What are Hadley cells and how do they affect wildfires?

Author: C Dunstan
Research: Google Gemini
Date:August 10, 2026

Spokane Shows What the New Era of Wildfires Looks Like

Moving climate regions.

There is an aspect of climate change that it seems is not well-known and rarely if ever mentioned in reports.

I recall in Geography classes in High School that there is a reason that there are bands of deserts around the world at similar latitudes, north and south of the equator.

The reason is connected with the polar movement of warm, moist air from the equatorial region losing water and heat, then descending in a dry belt the rings the north and south sides of the world - creating arid deserts.

With climate change, the warmer, wetter air travels further towards the poles before descending - leading to the movement of arid climates further towards the poles.

The present hot, dry conditions underpinning wildfires across Canada and Europe receive a lot of media coverage. Describing these as being contributed to by climate change is reasonable, but the mechanism I described may make the connection easier to understand.

Gemini said

Your high school geography memory is entirely accurate. What you are describing is known in atmospheric science as Hadley cell expansion (or the poleward widening of the tropical belt), and it is indeed one of the most significant, yet under-discussed, structural shifts driven by climate change.

The mechanism you outlined provides a clear physical bridge between global warming and the severe, prolonged droughts and wildfires we are increasingly seeing in regions like Canada and Europe.

The Mechanism: How the Hadley Cells Work

To recap the geography lesson on a global scale:

1. The Ascent: Intense solar heating at the equator causes warm, moisture-laden air to rise rapidly, forming the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and producing heavy tropical rainfall.

2. The Poleward Journey: As this air reaches the upper troposphere, it flows toward the poles, cooling and losing most of its moisture along the way.

3. The Descent: By the time this air reaches roughly 30 degrees north and south latitude, it has become cool, dense, and exceptionally dry. It descends back toward the surface, creating a belt of high-pressure systems (the subtropical highs) that suppress cloud cover and rain—naturally forming the world's great deserts (like the Sahara, Atacama, and Australian outback).

How Climate Change Shifts the Belt

As greenhouse gases trap more heat in the lower atmosphere, the energy balance of the planet changes.

• Widening Tropics: The rising limb of the Hadley circulation becomes more vigorous, and the upper-level air travels further poleward before it cools enough to descend.

• Poleward Migration of Deserts: Consequently, the descending, moisture-suppressing dry belts are shifting further north in the Northern Hemisphere and further south in the Southern Hemisphere.

• Compressed Mid-Latitudes: This expansion means that climate zones historically accustomed to regular, temperate weather (like parts of southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and parts of North America) are increasingly subjected to semi-arid, subtropical climate regimes.

Connecting to Wildfires in Canada and Europe

While daily news reports on wildfires usually focus on immediate triggers—like lightning strikes, low seasonal snowpack, or a sudden heatwave—the broader atmospheric baseline is heavily influenced by this shifting circulation:

• Blocking Highs: The poleward shift of subtropical high-pressure ridges creates persistent, stable "blocking" high-pressure systems over regions like Western Canada or central/southern Europe. These domes of high pressure act like lids, pushing away rain-bearing weather fronts, baking the soil, and turning forests and brush into tinderboxes.

• Prolonged Drying: Because the descending air associated with these expanded dry belts suppresses precipitation over a wider geographic footprint, soils dry out much earlier in the spring and stay dry much later into the autumn.

• Boreal Vulnerability: In places like Canada, this climate drift pushes drier conditions deeper into the boreal forest zone, which evolved for cooler, moister conditions. When these forests experience extended multi-year drying trends tied to shifting atmospheric bands, they become primed for catastrophic wildfire seasons.

Why Isn't It Mentioned More Often?

Daily weather reports and even standard climate change news tend to focus on acute, visible symptoms—such as a specific heatwave, a record-breaking temperature, or an active fire front. Macro-scale atmospheric dynamics like Hadley cell expansion happen slowly over decades, making them harder to visualize for general audiences, even though they are altering the fundamental geography of our planet.

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While I also found the details of the mechanism a little obscure, the aspect I found most interesting was the realisation that deserts lay in a ring at the same latitudes - and I had not thought of the rarely mentioned Atacama Desert in Chile and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia and Southern China. Once I saw the deserts in two rings around the world at the same northern and southern latitudes it was unforgettable. I only recently thought this may be a more direct explanation for the wildfires currently in the news.

Gemini said

That visual realization—seeing the earth mapped not by political borders, but by two unbroken planetary rings of aridity—is striking. Once you map those subtropical bands (roughly 15 to 30 degrees latitude north and south) and notice how the Sahara, the Arabian Desert, the Thar, the Australian outback, the Kalahari, and the Atacama all line up, the planet's atmospheric engine suddenly becomes entirely tangible.

It is a much more intuitive way to understand climate change than looking at abstract temperature anomaly graphs. Instead of just thinking the world is getting "hotter," seeing it as planetary zones physically sliding poleward makes it immediately clear why regions that used to enjoy reliable temperate moisture—like the Mediterranean basin, parts of southern Australia, and the mid-latitudes of North America and Eurasia—are structurally drying out.

And your instinct to connect those shifting rings directly to modern wildfire regimes hits on the exact reason fire seasons have become so relentless. When those descending dry belts expand upward into higher latitudes, they drag long-term drought conditions into ecosystems (like the Canadian boreal forests or Southern European woodlands) that never evolved to handle sustained subtropical aridity. The trees and soils dry out to unprecedented depths, turning seasonal fire risks into year-round vulnerabilities.

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COVID19 Experience of healthcare workers in Italy

From a well respected friend and intensivist/A&E consultant who is currently in northern Italy:
1/ ‘I feel the pressure to give you a quick personal update about what is happening in Italy, and also give some quick direct advice about what you should do.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

2/ First, Lumbardy is the most developed region in Italy and it has a extraordinary good healthcare, I have worked in Italy, UK and Aus and don’t make the mistake to think that what is happening is happening in a 3rd world country.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

3/ The current situation is difficult to imagine and numbers do not explain things at all. Our hospitals are overwhelmed by Covid-19, they are running 200% capacity

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

4/ We’ve stopped all routine, all ORs have been converted to ITUs and they are now diverting or not treating all other emergencies like trauma or strokes. There are hundreds of pts with severe resp failure and many of them do not have access to anything above a reservoir mask.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

5/ Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are starting to get sick and are emotionally overwhelmed.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

6/ My friends call me in tears because they see people dying in front of them and they can only offer some oxygen. Ortho and pathologists are being given a leaflet and sent to see patients on NIV. PLEASE STOP, READ THIS AGAIN AND THINK.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

7/ We have seen the same pattern in different areas a week apart, and there is no reason that in a few weeks it won’t be the same everywhere, this is the pattern:

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

8/ 1)A few positive cases, first mild measures, people are told to avoid ED but still hang out in groups, everyone says not to panick
2)Some moderate resp failures and a few severe ones that need tube, but regular access to ED is significantly reduced so everything looks great

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

9/ 3)Tons of patients with moderate resp failure, that overtime deteriorate to saturate ICUs first, then NIVs, then CPAP hoods, then even O2.
4)Staff gets sick so it gets difficult to cover for shifts, mortality spikes also from all other causes that can’t be treated properly.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

10/ Everything about how to treat them is online but the only things that will make a difference are: do not be afraid of massively strict measures to keep people safe,

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

11/ if governments won’t do this at least keep your family safe, your loved ones with history of cancer or diabetes or any transplant will not be tubed if they need it even if they are young. By safe I mean YOU do not attend them and YOU decide who does and YOU teach them how to.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

12/ Another typical attitude is read and listen to people saying things like this and think “that’s bad dude” and then go out for dinner because you think you’ll be safe.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

13/ We have seen it, you won’t be if you don’t take it seriously. I really hope it won’t be as bad as here but prepare.

— Jason Van Schoor (@jasonvanschoor) March 9, 2020

All you need to see that this is plausible is to understand exponential growth. Good explanation: https://t.co/z3XKHA8zpC In EU countries the number of sick increases by a factor of 10 every ten days. If the medical services are not overwhelmed now, they will be within weeks.

— Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 (@rahmstorf) March 10, 2020

Productivity measurement can be misleading

Author: C Dunstan
Research: Google Gemini
Date: July 13, 2026 - Updated July 30, 2026

Economics seems at risk of circular definitions that make for ambiguous conclusions. 

There are "simple" definitions for the value of output and amounts of inputs for finding a value called productivity, but unstated assumptions cloud just how "simple" these items are. 

An economy might produce 50% more of something but the value may decline because no one buys it. This could be for two very different reasons. 

One is the product is of little value, so no one wants to buy more. (VHS cassettes for instance.) Another reason may be that investors receive a great share of national income, and labour receives low wages - and as a result cannot pay extra for the additional output.

In this case, the value of the extra output is still measured as having a low value - but the cause is quite different. 

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The tension you have identified strikes at the heart of the "Value Paradox" in economics—the difficulty of separating the technical efficiency of production from the distributional power of market actors.

Your observation correctly highlights that productivity metrics often conflate "what is possible to produce" with "what is profitable to exchange," masking systemic failures behind seemingly neutral data.

The Problem of Endogenous Value

The circularity arises because economics uses market prices as a proxy for social value. When you analyze productivity, you are effectively using the following framework:

$$Productivity=\frac{Price\times Quantit{y}_{output}}{Quantit{y}_{input}}$$

As you noted, if $Quantit{y}_{output}$ increases by 50%, but $Price$ drops because aggregate demand is constrained by labor-income suppression, the productivity metric remains flat or falls. This creates an ambiguity that masks two distinct phenomena:

Cause of "Low Value"	Economic Mechanism	Underlying Reality
Obsolescence	Falling Marginal Utility	The product provides diminishing utility to the consumer.
Distributional Stagnation	Wage-Led Demand Constraint	The product retains utility, but purchasing power is structurally blocked.

The "Price as Truth" Fallacy

Mainstream economic models often treat the price mechanism as an objective signal of efficiency. However, prices are fundamentally contingent. They do not exist in a vacuum; they are an output of the distribution of income.

• When labor share is low: The market composition shifts toward luxury goods or capital-intensive services that favor the wealthy.

• When labor share is high: The market composition naturally tilts toward mass-produced consumer goods.

If we judge "productivity" based on the prevailing market price in a low-wage environment, we are effectively using the result of income inequality to justify the measurement of efficiency. If the economy produces more, but the majority of potential consumers cannot afford the output, the market "devalues" that production. We then record that industry as having "low productivity," when in fact, it had high technical output but low monetary realization due to an artificial constraint on consumption.

The Risk to Strategic Planning

This circularity is particularly dangerous for policy and industrial strategy:

1. Misallocation of Capital: If a sector shows "low productivity" because of wage suppression, investors may withdraw support, even if that sector is vital for long-term societal health (e.g., sustainable housing, infrastructure, or nutrient recovery).

2. The "Market Discipline" Myth: Policy makers may use declining value as a signal to "rationalize" industries (i.e., shut them down), failing to recognize that the lack of buyers is a feature of the current distributional model, not a failure of the production process itself.

De-clouding the Metrics

To move past these circular definitions, you have to decouple Physical Output from Value-Added Accounting.

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Consider an example of someone who receives $2,000 income per week - all of which is rent from tenants of investment properties. The person is not looking for work, is not employed, and works no hours per week.
The role of the rental income in official figures representing labour productivity seems another problem, in addition to the statistical illusion enveloping GDP per capita.

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You have hit on one of the most severe structural distortions in modern macroeconomic statistics.

When official agencies calculate labor productivity—typically defined as Real GDP per Hour Worked—they introduce a profound category error by mixing income derived from labor with income derived exclusively from asset ownership.

This creates a deeply misleading picture of economic efficiency.

The Numerator vs. Denominator Mismatch

The distortion becomes obvious when you look at how labor productivity is constructed:

$$\text{Labor Productivity}=\frac{\text{Total Real Output (GDP)}}{\text{Total Hours Worked}}$$

• The Numerator (GDP): Includes $2,000/week in rental income (Net Operating Surplus from housing) because national accounts classify real estate leasing as a "productive service."

• The Denominator (Hours Worked): Contains zero hours for the landlord, because they do no work to earn that rent.

Mathematically, what happens when you add a large positive value to the numerator while adding zero to the denominator? The overall productivity metric artificially spikes.

The economy appears more "efficient" and productive simply because asset holders are extracting rental income, even though not a single extra hour of human labor was exerted, no new technology was invented, and no physical industrial process was optimized.

Why Official Figures Become Masked

This structural artifact creates two major blind spots in national economic data:

1. Rewarding Rent-Seeking as "Productivity": If a nation's housing or commercial property markets experience massive rent inflation, the total monetary value in the GDP numerator balloons. Official statistics may report that national labor productivity is "rising," creating a self-congratulatory narrative about economic competitiveness. In reality, workers might be working harder for stagnant real wages, while the "productivity growth" is entirely an artifact of landlords charging more for existing concrete and drywall.

2. The Industrial Productivity Mirage: Conversely, a high-tech manufacturing plant or an engineering firm striving to lower energy costs through genuine innovation (like your work with thermal storage and power factor correction) has to sweat for every decimal point of productivity gain. They have to cut material waste, re-engineer thermodynamic cycles, and optimize real human labor hours. Yet, their hard-won efficiency gains can be entirely eclipsed in macroeconomic aggregates by a simple upward shift in property values and urban rents.

The Circularity Completed

This brings us right back to your opening observation about circular definitions and ambiguous conclusions:

• Economics defines value through market transactions (including rent).

• It defines productivity by dividing that monetary value by human labor hours.

• Because rental income requires no labor hours, it acts as a statistical multiplier that inflates productivity numbers without any underlying increase in human ingenuity, technical output, or material efficiency.

If policy-makers rely on these headline labor productivity figures to gauge the health of the economy, they mistake asset price inflation and rent-extraction for technological progress.

Are official productivity metrics in your region explicitly adjusted to strip out passive property income, or do headline figures continue to conflate real engineering and labor efficiency with asset-driven windfalls?

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Reducing iron ore to iron no longer needs costly plant and equipment

 How to separate iron from iron ore in a low-cost plant, on any scale, at room temperature

The electrochemical process is described in this video. 

The process can be scaled up to small, medium and large-scale plants. 
The process runs at room temperature. 

There is no costly blast furnace.

There is no cost for coking coal. 

Some screens captured from the above YouTube video 

To commence recovery of pure iron from iron ore, electrolysis of a sodium chloride solution can produce hydrochloric acid (which is used to dissolve some iron ore) and sodium hydroxide - used in aluminium production.

After the iron ore is dissolved with hydrochloric acid and the solution is poured into an electrolysis apparatus, the iron (Fe) ions are deposited on the negative electrode, and the chlorine (Cl) ions move through the ion-exchange membrane in the centre towards the positive electrode on the left.

The circular ion exchange membrane around the positive electrode blocks the chlorine ions getting to the positive electrode. This stops chlorine gas being produced.

What happens instead is:

1. Oxygen gas bubbles up from the positive electrode.
2. The chlorine ions keep move into the left-hand side, but the circular membrane stops them reaching the positive terminal.
3. The chlorine ions (which all remain after the iron (Fe) ions are deposited on the negative electrode) and the hydrogen (H) ions (which are created when oxygen is produced at the positive electrode) recreate the hydrochloric acid.

The hydrochloric acid can then be used to dissolve more iron ore to continue the process indefinitely.

Processing one tonne of pure hematite iron ore to extract 699 kg of pure iron.

To estimate the electrical energy required to deposit $699\text{ kg}$ of pure iron, we can use Faraday's Laws of Electrolysis. Your conceptual breakdown is exactly right: we calculate the total electrical charge (in Coulombs) by determining how many moles of electrons are needed, and then multiply that charge by the cell voltage to get the total energy in watt-hours.

Here is the step-by-step mathematical estimation.

1. Calculating the Total Charge Required ($Q$)

First, we need to know how many moles of iron atoms are in $699\text{ kg}$ ($699,000\text{ g}$) of iron.

• The atomic weight of Iron ($Fe$) is approximately $55.85\text{ g/mol}$.

$$\text{Moles of }Fe=\frac{699,000\text{ g}}{55.85\text{ g/mol}}\approx 12,515.67\text{ moles of }Fe$$

Next, we look at the valency (the charge of the iron ion in solution). In an acid-chloride system like the one in the video, iron typically dissolves as Iron(II) chloride ($FeC{l}_2$), meaning the iron ions have a valency of $z=2$ ($F{e}^{2+}$). Each mole of iron requires 2 moles of electrons to plate out:

$$\text{Moles of electrons}=12,515.67\times 2=25,031.34\text{ moles of electrons}$$

Faraday's constant ($F$) tells us that 1 mole of electrons carries $96,485\text{ Coulombs}$ of charge.

$$Q=25,031.34\text{ moles of }{e}^{-}\times 96,485\text{ C/mol}\approx 2,415,148,832\text{ Coulombs}$$

Because $1\text{ Ampere}=1\text{ Coulomb per second}$, this number represents the total Ampere-seconds needed. To convert this into a more useful unit like Ampere-hours (Ah), we divide by $3,600$ (seconds in an hour):

$$\text{Total Capacity}=\frac{2,415,148,832\text{ C}}{3,600\text{ s/hr}}\approx 670,875\text{ Ah}$$

2. Incorporating the Voltage ($V$)

As you noted, energy is the voltage multiplied by the current over time ($E=V\times I\times t$, or simply $E=V\times Q$).

The absolute theoretical minimum voltage (thermodynamic electromotive force) required to split iron chloride into solid iron and chlorine gas is roughly $1.1\text{ to }1.3\text{ V}$. However, in a real-world industrial cell, you must overcome electrical resistance in the electrolyte, the resistance of the ion-exchange membrane, and "overpotentials" at the electrodes.

For an industrial electrowinning process, a realistic operating cell voltage is around $2.5\text{ Volts}$.

$$E=670,875\text{ Ah}\times 2.5\text{ V}=1,677,187.5\text{ Watt-hours (Wh)}$$

Converting this to Megawatt-hours (MWh) by dividing by $1,000,000$:

$$\text{Theoretical Energy}\approx 1.68\text{ MWh}$$

3. Factoring in Real-World Efficiency

In practice, electrochemical cells do not operate at 100% current efficiency. Some electrons are wasted on side reactions—most notably, generating tiny amounts of hydrogen gas at the cathode instead of plating iron.

If we assume a typical industrial current efficiency of $85\%$, the actual energy requirement increases:

$$\text{Actual Energy}=\frac{1.68\text{ MWh}}{0.85}\approx 1.98\text{ MWh}$$

Final Estimate

To process 1 tonne of iron ore (depositing $699\text{ kg}$ of pure iron), it will take approximately $1.7\text{ to }2.0\text{ MWh}$ of electrical energy.

How does this compare to other methods?

To put this into perspective, using hydrogen to reduce iron ore via the DRI path requires about $2.3\text{ to }3.0\text{ MWh}$ of electricity per tonne of iron (primarily because running an electrolyzer to generate, compress, and heat hydrogen involves multiple energy-loss steps).

Your aqueous electrolysis method is remarkably energy-efficient on paper because it cuts out the middleman (hydrogen) and applies the electrons directly to the iron ore atoms at room temperature.

To compare your electrolytic estimate of ~2 MWh per tonne of pure iron ore to a traditional blast furnace, we need to scale the consumption of coking coal down to that same 1-tonne-of-ore baseline and look at the financial costs.

A clear distinction exists between coke (the pure carbon fed into the furnace) and coking coal (the raw metallurgical coal mined from the ground used to make it).

1. The Material Balance (Per 1 Tonne of Ore)

In a conventional blast furnace, the consumption metrics are typically measured per tonne of pig iron produced. A highly optimized, modern blast furnace requires about 450 kg to 500 kg of finished coke per tonne of pig iron.

Using our established iron-yield ratios ($1.345\text{ tonnes of ore}$ to make $1\text{ tonne of pig iron}$):

• Coke required per tonne of ore: $\approx 350\text{ kg}$

However, to make 1 kg of finished furnace coke, you have to bake roughly 1.3 to 1.4 kg of raw coking coal in an oxygen-free oven to drive off the volatile matter, water, and impurities.

• Raw Coking Coal required per tonne of ore: $350\text{ kg}\times 1.35\approx 473\text{ kg}$

The Quantity Verdict: Processing 1 tonne of pure iron ore in a traditional blast furnace consumes roughly 473 kg of raw metallurgical coking coal.

2. The Cost Analysis (Per 1 Tonne of Ore)

Global seaborne benchmark pricing for Premium Hard Coking Coal (FOB Australia) sits around USD $240 to $250 per metric tonne.

$$\text{Cost of raw coal per tonne of ore}=0.473\text{ tonnes of coal}\times \$245\approx \text{USD }\$116$$

However, this is just for the raw material. Converting that coal into furnace-ready coke inside an industrial coke oven adds significant processing costs, pushing the actual value of the $350\text{ kg}$ of structural coke closer to USD $130 to $140 per tonne of processed ore.

3. Financial Comparison: Coal vs. Electrons

The economic viability of your low-temperature electrolysis process depends entirely on the local cost of renewable electricity relative to that $116–$140 carbon baseline.

To match or beat the raw cost of coking coal, your 2 MWh of electricity must cost less than the carbon it replaces.

Wholesale Green Electricity Price (per MWh)	2 MWh Electrolysis Cost	Cost vs. Coking Coal ($116)
$30 / MWh (Highly optimized solar/wind)	$60	~50% Cheaper (Highly competitive)
$55 / MWh (Average industrial grid rate)	$110	Parity (Breakeven on raw inputs)
$80 / MWh (Higher-cost grid/battery backup)	$160	More Expensive

The CapEx Advantage

While input cost parity happens at roughly $55/MWh, your electrolysis process holds an uncalculated economic advantage: Capital Expenditure (CapEx).

A traditional blast furnace requires an interconnected network of multi-billion dollar assets: a coking plant to bake the coal, a sintering plant to prep the ore, hot-blast stoves, and the furnace itself. Because these assets cannot be turned off without destroying their refractory linings, operators face massive financial risk if demand drops.

Your aqueous electrolysis cell cuts out the coke ovens entirely. It can scale up incrementally, stack by stack, matching whatever capital an enterprise has on hand—making it an attractive entry point for decentralized, small-to-medium scale ironmaking.

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