ARCTIC SEA-ICE –2021 Minimum Shows Growing Ice–

The graph above says it all. This year has the highest sea-ice minimum of the past six years. The extent of sea-ice is not decreasing. It is increasing. The so-called “Death Spiral” is spiraling backwards, going the wrong way. The Alarmist’s tidy theory is confronted by the fact reality is not tidy. Reality is elegant, but we tend to see the elegance as untidy.

Reality messes up our preconceptions, and embarrasses us by, rather than affirming our pet theories, instead confirming that our personal confirmation-bias is a reality, by showing us what-we-were-sure-of was wrong, wrong, wrong, yet again.

It is rough being mortal and flawed. But it is rougher when you think you are beyond reproach.

It must be rough to be a sea-ice Alarmist, right now. For nearly two decades they’ve been pounding their drum about the sea-ice vanishing, (and calling people who hesitated to join their crusading parade cruel things, such as “a denier,”) but this year the sea-ice disobeyed them and increased in a rather big way.

How big? Well. Here is the current DMI volume graph:

It looks like volume has increased by roughly a thousand cubic kilometers over the last year. How much is that? Well, imagine an ice cube that is 6.2 miles wide, 6.2 miles tall, and 6.2 miles deep. But of course, like a pat of butter spread out over a slice of toast, the increase is spread over the Arctic Sea and is not a nice, big cube, easy to measure. But it is considerable.

This increase puts a rather gaping hole in the hull of the Death Spiral Theory, which presupposes that what we shall witness is a “positive feedback.” IE: Less-ice will encourage the melting of more-ice. But last year we had less-ice, and rather than encouraging less-ice, the exact opposite occurred. Rather than less-ice we have more-ice.

According to the ideas behind the “Death Spiral”, this is impossible. Why? Because that theory assumes less-ice will mean more of the Arctic Ocean does not have sunlight bounced back to outer space by the “albedo” of white sea-ice, and the Arctic Ocean will instead absorb the same sunlight due to the different “albedo” of dark waters. Therefore, the simplistic idea assumes more open water will lead to warmer waters which will melt more ice, which in turn will lead to more waters exposed to sunlight which will become even warmer and melt even more ice. It is a theoretical vicious-cycle and “positive feedback”, but it isn’t happening.

Why not? Because the initial theory was way, way too simplistic. The “Death Spiral” theory was tidy, and quite correct in terms of a single variable, but arctic sea-ice involves more than one variable. I have never bothered count how many variables are involved. I can’t tell you whether three or thirteen or 47.34 variables are involved, but I know the initial theory was so focused on its tidy explanation it was blind to other explanations, other variables, other ideas.

For eight years this blog has pointed out the other ideas. I have typed many thousands, perhaps millions, of words, explaining why the Death Spiral idea is too simple. But the simpletons are still warning everyone, “Sea-ice is melting to an unpresented degree, and this will end the world as we know it.”

That is why the graph above says it all. It says, “Sorry, Charlie. Sea ice is not melting to an unprecedented degree. It is increasing.”

I would like to discuss why. This would be actual science. It would venture into the elegance of Reality. It would traverse the multicolored canyons of history, witnessing the comings and goings of sea-ice and the comings and goings of men who dared sail ships in such a sea, some to profit and some to doom. One soon sees more than “albedo” is involved. Huge and wonderful powers are involved, ranging from the moods of our sun to the eruptions of our earth to the shifting of massive currents of warm and frigid waters to the undulations of our winds. I love simply describing what open eyes observe, for, even if it defies understanding, it evokes wonder.

But I’ve spent eight years doing that and it hasn’t penetrated the thick skulls of Alarmists. What do they do instead? They erase my comments on their websites. They ban me, on social platforms. They do not want to talk about it.

Therefore, I will conclude this short post with a brief diatribe about the difference between being tidy and being elegant.

It may display a certain loyalty if you stick to your guns despite an onslaught of evidence that you are wrong, but past a certain point you are no longer being faithful, and no longer are refusing to be discouraged by doubts, but rather have stepped over the line and are denying the Truth.

Truth is beauty, according to the poet John Keats, and according to other people Truth is God. Therefore, if you are picking a fight with Truth you are picking a fight with what is All-powerful. You are up against Omniscience and Omnipotence. The odds don’t look too good, if you do this thing.

Nevertheless, people are doing it. They are braying “The Big Lie” in various ways and forms, as if they can overpower the actual Truth.

This will not end well. Even engineers, who try their best to stick to Truth, (because otherwise structures may come crashing to earth), speak of “Murphy’s Law”, which states that if anything can go wrong it will go wrong. It follows that, if you don’t try your best to stick to the Truth, you discover “Murphy’s Escalation,” which states if you don’t even attempt to stand by Truth, much more will go wrong.

Much more is, in fact, now going wrong. The people who think they “won” the last election, (perhaps by altering the Truth of the actual tally of votes), are increasingly exposed as losers, for they are divorced from Truth, and all their efforts are embarrassing failures. But how can they succeed, when they refuse to admit their “agenda” or “narrative” or “postulate” or “hypothesis” may seem tidy, but has been disproven by the elegance of Truth?

In my next post I hope to show the elegance of Truth, as displayed by simply observing sea-ice without any sort of “confirmation bias.” But the point of this post is that “confirmation bias” has made Alarmists look like dunderheads, and that if they stick to their guns they are insisting on being dunderheaded.

Alarmists stated they had rock-hard evidence that the Pole would become ice-free, perhaps as early as 2016, and went on to say we should greatly alter our lives, due to this rock-hard evidence. But, rather than ice- free, the ice at the pole is (this year) increasing. They have lost their excuse for the rest of us greatly altering our lives. But they stick to their guns. We must greatly alter our lives, even if there is no reason to do so.

Sorry, Charlie. No one is buying it. And when no one is buying it, a salesman can either admit he is full of bull and back down, or completely lose self-control, and resort to extraordinary ways and means of selling his unsellable garbage.

What extraordinary means? Well, basically it involves a salesman, upon discovering no one wants to buy his garbage, whipping out a revolver and shrieking, “If you don’t buy my garbage, I will shoot you!”

Obviously, this is the behavior of a salesman who has lost control, but who seeks to gain control by bullying with a gun. Such a loss of control to gain control would be laughable, were it not the mentality of despots and dictators, and certain politicians who like the word, “mandate.”

In terms of arctic-sea-ice, such a “mandate” would state you must believe the North Pole was becoming ice-free, and if you looked at the actual facts and said, “it isn’t”, they could put you in jail.

It is behavior so absurd and ridiculous that it is bound to fail. It is the hysteria of people who have lost control, thinking they are in control.

It is nuts.

For some reason I can’t claim to understand, the nuts are at the helm, for little while. They, who are out of control, think they control, with their guns. But guns can’t hide the Truth, which is that they are out of control, can’t even control themselves, and can’t face the Truth. They are not cruising for a bruising; they are cruising for a catastrophe. Pity such people. They do not know what they do, when they crucify Truth. They have no idea of the consequences they will reap, sowing such seed.

As for me, there is only one “mandate” worthy of bowing to. It is called “Truth”. And the small truth I am sure of is: The arctic ocean is once again not ice-free, and in fact the sea-ice is increasing.

Duh. Any dolt can see this is true. But, when speaking such truth can get me banned from Facebook and Twitter, I must make a choice: Will I be socially popular, or will I be honest? Will I bow to nuts, or stand by the Truth?

Personally, I would rather stand by the Truth, for I believe that when you stand by the Truth, the Truth stands by you, [and Truth is a very fine (and also [in my experience] very loving) Power to have at your side.]

Amen.

LOCAL VIEW: Cherry’s For October

The news tends to aggravate me so much I’ve decided it is bad for my health.

One conspiracy theory I toy with is that politicians and the media are attempting to drive healthy people insane by being utterly idiotic and then pretending it isn’t idiotic to be idiotic, but rather it is idiotic to call idiocy what it is: Idiotic. If this is their sinister plot, it is succeeding. But I counter them with a counter-attack. I ignore them.

Or…well…I don’t utterly ignore them. For example, when Fraudulent Biden’s idiotic energy policies threaten to put the price of home heating through the roof, I figure I should find a different way to heat my home. Either that, or start knitting like crazy and muff myself in yarn.

It actually isn’t that hard to find an alternative to taxable energy, for I live in an area with lots of trees. It also isn’t that hard for me to burn wood, for I’ve done it all my life. I don’t need to buy a wood stove for I already have four. If you search my website for something I wrote back on August 7,  2013 called “Firewood”,  you’ll see even back then, I was a veteran.

I could write a book about the advantages of burning free, local wood, compared to using fossil fuels and enriching others.

Also, another conspiracy theory I toy with is that the idiots in control want to get rid of old people, because old people are not idiotic enough. They want to get rid of them by freezing them to death. Old folk like me can’t withstand the cold like we did when young and hot-blooded, and the majority of old folk do not die in the summer, due to Global Warming, but in the winter because their fixed-incomes can’t pay for inflated food costs, and also inflated heating costs.

The politicians promised, decades ago, that we were taxed in various ways because we were too irresponsible to save up on our own, and they were going help us by saving for us, so that when we were old and gray we’d be taken care of. Now politicians are annoyed, for too many of us have become old and gray, and too many quite understandably expect to be cared for. However the politicians blew the money they collected years ago. How? Basically by buying votes, often from refugees who never paid a penny into the supposed “savings for old age.” So now there are no savings, but there are a lot of good and honest old people who have every right to expect to be cared for, at least in a rudimentary manner. Yet some idiotic politicians are annoyed by the elder’s request that politicians fulfill their vows. In the case of the frailest old-timers, the cost of fulfilling vows is over $100,000.00 a year. If the politicians had kept their hands off the money, it would be there. But they didn’t, and to the worst of these unscrupulous politicians the evil idea occurs that, If you just bump off ten “useless old individuals”, you have “saved” a million dollars. And, if you intentionally introduce coronavirus into homes for the elderly, (like a number of governors did), you can have ten thousand die, and “save” a billion.

In actual fact you have lost much that money can’t buy. You have lost people who have decades of experience, and are not idiots. But some only value idiocy. Such people are the lunatics who are currently running the asylum.

Fortunately (for me) after being burned when young I never trusted the government, or any employer. I was not attracted to the idea that in some imaginary future the people who took my money would give it back. My sad experience was that people are selfish, and even when they mean well they tend to forget to pay-back. Even in the break-rooms of ordinary workplaces, where an honor-system asked folk to pay for the coffee they drank, people tended to only put a quarter in the coffee-can for every dollar they drank. (Oh sure, they might grandly put a five in at some point, but the memory of that five strangely blinded them to the following sixty days when they put in nothing).

Me? I’m (occasionally) not like the others, and am amazingly generous, (especially when it comes to rotton poetry), but many times in my life, after being generous, I have found myself unrewarded, sleeping in my car, cold, and hungry. This does tend to focus the mind wondrously on basic needs.

One need which privileged people with dark skins don’t know about, because God blessed them with warm homelands, is the curse poor, disadvantaged white people know, called “Winter”. It can kill you in an hour, easily. Therefore warmth is one of those basic needs the mind focuses wondrously upon. You cannot wait for a government check. You need to be warm right away, right now.

Years ago I faced this basic failure of others to tend to my needs. As a father of five, with a wife depending on me, and cold weather coming on, I turned to the government for help, and it did its best, which was a comical failure. (This is a funny story, hopefully for some future post.) So then I realized: It was up to me.

It’s amazing what you can do when you have to. I scavenged firewood like crazy, and learned a truism: You are likely to get more heat cutting wood for eight hours than you will get spending eight hours in the waiting rooms of bureaucrats.

And thirty years later, this is what I fall back on. The bureaucrats have basically gone berserk, and I doubt very much they care a hoot for old fossils like me, (no matter what they palaver), so it seems the best strategy I can enact, as winter approaches, is to gather wood.

One nice thing about firewood, in New Hampshire, is that it is basically free. It is all over the place. All you pay is your own effort. Of course, this involves a good work-out, but you would pay to have a good work-out at a gym, but this work-out doesn’t charge you. It actually pays you with free home-heating, and also warms you on cold days even before you start the fire.

Besides woodstoves, my home does have a propane heater. However it broke down in 1992 and I never could afford to replace it (with a far more efficient furnace) until around 2012. So what does that show? It shows that for twenty years I did not pay utility companies for heat in the winter. I did not support “Big Oil”. I did not support “Arab Emirates”.  No politics were involved; no young American men had to die in a foreign land to heat my home. All I needed to do was cut wood.

Years later, this is what I fall back on. Furthermore, I have an advantage I didn’t have thirty years ago: The local folk know I will not mind if they skip the bother of hauling logs far away, and instead just dump them at the edge of my yard. This would seldom have happened thirty years ago, but logs are not as valuable as they once were. I assume it is because many have shifted from wood stoves to “pellet” stoves.

Personally, I am not certain it is worth it to reduce logs to pellets before you burn them. I would like to see a scientific comparison: How much does it cost to split a log into firewood, compared to how much it costs to reduce a log to pellets, and then, how much heat do you get from firewood, compared to how much heat you get from pellets. Maybe pellets are more efficient? I don’t know. It seems to me most burn pellets because it allows them more free time than splitting and lugging firewood allows. For them it is a good deal, but a cost-analysis might show they are paying more.

Me? I can’t afford to replace my four wood-stoves with pellet stoves, and therefore I’m an anachronism, because pellets do not matter to me. Staying warm matters. I need wood! And therefore I do my own sort of cost analysis, in terms of the exercise I get, and the time I get to spend outside, and the thinking splitting wood seems to stimulate, and (to me) burning wood and not pellets seems the better deal.

Recently my next-door neighbor had to to cut down a cherry tree because it threatened electric lines, and, rather than paying someone to haul wood elsewhere, he assumed I would be grateful to get the wood for free. I walked out one morning to find the logs neatly stacked close to where the the cherry tree had grown, which happens to be where I split my wood.

I was immediately grateful, and it wasn’t merely because the wood was free. It was because the wood was cherry, and as I looked at the reddish wood I immediately began to hear the voices of old Yankees echoing in the lanes of my memory. Not that I was actually hearing voices, like a madman, but those old-timers really knew a lot about wood, and they liked to compare notes as they worked.

Back when I was young there were far fewer power tools, and something about hand tools seemed to make men more intimate with boards, and with the various sorts of logs and lumber, and the differences between “green” wood and “seasoned” wood, and “clean grained” wood and “knotty” wood, and “live knots” versus “dead knots” versus wood that was “burled”. They could go on at great length about what many now only have a four-letter-word for, “wood”.

Not that I appreciated their knowledge. Men always seem able to bore the uninterested by going on ad infinitum about car-parts or computer-programs or whatever it is that they work with, and when young I was often uninterested. In fact I think I only became interested by watching, rather than listening. Something about the way an old-time-carpenter would examine several boards before choosing the one he wanted made me curious. What was he seeing? What was he looking for? Then the way the wood seemed to so easily peel away under his plane, when I had no such luck when using a plane, increased my curiosity.

Some old-timers looked too cross to question, but I initially was naïve and cheerful enough to pipe questions, and learned that, if I could withstand the initial grumpy torrent of abuse, wherein I heard my ignorance described in the most scornful and graphic terms, I sometimes learned those old-timers were quite glad to tell me what they knew about wood. In fact it could be difficult to get them to stop.

There were a couple of young men, Robert Bryant and Marshall Dodge, who, back in the 1960’s when I was young, blundered into making a good living simply by doing impressions of old New Englanders, playing the characters of “Bert and I.”  As I recall one told the stories in a down-east Maine accent, and the other made the sound effects. They cut a humor-album, and what surprised them initially was that their album was a slight one-hit-wonder and they got nice royalty checks. What surprised them later was that the checks didn’t stop. Their popularity didn’t fade. So they made a total of four humor-albums, but people thirsted for more. Despite the fact they were relatively young and were not earning their living by working with their hands, their ability to imitate the way old geezers talk likely made old geezers wonder, “Why do they get all the glory, and not us?”

In any case, when young I liked “Bert and I”, and to some degree also liked old geezers.  I wish I had listened more than I did, and had asked questions I didn’t, yet now that I myself am an old geezer I find my brains are the repository for an extraordinary amount of trivia I picked up along the way, and a lot has to do with firewood.

I also know the old-timers valued wood in a way we don’t, and there were forgotten rules about what you should use as lumber, an what was to be used as firewood. Those men likely roll over in their graves, seeing what we cut up for firewood or even grind up for pellets. They are likely appalled by every tree that falls in the woods and lays unused. The fact the ferocity of California forest fires is largely fueled by fallen trees and dead brush is something they could not imagine, for the forests of New England were well groomed when they were in charge, for they had a use for just about every fallen twig.

When you see video of California forest fires, does it ever seem odd to you that many in California are worried about an “energy crisis”? How much firewood do they waste, with their refusal to clean up their woods? If they cleaned up their woods, and used the deadwood to fuel a power plant (with scrubbers in its smokestacks), maybe they’d get energy, and we in the east wouldn’t have our skies dirtied and our sunlight dimmed by their stupid fires. However I am veering into the idiocy of the Elite. Let me get back on track.

Where was I? Oh yes, a pile of cherry wood neatly stacked on the edge of my property.

I recalled the voices of old-timers, and recalled one odd thing about cherry is that it is unlike other woods. Most wood, when green, has a certain spring and bounce to it, and it is easier to to split such logs as they dry out. Cherry is the opposite. Some process I do not comprehend causes cherry wood to bind and knit more firmly, the older it gets. For the old-timers, who used cherry to make beautiful furniture, this likely created rules for when to use “green” cherry and when to use “seasoned” cherry, but all I cared about was how to split the logs. Basically the rule is: “The sooner the better.” So, despite the heat of the summer, I attacked the wood. I’m glad I started early, for even green the wood can withstand a geezer’s first whack.

Another thing I recalled geezers saying about Cherry is that it burns “cool” compared to most hardwoods. Only Birch and Poplar burns “cooler”, (and Poplar is called “gopher wood” because it burns so quickly that even as you put it in the stove you need to “go for” more).

It seemed smart to first work on a wood that burns “cool”, because that is what you want, on the first frosty mornings of late September. You certainly don’t want a wood that burns “hot”, the king of which is Black Locust. Black Locust wood is so dense it is hard to light, but once going it is the opposite of Poplar. Poplar coals turn to ashes and go out in a twinkling of the eye, but a bed of Black Poplar coals burns all night. Therefore on a September morning a Black Locust fire would turn your stove into a furnace, as the morning chill became a memory, and it would cause unnecessary sweltering in the home by midmorning. Black locust, and oak, and even maple, should be reserved for sub-zero days in January. Cherry is for September and October.

A final thing I remembered from old-timers is that split cherry smells good, while other wood, and especially Red Oak, (which old-timers called piss-oak), does not smell as good. Therefore, if you want your wife happy you don’t want to stack “piss oak” in the box by the stove in her living room. You can argue all you want about how having the wood indoors will dry the wood and make a warmer living room; piss-oak is not what wives desire as an air freshener. But cherry? Cherry you can stack, and you don’t get in trouble. And so it is, before our first fire of the fall, the wood boxes of the stoves are stacked with sweet-smelling cherry. The wood is getting drier and drier, and the first fires will burn bright and clean without hissing.

Why do I tell you this? I suppose it is because it demonstrates a process wherein the knowledge of prior generations has a good effect on the present tense.  I do this to fly in the face of so-called “cancel culture.” I do this because it is a big mistake to attempt to tear down statues and erase the past. It is a mistake because our elders may have been imperfect, but they knew a lot more than we do about a number of things, and if we insist upon ignoring them we are insisting upon being ignorant.

Santayana put it well, in this manner:

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve, and no direction is set for possible improvement. And when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”