anyway, you wouldn't be stuck repeating the unsupported claims of a political blog about the absence of cloud (the Met Office recorded cloud coverage of 1 oktas at 3pm at that site that day, but I guess Chris Morrison who wasn't there and doesn't exactly hide his partisanship is wayyy more reliable than the weather station's lidar)
I'd be happier if you'd thrown in some concession like "I admit data is sometimes bad quality". That wouldn't mean agreeing with your opponent's implicit denial that any warming is happening. Your side doesn't have to be perfect in order to be in the right, and if you claim infallibility it looks less credible, to me. Is it more important to laugh at this guy, than to be scrupulous?
It may spoil an entertaining deliberate confusion, but you know the airports with the jets, and the cities full of immigrants, were clearly stated as separate from the start: "two sources of corruption ... the first ... the second".
> I'd be happier if you'd thrown in some concession like "I admit data is sometimes bad quality".
"be reasonable, meet them halfway."
I haven't claimed infallibility though, I've even explicitly pointed out that if we choose to take the climate sceptic blog's claims that 3 planes landing some distance away from the weather station added 1.3 degrees to the RAF Coningsby temperature seriously it was still the hottest day ever recorded in that place before the planes landed, and in lots of other places too.
Immigrants were explicitly linked to supposed airport-induced measurement error "as population goes up due to immigration...jet travel goes up and this causes more traffic which warms the air at these weather stations" in the original post and doubled down on by these immigrants supposedly being "a primary driver of data difficulties in climatology". I found it amusing that the example posed was a RAF base...
You know what else happened 125 years ago? Less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
> Clearly everywhere that recorded record temperatures last month was either next to a runway
I'm not saying he's right but we had here one of the highest temperatures recorded in France these days (not the highest, but we did reach a bit more than 42°C) and there's a runway just a kilometre away or so. QED.
It's used approximately twice a week by Cessnas, but probably on this day the plane had directed its exhaust on the weather station and also straight on our garden.
Not sure if the pilot was French, but there's a good chance it was an English immigrant.
You dropped your /s
Moreover with 78% of UK Met Office temperature measuring sites failing to meet Class 1 or 2 standards ex FOI request), the reported temperatures are all spot on! Might add that the ~ 2 trillion tons of concrete associated with energy-producing-humans which we've taken from under the earth and dumped on top since 1900 has had zero effect on any local temperatures. As we all know, the storage heater principle only works if you buy those devices you get from home appliance stores.
And if a few dozen weather stations records temperatures a couple of degrees higher than any of them recorded in their previous decades of operation, only an idiot would conclude that the day was actually warmer than previous days, when it could be because those weather stations were within 100m of bodies of water or not as exposed to the wind as parts of the surrounding environment, just like they always had been.
As we all know, meteorologists know nothing about heat islands, which actually work by saving up all the heat from urban areas built last century and discharging it in comparatively rural areas in the 2020s.
You're using the dishonest argument technique of strawmanning. The claim you're sarcastically criticizing is not one that he made. It's one you created yourself just so you could ridicule it. You did this before too with your statement about the Lingwood temperature being due to weather stations at runways. I think what's happened is you've sensed a faint ghost of heresy and were so offended that you neglected to think rationally because fighting your perceived enemies is more important to you than knowledge or understanding.
I didn't create the claim "almost all the records are being set at weather stations that can't measure change in the climate due to urban corruption or being sited at runways", the OP did. When we've had June records for days without rain, duration above temperature thresholds and peak temperatures in rural areas just last month it's.... kind of impossible not to sneer at the insinuation that "almost all" such records are artefacts of insufficient quality monitoring sites.
It was also insinuated that the temperature range here on this day[1] in 2022 wouldn't be abnormal in a country which had previously never experienced more than 38.7 degrees if it wasn't for the jets landing at 3:10 ish which a climate sceptic blog was excited enough to file a FOIA request to find. I don't think the person "neglecting to think rationally" is the one highlighting the absurdity of suggesting the real reason an air base recorded its highest ever temperature was routine landings of aircraft based there...
I think what's happened is you're so determined to defend arguments which are indefensible - whether it's because you don't like the sarcasm or because you actually sympathise with the idea that global warming is just data corruption - you've resorted even to suggesting that even citing counterexamples like Lingwood is an illegitimate approach to debating pseudoscience...
[1]https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/9c47b6b2-9d1...
But it's still hotter than any previous time 2 typhoon fighters landed.
So unless you want to put that down to the new houses put up, it means that temperatures have gone up.
Maybe the fighter jets switched to a different kind of fuel and are now producing hotter exhaust. </s>
>a true and well known problem in climatology. Population increases create an appearance of warming in the dataset.
How does this explain the increasing excess deaths?
London has had continual weather measurements at Kew Gardens and Greenwich for over a century.
If you look at the raw data for Kew Gardens, that site can see spikes of 2 degrees or more from hour to hour, which isn't natural in origin. It happens because it's right next to a greenhouse that sometimes vents hot air.
This is exactly the kind of urban heat island problem that is so important to avoid.
Wouldn't immigration be a real effect too, not just poor measurement? If a person moves from a low emissions per-capita country to a high emissions per-capita country, the emissions attributable to that person would increase because of their lifestyle changes adapting to the new country.
Those cities in the Artic and Anartic sure causing a lot of urban heat sync effect, aren't they.
You'll catch people blaming their heart attacks and strokes on immigration before long.
This is called the urban heat island effect. It’s well studied and well understood.
In a couple of years all the head in the sand types will be commenting that "we've always grown bananas in the UK".
There were hippo bones found under Trafalgar Square, and once-upon-a-time (10kya) elephants, lions, and rhinos were once endedmic to Britain
It looks like Javanese call that banana as Gedhang Kluthuk (Stone Banana, direct translation). The owner can use it to make a super delicious Rujak Cingur.
... Botanist James Wong has appeared on the BBC's A Countryside Summer
Wong, 45, has presented for BBC series' Grow Your Own Drugs and Secrets of Your Food.
Curious what is the latest on genetic improvement of banana against Panama disease ?
Lovely
I have several banana plants in my garden in Southern England. Musa Sikkimensis and Musa Basjoo, 3+m tall at the moment.
Winters are too cold for them here. So either you heavily mulch them and they start from the roots every spring while the stems die in winter. Or you learn how to wrap the stems to protect them over winter.
It might be possible, or borderline to keep them unprotected within London but outside of there and inland temperatures can drop below -5C even in the South.
On the other hand, I think they have started growing tropical fruits like mangos and bananas in Sicily.
Um. I wonder if there are any export opportunities for British Bananas ?
Slightly off-topic:
When I used to eat banana-flavored things (milkshakes, chocolate bars, etc), I always thought that the flavor was artifically inflated and tasted nothing like an actual banana...
...until I went to Fiji. Externally, the appearance of the banana would probably render it as waste in Western countries as it doesn't look nice and yellow - and looks close to what an overripe/rotten banana looks like, but gosh they tasted amazing!
> ...while we say goodbye to some old favourites.
An incredibly dystopian way to minimise human-caused climate change and potential extinction for yet more species.
Potential? The Holocene Extinction is already the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history, and that's pre-climate-change.
I know, but currently we still have rhubarb. The article is extremely blasé about even more species losing their environment.
Rhubarb isn't native to the UK. Its origins are mysterious (the "barb" is for barbarian) but I think it came over with the Romans. I had a feeling that the Tiber was named after rhubarb, but I'm remembering something wrong there evidently.
Most probably Asian. There are closer Hymalayan species, if I remember correctly
I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Fribourg Switzerland in September 2025. According to Gemini this city is much colder than Essex, and yet.
> According to Gemini
According to Gemini, lots of untrue things are true.
More useful to look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/World_Ha... and see if that makes more sense, although seemingly it's changing a bit and that graphic is quite old by now (2012). A plant's survival depends on more than just its hardiness and what zone it's in of course, but it's a useful starting point.
What am I looking at? Switzerland is just a black line mess. The average temperature is lower in Fribourg and you can confirm by looking at actual historical data, which is what Gemini did—correctly.
> According to Gemini this city is much colder than Essex, and yet
And according to science Fribourg offers more growing degree days
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/45015~56049/Comparison-of...
Only infinitesimally more (most of what that chart is showing is that the growing degree days come earlier in the year), and it also gets colder and has a shorter growing season. I'd expect most plants to like this less.
Huh? Fribourg is literally colder, especially in September.
Sure, but there is a reason we came up with growing degree days, wikipedia is one click away
> "Could bananas be common in British gardens soon?"
Unlikely
> I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Switzerland
1) I believe you. This is not rare. Culturing a banana tree is super easy.
You can easily find one ornamental dwarf banana for your office in Zurich, put it outside in summer and enjoy the sight of the little green bananas. You just need lots of water, a decent sized pot (bananas can produce fruit in pots), some manure and a summer hot. All of this can be found in Switzerland.
Just don't expect fruit.
2) Growing bananas to their harvest time is the impossible part.
Flowers need to mature all winter long, and if they touch just a little chill, commercial banana fruits will stop growing, the stems will wither and collapse to the ground. They need more than 12 months of non-stop warm temperatures to became yellow and tasty. Your banana tree should be treated as an annual herb or kept indoors for many months each year.
But, there are more in this history.
There are around 50 species of banana trees. And lots of hybrids. There are yellow bananas, green bananas, lipstick pink bananas and steel blue bananas.
Some species evolved in mountains of tropical areas. Basically a temperate climate. The trunks that support the fruits can stand much more cold without dying. The problem is that they have small short bluish green bananas that don't worth the effort.
So far, those species are collector oddities or kept for hybridization purposes; but everybody in the field would salivate about breeding a seedless banana of decent quality that stands cold. This creatures are very productive.
> You just need lots of water
They're more like pets in this sense. Really fun plants to have inside though.
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Please don't post dreck like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Try watching a bit less Fox News and talk to real people sometimes. It helps.
Where on earth do you get 'a hint of Sharia Law' from?
Why are you adding something not mentioned to steer the conversation?
They're just being racist.