It’s all Toto nonsense!
QUESTION The American rock band Toto’s song Africa has the lyric: ‘Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.’ Can Kilimanjaro be seen from the Serengeti?
FROM personal experience, you can’t see Kilimanjaro from anywhere west of Arusha, 80km west of the mountain, unless it’s an extremely clear day and you’re on the slopes on Mount Meru north of Arusha. The eastern edge of the Serengeti is more than 160km away. Diana Murphy, Huntingdon, Cambs. THE distance we see horizontally depends a great deal on atmospheric conditions, since air and the particulates it contains will block and scatter some of the light passing through.
If you look horizontally, you can’t see as far as if you look vertically because there is more atmosphere in the horizontal direction. In very clean air, horizontal visibility is 80km. More typical visibility levels are between two and 32km.
The Toto lyric is particularly absurd in that, other than being mountains, the two landmarks couldn’t be more different.
Mount Olympus is 3km high, while at 6km, Kilimanjaro is more than twice the height.
Kilimanjaro is a large volcano with three cones. Mount Olympus is formed of sedimentary rock laid down 200 million years ago in a shallow sea. Various geological events caused the emergence of the whole region. Around one million years ago, glaciers covered Olympus and created its plateaus and depressions. L. Meyer, Morecambe, Lancs.
QUESTION The new internet buzzword is gaslighting. What does it mean?
GASLIGHTING is an abusive psychological tactic in which a person, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their view of reality. It is a technique used by abusers, dictators, narcissists and cult leaders. USs President Donald Trump is often accused of using it.
The term, which was coined in the 1960s, owes its origin to the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Gas Light, its 1940 British film adaptation and its 1944 Hollywood adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman. In the play, Jack Manningham terrorises his wife Bella (the characlipsticks, ters are called Gregory and Paula in the 1944 film) and blames her for mischievously misplacing household items which, in fact, he has systematically hidden.
Paintings in the home go missing and, even though she has no recollection of doing so, Jack tells Bella she is the one who has been moving them.
Claiming she’s unfit to be out in public, he alienates her from other people. Doubting whether her perspective can be trusted, Bella clings to a single shred of evidence: the dimming of the gas lights that accompanies the latenight execution of Jack’s trickery.
The wavering flame is the one thing that holds her sanity in place as she wriggles free of her captor’s control.
The term entered the political arena during the Bill Clinton US presidential administration when the phrase ‘gaslighting America’ was used to describe the Democratic party’s treatment of White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Clinton first denied and then admitted to having an affair, suggesting she was unhinged and obsessed when, in fact, he had invited her into the Oval Office.
However, it is with Donald Trump that the term has gained traction. There are many examples, for example, with Trump claiming he watched thousands of people – ‘a heavy Arab population’ – cheering on the 9/11 attacks in Jersey City (police say there is no evidence of this); the Mexican government forces immigrants into the US (no evidence); there are ‘30 or 34 million’ immigrants in the US (there are ten or 11 million); that he never supported the Iraq War (he told the ‘shock jock’ radio host Howard Stern he did); and the unemployment rate was as high as ‘42%’ under Obama (the highest reported rate was 16.4%).
When confronted over such easily disputed claims, Trump complains of ‘fake news’ – his term for what he sees as unfair treatment by the media.
QUESTION Is more palm oil used for food or in the biofuel industry?
PALM oil is the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet. In 1970, annual global production was a million tonnes. By 2016, that had jumped to 63 million tonnes.
Most is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia. The oil is found in chocolate spreads, ice cream, soaps and is used as a biofuel. The rise in palm oil consumption has come at a cost. Demand has led to widespread destruction of rainforests, cleared to make way for palm plantations.
The most famous victims of palm-oil driven deforestation are Borneo’s orangutans, whose numbers have fallen so sharply they could become extinct in the wild within a decade.
Orangutans are susceptible to deforestation because they spend 90% of their time in trees. Between 1973 and 2010, Borneo’s rainforest coverage has fallen from 76 to 28%. Globally, most palm oil – 71% – is used in the food industry and just 5% on energy.
However, that figure is skewed in the EU. In 2009, the European Parliament ordained that 10% of energy for transport must come from renewable sources by 2020. By 2014, nearly half of the palm oil used in Europe was in the fuel tanks of cars and trucks. However, research shows the climate impact of first-generation biofuels – rapeseed, palm, sunflower and soy oil – is greater than for fossil fuels, if deforestation is taken into account. In 2017, the EU put a cap on palm oil, enraging exporting nations they had once courted. It is a salutary lesson in poorly thought through environmental policy. Michelle Braithwaite, London
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