DRIED UP ALL WET

Things have gotten very weird in a hurry. People insist upon being confused. Basic, fundamental, scientific realities are now open to debate. For example, are you a man or a woman?

Forgive me, but this seems like an amazingly stupid thing to argue about. As a “child care professional” I see very small children are very aware if they are born into a male or female body. Their “science” is simple. As they gain coordination, their hands become able to feel between their legs, and they understand, “This birth I am born into a male (or female) body.” If a two-year-old can arrive at such a simple conclusion, how amazingly stupid are those who can’t?

This stupidity has been a sort of blindness which has ripened like a cataract over the years, (and hopefully now can be operated upon and removed.) It is due to a simple mathematical equation: Science + Politics = Politics – Science. (Also: Science + Politics = Politics.)

A true scientist in some senses is like a poet, in that his thirst for Truth tends to cause him to neglect fashion and proper grooming, and he tends to walk about in a disheveled state with a wild gleam in his eye. Also, he tends to be broke, and unattractive to women, or at least women who desire money, and consequently he tends to feel lonely and sorry for himself, which leaves him open to temptation. He (or she) may be susceptible to a bribe. Money may not slake his (or her) thirst for Truth, but may gratify his (or her) hankering for blonds.

That is where politics steps in, for politicians often deal in short, sound-bite solutions that sound good but are not deeply thought out. This is not a problem when the politician surrounds himself with people who do think deeply, and also is a politician willing to stand corrected. One of Winston Churchill’s aides once said something along the lines of, “Winnie has a hundred ideas a day, and three are good ones.” Churchill’s genius (in part) lay in being able to stand being corrected ninety-seven times a day without any loss of confidence (which some mistook as arrogance). Unfortunately, many politicians lack such genius.

Sadly, there are all too many politicians who so treasure their shallow sound-bite solutions that they become ruled by a dogma which is not feasible. Their focus is power, and they seek to overpower all who seek to correct them. Some scientists they bribe, and some scientists they bully, and some scientists they ostracize, but, in the end, they don’t stand corrected but instead they fall uncorrected; in which case they fall prey to stupidity.

I saw the stupidity a long, long time ago, when watching very intelligent minds burn out on drugs around Harvard Square in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Back then Harvard and MIT looked for merit in applicants, and the brains being burned out were brilliant. They were different from the brains of a good-hearted but very average lout. Where a lout on drugs merely commented, “Wow, man. Wow,” these youths with IQ’s of 160 flashed like setting suns, and articulated all sorts of amazing ideas, with around three out of every hundred ideas good ones.

Back in those pre-stupidity days there were time-tested ways of debating, and “peer-reviewing”, a brilliant-sounding idea to see if it was a good one. This was done formally in carefully written papers, but also occurred informally among students over drinks. The informal debates could get wonderfully rowdy at times, but the general assumption at that time was that everyone was interested in the same thing: IE: the Truth. It may sound prudish in our age of fraud and corruption, but the idea of intentionally lying was beyond the conception of many. Lying was simply not how the game was played.

I was privileged to be a younger person, eavesdropping on many of these debates. Initially I was a little pitcher with big ears listening to my parent’s generation. Later I became a little squirt listening to the societies of three older siblings. I basically shut up, and just listened. In general I learned far more from such situations than from any class in school.

Besides the topics at hand, I learned there were two sides to any debate. On one hand there was the person who dreamed up a new idea. On the other hand there was the person who tried to shoot it down in flames.

I tended to side with the dreamer. Some ideas were sound, such as the idea continents drifted, while others were not so sound, such as the idea you could invent a “dark light” which would direct a beam of darkness in the manner a flashlight directs a beam of light. But soundness didn’t matter to me. I liked the inspiration, the “high” of dreaming.

I didn’t like the “down” of skeptics, disbelievers who used cold facts to turn happy, buoyant balloons into blazing Hindenburgs crashing in disaster. To be a “down” seemed rude to me; it was far more polite to be a “high”. I did not like disagreeable people and preferred agreeable people.

Of course, Truth doesn’t care if you agree or disagree with It. Truth remains true even if the entire world denies it. And here’s the most mysterious thing: While people say, “Truth hurts”, in actual fact Truth is the most agreeable of all agreeable things. (However, you’ll have to trust me on this, for now.)

People say, “Truth hurts”, predominantly because their pride is wounded when their “high” is shot from the sky and becomes a “Hindenburg.” One moment they feel like a genius, and the next they feel like a fool and a laughingstock, “in error.” When egos are wounded in this manner, especially among young college students who are drinking or drugged, the subject can be dragged down from the pinnacles of Truth to the swamps of ill will and vengeance, all because of “hurt feelings”. Vanity leads people astray.

One knew they were completely astray when “hurt feelings” became the focus. Debates forgot the Truth, and instead became about who could make the other guilty. Guilty of what? Guilty of being a fool and a laughingstock. “In error.”

That happened to be what I usually was, as the youngest person in the room, more often than not. `Even the most stupid-seeming laughingstock in a debate could wheel upon me, should I laugh at their discomfiture, and snarl, “What are you laughing at, pea-brain?” And what could I say? The Truth was I was likely five to ten years younger than they, (for example aged fifteen when they were twenty-five), and in Truth I was a pea-brain, compared to them.

It was in some ways an unenviable position to be in, but in another it was a great blessing. It was a curse because “my feelings were hurt” and I could waste a lot of time licking the wounds of self-pity, but it was a blessing because being at the very bottom of the pecking order, a scapegoat even scapegoats could scape, made me aware how stupid the whole process was. It was a sort of blame game that wasted time and made no sense.

It would have been nice if, at that point, some wise adult had stepped in and stated, “It is wrong for them to treat you as an object of ridicule. They should treat you as a young mind, eager to learn, and as a potential protégé.” But of course, that didn’t happen. Instead I was repelled from the college-minded, into the travail of what I suppose you could call The School Of Hard Knocks, but what also might be called The School Of The Most Blessed, for in some ways I skipped a lot of the bother of the blame game.

How it happened is hard to say. I really can’t explain it, except to say Truth is the most agreeable of all agreeable things.

Someone told me, around thirty-seven years ago, something like, “When you point at others, three of your fingers are pointing back at you.” Someone else ruthlessly stated, around thirty-six years ago, “You are just blaming the world for being about to suffer an environmental collapse, because, if the world ends, it excuses you from having to get a Real Job”. Lastly, someone I respected greatly said, for the tenth time, around thirty-six years ago, simply, but with impressive authority and strength, “Don’t blame.”

I’m not sure why, but shifting away from blame brought a greater clarity to my thought. Rather than squealing about whether “my side” or “the other side” was “to blame”, I felt more able to focus on what the problem actually was.

I then noticed something odd. Often it is the people “to blame” who come up with solutions to problems, rather than the people who do all the blaming.

It seemed, for example, that the people who built power plants were more familiar with how power plants work, and therefore were better equipped to engineer improvements. Meanwhile, the people who merely blamed, squawking, “Your smoke is pollution!” never really lifted a finger. Blaming was not what created smoke-stack-scrubbers; the solution came through focusing on what the problem actually was.

Ask yourself, “Do I focus on what the problem actually is, or politics?”

When I was especially young, more than fifty years ago, to focus-on-what-a-problem-actually-was turned out to be difficult for me, as I was prone to running away from problems.

This escapism actually is a bit humorous to look back upon. In my youth a rock group called “The Jefferson Airplane” changed its name to “Jefferson Starship”, because they also wanted to run away. They planned to hijack NASA’s first interplanetary spacecraft, and head off into the void with poets and musicians and….um….mechanics and engineers. (I think they added “mechanics and engineers” because, even in their LSD-addled ambitions, someone understood the spacecraft they hijacked might develop engine problems, and at that point a poet would be of little use. You might need someone who could focus on what the problem actually was, and who could fix it.)

I think some of those Baby-boomers either took too much LSD, or never grew up, but they never got the memo about the importance of mechanics and engineers. And now they are old fossils in the “Swamp”, utterly engrossed in hijacking a different starship, (namely the United States), even though they haven’t got a clue how to run the thing, should they ever gain complete control. They are lost in some strange dream where, should they gain control, “mechanics and engineers” will magically appear and be servants who will do whatever they command, even if what they command is physically impossible.

You should notice I was careful to add the word “physically”. Some amazing things are spiritually possible, which are not taught at institutes of technology. For example, Jesus demonstrated it is possible to walk on water, and Saint Peter demonstrated he could follow, (albeit somewhat clumsily). Does this mean we should sink all our shipping, because such a physical dependence on ships is holding us back, spiritually?

I think not, for thousands of ships have sunk over the centuries, and you hardly ever hear of even a single passenger being freed from their dependence on lifeboats to such a degree that they could stroll blithely across the waves to safety on shore. In fact people usually drown.

In like manner, perhaps we ought not sink the “ship” of fossil fuels, so smugly certain freedom from such dependence will allow us to “walk on water” and create a life free of pollution. What the actual result may be is: Many people will drown.

Unfortunately, the smugly-certain lack such pragmatism. They tend to see in political terms, and envision Caesar crossing the Rubicon and burning all the bridges behind him. (As soon as Caesar crossed that river he was under the death penalty, as were all his troops. The Rubicon truly was “a point of no return”. There was no going back.) It was a daring step from safety to danger, and won Julius the crown.

All the stuff modern Rubicon-crossers are smugly-certain about is myopically focused upon power; they want to be “dictators for life” like Caesar became, forgetful of how Caesar died, daggered to death in the very hallways of power he lusted to abide in.

The people lusting for power now are ignoring fundamental realities, in their eagerness to control. In their desire to forbid fossil fuels (which allow liberty) they instead lust to make all electric (which controls all with the leashes of power lines and cords). To achieve this end they ask for the impossible from the “mechanics and engineers” whom they deem mere servants, mere peons who must do what they command. (But who can’t.)

The powerful are asking for the impossible, and, when reality hits home, the powerful are likely to face the wrath of a starved and frozen populace whom they, as powerful leaders, failed to serve and to protect. Then they, who were so swift to blame fossil fuels, (and to also blame any who said fossil fuels might have advantages), are liable to see an avalanche of blame come crashing back upon them. Some call this “rebounding Karma”. I call it the blame game.

The saddest example of such “rebounding Karma” I’ve learned of is the Christmas present the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu received in 1989. The poor fellow was so clueless about the rage he had created that rather than Christmas carols he sung communist anthems as he was marched to the wall and turned to face the firing squad.

To be honest, what the Swamp has set out to accomplish looks to me like it is worse than a detour. If it was a detour it would eventually get back to the right route, but the Swamp’s plots look like what the self-described “genius” Wile E. Coyote is known for: Inevitable Disaster.

Such cartoons get tiresome after too many episodes; one wearies of anvils always falling upon Wile’s genius. One yearns to just get down to earth, and down to business, and face what the problems actually are.

In the American Southwest one major problem is drought, for the area is basically a desert. Therefore the primary solution (get it?) for watering crops is not rain, but is irrigation, practiced even by the ancient, indigenous populations. The first hints of agricultural habitation exist 2000 years BCE, and the importance of digging canals to irrigate crops was apparent to inhabitants even before the culture described as the Hohokan appeared around 200 BE.

The Hohokan deserve an encyclopedia, as a people, and a remnant may still exist today as modern tribes, but they suffered a crash around the year 1350 for reasons that likely involve climate change, but likely also involved some failure of their leadership.

Such ups and downs are inevitable when a civilization such as theirs exists five times as long as the United States has existed.

Just as we had our Great Depression, the Hohokan had their mysterious equivalents, more than once. For example: A sort of capital city archeologists dub “Snaketown” was abandoned (with some buildings burned), even as the rest of the land prospered, around 1100 CE, and we know next to nothing of why. (I like to think some leaders got too smugly certain.) Over two centuries later a more recent downturn of their fortunes likely involved not drought, but flooding rains, which dug deep gullies which put the water levels of their rivers below the inlets to their vast system of irrigation. Faced with a massive engineering challenge, it seems likely that most of the people instead chose to migrate elsewhere.

Far more could be said; I only broach the topic of these past people to stress two things. First, the ups and downs of these people had nothing to do with white Europeans (at least before 1500), and second, floods, as well as droughts, were a reality that challenged them.

The situation in Phoenix today is not really all that different from what the Hohokan culture faced at its peak. A so-called “overpopulation” thrived/thrives in a desert that seemed incapable of feeding so many, but the genius of the society allowed/allows the people to live good lives. Just as the Hohokan households held shells from distant seashores and jewels from distant mountains, modern Pheonix holds much that isn’t created locally, but is brought in by trade from places far away. Likewise, just as Hohokan culture suffered a downfall when its irrigation systems were not adequately maintained, the millions of people now happy in Phoenix could suffer, if our modern systems are not adequately maintained.

I hope you can see where I am going with this. What is important is to-focus-on-what-the-problem-actually-is, and not on some irrelevant topic. The problem is not whether one race owes another race because of “blame”, or whether driving a car that runs on fossil fuel is to “blame” for both droughts and floods. That stuff is just the blame game. The real problems are more down to earth: How are we handling the gift we are given, called water.

I am no expert on water management, but I do feel I should try to be an educated voter. In pursuit of such education I should be able to turn to the media to be fed the news, but we all shake our heads over what has become of our media. The media has basically become screaming meemies. Like an alcoholic in need of a drink, they see worms crawling from the woodwork and are reduced to hysteria by the slightest drought or slightest flood. Not helpful. So I have to do research on my own.

The irrigation systems devised by modern engineers are amazing, and contain more variables than most consider. Irrigation doesn’t merely involve impounding water behind dams, which can be allowed to flow downhill by turning a faucet. Such a simple system would be a win-win, for it would involve both irrigating crops (and people), and also generating electricity. However in fact the system also involves pumping water uphill, before it flows downhill in the aqueducts, and all the pumping uses amazing amounts of electricity. In fact the water pumps of Arizona’s aqueducts use more electricity than any other consumer. In other words, the flow of water both produces, and consumes, electricity. Therefore, the people managing the flow of water need to be knowledgeable about how much money turning on the faucet is making, compared to how much it is costing. The situation is not so simple as it initially may seem.

Another variable is how dry or rainy it has been. When it is dry, the demand for water grows, even if it is costly to pump water uphill. But if it rains the water is not needed, and there is not such a need for the expense. The supply and demand go through amazing swings.

A totally unforeseen variable, when the dams were first built, were that the lakes of impounded water would become a significant tourism industry involving people who like to boat, fish, swim, water-ski or simply sit in the sun on a small houseboat. Such people have their own economic power, and have their say about whether their marinas will have enough water to float boats or not.

Lastly, there is only so much water to go around during dry times, and this causes states and nations to quibble about who gets how much, and cooler heads must avoid war by writing treaties that decree who gets how much. Even if your state needs water, you must sometimes begrudgingly release a certain amount to flow from your dams downstream to other states, if the treaty says so.

But this diplomacy gets stood on its head when there is too much water. Then you can get in trouble if you are “generous” and allow too much to flow downstream, for you are then to “blame” for downstream flooding. Again, supply and demand has swung about dramatically.

In the past two years we have seen the wailing of Alarmists shift from freaking-out about a mega-drought to the recent concerns about a mega-flood which might have occurred due to Hurricane Hilary. What I want to stress is that such hysteria accomplishes nothing if it blames “Global Warming”, (which gets the blame regardless of whether it rains or shines, or whether we manage or mismanage).

I think that, in the end, what matters most is what accomplishes something, which is the current system of dams and aqueducts, turbines and pumps, which has allowed the desert to bloom in the American Southwest. That practical scheme should be the focus. We want the desert to continue to bloom, for the alternative would involve hardship for many millions of people.

Los Angeles is much like Phoenix, in that it is a so-called overpopulation thriving in a desert that seemingly should not be able to support so many. In terms of local rainfall and snow-melt, Los Angeles should only be able to support 300,000 people, and the fact that, including its suburbs, it now supports 13,000,000 suggests two things. 1.) Some amazing engineering was done, and 2.) if that engineering is not maintained, 12,700,000 people will swiftly find themselves in dire circumstances. It is therefore important to be pragmatic, and not off in some dream-world where the fact walking-on-water is a spiritual possibility becomes an accepted physical reality.

Los Angeles’ growth involved, as often is the case with big cities, water being imported from distant farmlands, which often angers the distant farmers. Even in the suburbs of Boston, as a boy, I heard grumblings from old-timers about how the Boston Big-shots “stole” water-rights from small towns, and that grumbling was occurring in the far greener and rainier landscape of New England.

In California the way water was removed from Owen Valley involved some brutal power politics, and destroyed a landscape once described as “America’s Switzerland.” Owen Lake, once fifty feet deep after heavy rains, became an arid flatland with choking dust-storms of alkaline poisons. Were it not for some artesian springs that fed a few remaining marshes, an important flyway for many species of migratory birds would have been completely wiped out. When Los Angeles began to pump out even Owen Valley’s ground water, and even the artesian wells began drying up, the howl of conservationists finally created enough push-back to halt the myopia of a civic Los Angeles leadership which was fundamentally selfish and greedy, more interested in making money through growth than in facing the problems inherent in growth.

Some of the problems should have been obvious early on, when the conflict erupted in “water wars”, with angry farmers actually dynamiting aqueducts. There were also angry businesses that made money extracting alkaline chemicals from Lake Owen’s water, who sued Los Angeles as the lake dried up. The fact water vanished drove one small business to build a new plant (using a new process) right onto the dried lake-bed, but then that business needed to sue Los Angeles yet again because, in a period of heavy rains in the late 1930’s, the balance of supply and demand swung so violently from drought to flood that those in charge of the aqueducts abruptly had to dump water down into the bone dry lake, flooding the new factory.

California is interesting, for diverse interests sought water, and all the quibbling actually did result in some serious thinking by smarter people, who sought to balance the thirst of migrating birds with the thirst of farmers and thirst of small businesses, and also with the thirst of those who wanted to see Los Angeles grow.

An important factor is that, without water, much of the land is worthless. Some land may support orange and almond groves, but beyond 300,000 people, there could be no suburbs. However, with water, that same land, bought very cheaply, could be sold at a huge profit. And once profits become huge, an insanity called “greed” appears.

California is even more fascinating when one stands back, and watches the mania of greed operate through its history.

Greed was there in the first gold rush, when men flocked into the hills to such a degree that boats docking in San Francisco lost their entire crews and could not depart. Greed was there in the Water Wars, that allowed Los Angeles’ population to explode and made real estate sellers into moguls. It was there when small-town men and women abruptly became idolized Hollywood stars. And it was there when intellectual geeks fooling about with computer hardware and software abruptly became the world’s richest men. Very few of these rags-to-riches stories involved slow and patient growth, nor the careful balancing of multifarious interests. Instead it tended to be a great, big, all-American, “Yippie!”

Now you are probably going to ask me to define “Yippie.” Sigh.

I sigh because, when you get all spiritual about things, greed is not usually a good thing. Occasionally love can cause greed to be greedy about others experiencing mercy and kindness, but more often greed is all about me, or “my side”, (which plays into the blame game.) Greed wants to skim the cream and leave others the milk, or even to steal the water and leave others the dust.

Greed tends to start small and then grow like a cancer. The simple grift of a carnival barker becomes the majestic graft of a state senator. It grows because greed can never satisfy the human heart, which wants to give and forgive. In fact the greater greed grows the greater the hunger of the heart gets, which makes greed want even more. (This is why you so often see crooked people, who could have gotten away with their petty crimes, instead overdo their robberies until they are so flagrant not even the most indulgent authorities can overlook them.) Greed is a sort of vicious cycle and becomes the author of its own demise. Eventually one can own the whole world but is reduced to a King Midas, weeping because he has transformed his favorite daughter into heavy metal.

Yet in a strange way this ugly, dog-like habit of greed is part of the American “Yippie”. It is a confession that part of being free is to be human, and part of being human is to be greedy. Liberty allows us to want what we want. We crave what we crave. We desire what we desire. However, (and this is very important), we also know such greediness can be rebuked. Part of the American “Yippee” is the knowledge we can be smacked on the nose like a bad dog by a rolled-up newspaper. It doesn’t matter who you are. You could be King George of England. The American “Yippee” will smack you. Even newspapers get smacked by a newspaper.

Europeans, who seem by and large more obedient than “Yippee” Americans, have every right to criticize Americans for being both greedy and rebellious, (which is likely why their souls were born in Europe). If you are born in America your soul is wild and free and yet fully expects to get smacked in the nose by a newspaper. And the reason is stamped into the very coins our greed likes to finger, as the motto, “In God we trust.”

What this suggests is that, hand in hand with deplorable selfishness, the American “Yippee” believes in Something higher and better, which will not leave a hole in the heart like greed does, but rather warms and fills the heart with giving and forgiveness. It may seem like an impossible contradiction, but it is what it is.

It may also seem ambiguous, but few people are more generous than greedy Americans are. If our prosperity is due to greed, why did we give so much of it away? If we were truly greedy we would just keep it for ourselves. Instead we have given not merely money, but our lives, to help others.

Of course, greedy grifters do tend to skim the cream from a charity. The graft starts out small, as a line-item called “administrative expenses”, and grows to the unholy insult to charity the Clintons enacted, when millions in donations to help out after the Haitian earthquake built an absurd, single, lone house in Haiti, as the Clintons kept all the rest of the money for themselves, (uttering the amazing hypocrisy that they, the Clintons, could be trusted with the money more than Haitian leaders, because the Haitians were corrupt.)

Outsiders wonder why Americans don’t rise in wrath. The simple fact of the matter is that Americans did; Americans have an intuitive understanding of greed, and how it grows grotesque, and of how it is healed by giving and forgiving. In any case, when Hillary Clinton ran for president, the election was “rigged” so she would win, but the overwhelming disgust Americans felt towards her greed outnumbered the fraudulent ballots, and, against all odds, Trump appeared.

At this point we can return to what actually matters, for Trump was a hard-nosed businessman who knew the ropes. He dealt with what actually matters. In terms of the American Southwest, what actually matters is dams that hold waters for droughts, canals that move waters from supplies to demands, and contingency plans involving what to do when times of drought give way to times of flood. The proper management of this infrastructure is crucial to the comfort and perhaps survival of around 75 million people. We are not in the moccasins of the Hohokan, who could just migrate somewhere else (likely down to Mexico) when their infrastructure crashed. We are in a situation we should take very seriously. And blaming light bulbs for Global Warming is not a very serious thing to do.

One thing I liked about Trump, in those long ago days when he ruled, was that he simply stated Global Warming was not worth our attention. He was correct. The infrastructure is worth out attention, and, in the case of California, the irrigation system is a hundred years old in places. Cement gets crumbly after that long; the wiring of pumps and turbines ages and metal fatigues, maintenance is a requirement which millions of people are dependent upon.

This past year has seen the weather of the west go through one of its typical swings from one extreme to another. A very dry time was followed by a very wet time. Massive Pacific gales dug far south of their usual abode up in the Aleutian Islands, directing a stream of moisture directly at California, and filling rivers with flood waters even as mountains all the way to Utah saw especially deep snows.

This should have embarrassed the media, which had been stating “Global Warming” was creating a “Mega-drought”, because rather than a drought there was a flood, and the flood would continue when all the snow melted in the spring.

In actual fact the Alarmist media then did what it accuses everyone else of doing; it went into denial. It insisted the rains were just a brief, upward blip in the downward graph of a terrible drought. Authoritative maps were produced, showing areas experiencing floods were still painted red, indicating drought. This became absurd. By last July twelve maps had been produced by various “authorities” showing all sorts of varying scenarios, with some maps showing drought in the same places other maps showed flood.

Apparently there were differing definitions of “drought”. (To resort to hyperbole, what is not a drought for a farmer growing cactus is a drought for a farmer growing watercress.) But the media chose the maps with the most red, as they had their propaganda to crank out, their narrative to reinforce, and their balderdash to support, to earn their pay. They were bought and paid for, and were handed the news they were to report, investigating nothing while pretending to be “investigative”. Meanwhile mechanics and engineers had to tend to reality; the infrastructure.

The infrastructure was stressed, just as it was in the time of the Hohokan, and in places levees failed and aqueducts crumbled. Owen Lake reappeared, as did Tulare Lake on the far side of the mountains.

The reappearance of Owen Lake had some benefits in terms of settling the clouds of alkaline dust, and watering migratory flyways for birds, but repairs to the aqueduct became more urgent, to supply Los Angeles with water. Meanwhile the reappearance of Tulare Lake had a very different effect, as rather than alkaline dust it’s lake-bed was excellent soil, and had become excellent farmland. When the lake reappeared the farmland was flooded and crops were lost.

California’s farmland is a blessing to the rest of the nation, for in places a 300-day growing season allows California (along with Arizona and Florida) to produce fresh vegetables when the rest of the nation is buried in snow. People who scorn California’s politics and state the rest of the nation would be better off without California are not thinking clearly about their food budgets. To lose vast acreages to floods has consequences. The mechanics and engineers in charge of how much flow is held back in dams wanted to hold as much as possible back to reduce river levels, and thus reduce the regrowth of Lake Tulare, yet at the same time they looked nervously at the deep snow in the mountains. Had nature been mischievous, a single warm rainstorm could have unleashed an amount impossible to contain.

A worst case scenario was possible to visualize because early in its history California was hit by a tremendous, once-every-500-year combination of rain, snow and snow-melt which very nearly ruined the entire state. Nearly the entire Central Valley became an enormous lake. The government had to be moved from Sacramento.

It is possible to map the flooded areas using old reports

And mechanics and engineers dub a repetition of such weather an “ARkStorm” and map how modern engineering might handle a similar fiasco.

So you can see that highly qualified mechanics and engineers are quite aware they can fail, and flood waters can be ten to twenty feet deep in the Central Valley. This is because they are not given enough money to prepare for once-every-500-year events. It’ too expensive. So negotiations tend to pare back the costs, until they are only preparing for once-every-100-year events. But they still are aware of how such preparations may prove inadequate, and think about what their responses should be when the s— hits the fan and the levees are not tall enough and Lake Tulare reappears. They have “contingency plans”, which are basically how to make the pain less when the s— hits the fan. Practical stuff.

Now please compare this with the demented response of the media, last winter, when Lake Tulare reappeared. It was not the slightest bit practical, yet they got paid well to produce pure pulp.

First, the media can never resist using the word “unprecedented”. This is just plain stupid. I have just shown you the precedent. Even if I couldn’t find the precedent on my computer, I could turn to my nine-year-old granddaughter and she’d find it. The California history regarding the terrible floods from November 1861 to March 1862 is right there in plain sight, at your fingertips. They even involve episodes of our national history having little to do with meteorology; IE: How did the Confederate forces escape the superior Union forces in Arizona? (Answer: The rivers were flooding and blocked the advance of armies.) The evidence of a far more severe flood are everywhere you look, and this proves the media does not look, when they use the word “unprecedented”.

When one looks at the flooding of Lake Tulare that actually occurred last winter and spring, and one compares it to 1862, it is obvious last winter and spring were small potatoes, compared to a worst-case scenario. It could have been much, much worse, if the mountain snows had melted faster, but the fact is: It wasn’t worse. So how in the world can the press call the event, “unprecedented”?

Obviously the press does not care if it is accurate. The press does not care about the Truth. So, what does the press care about? Greed. For greed it grovels. It grovels to get its next paycheck, which it can only get if it obeys a master who thinks lying to the public is good policy. Good policy? Apparently. Apparently it is good policy to make the public afraid. It is good policy to whip up anxiety about the weather. It is good policy to state the current weather is a sign that Global Warming is about to end life as we know it. But current weather isn’t going to do that. Far worse has been seen before. And it didn’t end life as we know it.

Besides ignoring the history which one needs to research, the press ignores the history it itself made. After all, it was the press that stated, in November, that the mega-drought was going to last. It was the press that stated that the mega-drought proved that Global Warming resulted in unprecedented weather. This wasn’t ancient history. It was recent. But now they abruptly forgot their own history and stated that it was the flooding which was going to last, and to prove that Global Warming resulted in unprecedented weather.

The press seems to think the public is amazingly gullible, and that they can “cry wolf” on and on and on, and the public will never become jaded. They have forgotten the fable. In the fable, the mischievous shepherd boy arrives at a day when a wolf actually appears, and the boy cries, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” but everyone is so jaded that that no one comes to his rescue. In the case of the modern mainstream media, “rescue” is the paychecks reporters receive each week, but such “rescue” can cease. The media have lost so many viewers with their dishonest hyperbole that their parent entities can’t afford them, and the reporters get laid off.

So far, news reporters haven’t learned their lesson. In fact they are doubling down, and are worse than ever. I have the sense they feel their power slipping away, and are desperately trying to bring things to a head, wherein acceptance of Global Warming (AKA Climate Change) is a prerequisite to being listened-to. If you don’t tow the line, thou shalt receive no funding. Thou shalt receive no publicity. Thou shalt be marginalized and ostracized and lonely as heck.

Oddly, this strategy is backfiring. Who receives no publicity? Increasingly it is the press itself. Who receives no funding? Who increasingly is lonely as heck?

What people seem to be interested in is: What is actually happening. To some degree there seems to be a bit of the mechanic and the engineer in the ordinary thought of ordinary people.

Of course, just as ordinary people are ambiguous in terms of greed and the rolled-up newspaper that smacks greed on the snout, the pragmatic side of ordinary thinking, which is like an engineer, must also deal with the “Karen’s”, who are not all that interested in what is actually happening. The “Karen’s” love to murmur and gossip, backbite and belittle, and in some cases badly hurt innocent people. (Likely this is why scriptures startle some people by, when defining certain behavior as “un-spiritual”, listing “gossip” right next to “murder”.) However, perhaps the hook of behaving like a Karen is a desire to learn the Truth, (even as it spreads a lie.) In the end, people seem interested in what is actually happening.

What was actually happening in the American Southwest was that a dry time was shifting to a wet time. But how long would the wet time last? It was obvious rivers would run high, as the tremendous snowpack in the mountains melted, but what to do with those waters as they ran, and what to do if the drought returned?

I think this is what we would be discussing, if we were a sane society with a sane media. And some people were sane, and actually dealing with the issues.

I was very curious about why they decided what they decided, because I am one of those people who ignores what the media blares, because they have violated my trust. Instead I look, when possible, to what reporters would look at, if they were something other than paid parrots.

At this point the general public can still access, to an amazing degree, the water levels of scores of reservoirs, and the flow rates of many rivers, and the level of snowpack in the mountains. (Those-in-charge haven’t yet shut such sources down, the way they closed down most ways an ordinary person could examine arctic sea-ice.) Therefore, without newspapers, one can see the situation in the Southwest for oneself.

The two largest reservoirs along the Colorado River are Lake Mead and, upstream, Lake Powell. Lake Mead was getting all the attention a year ago, as its levels sank so low sunk boats and mob-related corpses were exposed. The generation of electricity was curtailed. However, since then the levels have risen dramatically.

Lake Powell also showed a great recovery, as snowmelt poured into it last spring, but has dipped slightly more recently as some of its waters were released to Lake Mead.

Upstream of Lake Powell the 34 larger “tracked reservoirs” also recovered from low levels to what averaged out to nearly 90 % of capacity. In a few cases reservoirs were over 100% of capacity, which is not a good thing, for it demonstrates the reservoir has become useless in terms of flood control. Most never reached 100%, and the torrents released by spring melting were well handled.

The actual handling of the waters occurs below the radar of the mainstream media, which is only interested in the panic porn of sensationalism. However, there are true public servants working behind the scenes. As an outsider, some of the things they need to consider are puzzling.

For example, when the water had just started to rise in Lake Powell its floodgates were abruptly opened wide, to such an extent that its levels actually dropped. It was a five day event.

It took between two to three days for the torrents to flow down to Lake Mead, and then resulted in a very rapid rise in the levels of Lake Mead, for five days.

What was that all about? Rather than seek the mainstream media, it paid to seek the more local papers. The general public along the Colorado River needed to be warned the river was going to flood for five days. It would not hurt tourism, for it was during the off-season. But, as the flood was man-made, insignificant but curious local reporters asked the questions the mainstream doesn’t, and received an interesting answer.

Apparently, when a river moves around a bend, it erodes and scours deep channels to the outside of the curve, yet builds sandy, shallow beaches on the inside of the curve. These beaches were delightful places to stop, as people floated down the Colorado through the majesty of the Grand Canyon, but drought and low water caused the beaches to be degraded. The theory was that a flood would rebuild them. I never heard how the theory worked out. But it was interesting to read that someone decided a good flushing would do good, and could build as well as erode.

Another interesting disparity involved the treaties which require reservoirs to, in times of drought, release water for people downstream to use. Lake Powell easily achieved its quota, and currently has released more than 112% of the required amount. Yet Lake Mead has failed to meet the requirement, and currently has released just over 83% of the required amount. I assume this demonstrates how wet the year has been, and that rather than drought, flooding has been a concern downstream.

Downstream from Lake Mead are two large reservoirs, Mohave Lake and Lake Havasu. Lake Mead’s discharges keeps the level of these reservoirs fairly stable for irrigation purposes, while at the same time these two reservoirs stabilize the flow of the Colorado River, which otherwise would fluctuate wildly, because the demand for electricity varies hugely. If Lake Mead must release a set amount, they would not be prone to do it in a steady way. They would be prone to release lots all at once, when demand is high, and to release little when demand is low, which would make the Colorado flow in erratic pulses, but the downstream reservoirs smooth the flow out.

At Lake Havasu the waters of the Colorado are divvied up between the interested parties. 365 billion gallons a year head off to Los Angeles and San Diego via the Colorado Aqueduct, 488 billion gallons flow to Pheonix and Tuscon via Arizona’s Aqueducts, and the remaining 488 billion gallons flow to Mexican aqueducts, which leave not a drop to flow to the sea. Men have been so efficient that not a drop is squandered. A riverbed which once saw over a trillion gallons of water flow by becomes bone dry.

The same efficiency can have the bed of the Gila River bone dry, where it enters the Colorado at Yuma, south of Lake Havasu. Originally the Gila ran so deep that paddlewheel steamers ran between Yuma and Pheonix, but now all that water is used for crop irrigation and drinking water, golf courses and swimming pools and whatever men desire, upstream.

Before modern people say rude things about the mentality of people of the past, one needs to understand these past people were doing things on a scale never seen before, and were naive concerning consequences. They were simply doing what people had always done, but doing it better. The Hohokan had irrigated their crops for two thousand years; they just never did such a good job that they stopped the Colorado River, and the Gila River as well. Nor were modern consequences immediately obvious: The populations (and therefore thirst) of Los Angeles and Pheonix were much smaller when the projects began, and some projects, such as water for Tuscon, were not even completed until 1970.

Simply planning the construction of Hoover Dam took nine years, beginning in 1922 when Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. Construction began in 1931 when Hoover was president, and was completed in 1936 when FDR was president, and FDR saw to it Hoover’s name was removed. (A bit ungracious? But an example of the petty politics involved.) Only after FDR was dead was “Boulder Dam” called “Hoover Dam” again. Hoover lived to see his vindication, dying in 1964.)

It would be a glorious sidetrack to plunge deeply into the history of the dam builders, but what is important here is that the project was gigantic and straddled the desperation of the Great Depression. Even before the project began thousands of unemployed workers had shown up, with their families, in a desert where temperatures exceeded 110 degrees, that had no housing. Workers were dying of heat stroke even before the first worker was hired. Thoughts about native species of fish such as the “Boney Tailed Chub” and the “Razor Backed Sucker” were not on people’s minds. Nor was the nation of Mexico, at first.

However, you cannot just dry up a major system of rivers without suffering environmental consequences. People began to understand there was a price to be paid downstream for efficiency upstream. Plants and wildlife and fish and birds all suffered, as did people depending on them, when the Colorado stopped flowing. When the population of fish in the Sea of Cortez south of the Colorado River Delta crashed, dawn broke on Marblehead. Mexicans began to do calculations on the back of envelopes. They wondered if the protein they gained through irrigation matched the protein they lost through a decreased catch of fish.

It is important to remember our modern environmental awareness came from elders who learned things the hard way. For example, the United State’s EPA was not created until a river was so polluted it caught on fire in 1969. In like manner, the concept of “wetlands” being important simply didn’t enter ordinary thinking, a century ago. People saw a marsh as a stinking place of no value. They had no idea smelly places fed so many baby fish, which fed the bigger fish.

Becoming aware of unforeseen consequences is no reason to glue yourself to a highway, or enact some other overreaction too often seen in the antics of radical environmentalists. More moderate conservationists often propose solutions that don’t involve dynamiting Hoover Dam, and in some ways Mexico has been a better example of such sanity than the United States.

Rather than just blaming the United States for using water upstream, some Mexicans faced the fact that their politicians had fought to get 488 billion gallons of Colorado River water delivered across the border, and, if none of that water reached the delta, Mexico deserved some “blame.”

At this point some Mexicans wondered, “Couldn’t we allow just a little to flow down the parched riverbed to the sea, as an experiment?” The experiment was done, largely using wastewater from irrigation ditches, and, even with such cruddy water, the scientists taking measurements were amazed at the positive results, which allowing even a little water to flow down to the Sea of Cortez, achieved. When paired with tree-planting along the scorched banks of the river, barren stretches of land became verdant. Fish populations rebounded.

What is important about this experiment is that the blame game was avoided. Rather than pitting the desires of farmers against the desires of fishermen, the desires of both were met. It was a case of having your cake and eating it too; (IE: Impossible, in the eyes of some radicals.)

It should be noted that to the north conservationists, concerned about the decreasing populations of fish native to the Colorado River, (especially the “Boney Tailed Chub” and the “Razor Backed Sucker”), discovered they did not need to blow up Hoover Dam. Instead, the level of Lake Mohave began to be dropped and raised ten feet, each autumn, simply to help these obscure fish. We humans can behave sanely, if we work at it.

I bring this up because it demonstrates how, quietly and behind the scenes, sensible people tweak the system, even in a time of drought, to make it more productive. It is counter-intuitive to think that, in a time of drought, allowing any water to escape the “efficiency” of the upstream system would be a good thing, yet the level of Lake Mohave was lowered and water was allowed to escape irrigation and flow down the dry Colorado to the sea, and the benefits were, if not immediately obvious, obvious enough to vindicate the daring thinkers who dared challenge the “efficient”.

The simple fact of the matter is that the marshes and wetlands of a delta are swarming with life and feed the nearby fish to a degree where there is a population explosion, if the dry Colorado Delta is allowed to again be wet. An increase in the catch of fish becomes an economic fact practical people notice. Making money with fish must be weighed with making money with irrigation. And this can lead to further thought, such as “Can we irrigate without the Colorado?” Which in turn has Mexicans considering something perhaps California should consider: The economic feasibility of desalinization plants.

Desalinization is a topic one needs to keep abreast upon. Back when I originally researched the topic in 1970 it was not feasible except in extreme cases, such as on desert islands where it almost never rains, or ships at sea for long periods of time. But that is fifty years ago, and a lot has been learned, especially in very arid Arab lands, where they had lots of oil money to pour into research, or in Israel, where their very survival depended on water. The US Navy has also researched the subject. Both the subjects of distilling and osmosis have evolved to a degree where desalinization is only a tenth as expensive as it once was. To be an old hippy who researched the subject in 1970, and who therefore thinks they know all about it, is to be a fool.

Unfortunately, there is a certain mindset which made up its mind in 1969, concerning environmental issues, and hasn’t grown. (This failure to grow may well be an insidious side effect of seemingly harmless “recreational” drugs.) (People like to say, “There is no sign the drug changed me.” What they fail to see is that you are supposed to change. If Beethoven didn’t change, his ninth symphony would sound the same as his first.)

A more mature mindset sees Desalinization is important for a reason people failed to foresee, in the past. And what is that? It is that the irrigation of deserts has a habit of making soil more and more salty, for there is a little salt in the “fresh” water of the Colorado River, and when that water evaporates the residue of salt is left behind, until the salt in soil can reach a level where it kills the very plants you are attempting to irrigate. In other words, irrigation results in the “salinization” of soil, and flushing the salt from that soil with fresh water makes “desalinization” important, even miles from the sea.

So which mindset talks about blowing up Hoover Dam, and which mindset investigates desalinization? California’s or Mexico’s? Or even, California’s or Arizona’s?

What a joke it would be if Arizona, which doesn’t even have a coastline, invested in desalinization when California didn’t!

If it was Mexico that made choices that led to prosperity, as California made choices that led to poverty, a tide could turn, and people could be seen sneaking across the border in a southerly direction. After all, the grass is always greener….

Actually I’m perfectly fine with Mexico becoming prosperous. I cheer the successes of other people. What bugs me is the failures of my own people. And there is something prone to failure about the obstinate attitude of an American media which can’t budge beyond its fixation on Global Warming.

To me our American problem, to some degree, seems to involve semantics. We lack the words that adequately describe why it is spiritually true that unselfish behavior is far better than selfish behavior. I resort to clumsy images of people going “Yippie” and then getting their snouts whacked with a rolled-up newspaper. Why? Because I lack the words that properly define an important distinction.

For example, consider the word “compromise.” Is it a negative or positive word? I would like to suggest it is very necessary in any negotiations, but that it tends to be burdened by the baggage of selfishness. People tend to see “compromise” as a sort of surrender, but only for a while. It is like a “cease fire” in the heat of battle; it is not a true peace, but just a pause in a fight which will resume at a later date. Maybe you will agree not to blow up Hoover Dam this year, but reducing Hoover Dam to rubble remains on your agenda.

Now consider he word “integration”. Is it a negative or positive word? I would like to suggest it takes opposing parties which apparently are at loggerheads, and instead puts them on the same page. Rather than seeing things in either-or terms, things are seen in terms involving the benefit of all. For example, in Mexico farmers did not need to “compromise” with fishermen, because they both wanted the other to succeed, because they wanted Mexico to succeed. What’s more, they have succeeded (so far).

To conclude this digression, the distinction I am attempting to make would put the word “compromise” on the selfish side as the word “integrate” would be on the unselfish side. And why is this distinction important?

It is because the mentality of communists, globalists, elitists and other dictators and tyrants seem incapable of anything other than the most degrading sort of selfishness. They do not value any view other than their own myopia. They cannot see the value of other views. They are so certain their views are superior that they inevitably fall into the repression of other views, which is a sickness like cancer that always seeks a “final solution” which involves actually killing those who differ. The fishermen must kill the farmers, or the farmers must kill the fishermen. I have even heard some go so far as to suggest it would be a good thing to kill 95% of the earth’s population, because “over population” is “the problem”.

Over population is not the problem. The more the merrier. The more we have the more minds we have working on true solutions to the problems we are faced by. In fact, if you take the time to bother with actually studying history, it is amazing to see the problems mankind has overcome, and amazing to see where the saviors have sprung from. Sadly, however, some think they already know it all, and they can’t be bothered with the elders of our past. They would rather rewrite history to affirm what they think they already know, even if they are dead wrong. Such souls are not mankind’s saviors, but rather mankind’s nemesis.

Such devils actually have little interest in what actually matters, in terms of the infrastructure which millions of lives are dependent upon in the American Southwest. They live in a far-away swamp they think is not low, but a high Elysium of god-like power and privilege. Dams and canals? Fishermen and farmers? Such low-brow considerations are delegated to the riffraff, to those boring mechanics and engineers who do not comprehend the intricacies of Washington power-politics.

Personally, I prefer the low-brow stuff, because in my humble opinions the high-brows make no real sense. Their heads exploded at some point, (perhaps during an LSD trip in 1969), and they are now convinced they are aboard the Jefferson Starship, which they have highjacked and are now confidently steering out into a lifeless void. I prefer more sane brows. So let us look at what is actually happening, in the American Southwest.

After the mountain snows are done melting, (they actually keep melting, but the majority of the snow is melted by late June,) the next best source of water is the so-called “monsoon.” These are summer thunderstorms which vary greatly in their intensity and coverage.

I think the variation reminded some of the variation in India between drought and flood. Because that variation hinges upon the strength of the Asian monsoon, it was assumed our variation must also be a “monsoon”. However our variation is different, and, if you want the honest truth, I think more research is needed, for I think a degree of mystery is involved concerning why it sometimes rains and sometimes doesn’t, in the American Southwest. It involves factors different from Asia’s, which leads some to argue about the definition of “monsoon”.

Pretty pointless, if you ask me. East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet. If you define monsoon as strictly the situation created by prevailing winds in Asia, our monsoon is not a monsoon. We must invent our own word for some-years-wet-and-some-year-dry. Call it a “monseen” if you insist. But then get down to the business of describing what is actually happening.

And it is here the wonder sets in. For the fact of the matter is that there is still much to be learned and incorporated into our understanding. The science is not settled. There are some excellent theories floating around, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty of predicting whether it will rain or be dry, flip a coin.

Here is my layman’s understanding of the American “monseen”.

The Southwest lacks trees in many areas, and bakes under a summer sun that creates temperatures over 110 ( 44 Celsius) at the surface, and that hot air rises, which creates less air at the surface, which is a partial vacuum, so the barometric pressure falls. Nature abhors a vacuum, so air must come from somewhere to replace the air that has risen. Where does this air come from? And is it’s composition the same as the air that was lifted?

At this point you have to start to attend to the “partial pressure” of some air molecules compared to the “partial pressure” of other air molecules. And most important is water. Of course.

It turns out that, to a degree, when molecules of oxygen and nitrogen rise, their space can be taken by molecules of H2O. From where, in a desert? Well, from the surface of Lake Mead and Lake Powell and the 34 reservoirs upstream, of course. Vast amounts of water are available which were not available when the Hohoham scientists tried to figure things out.

But, if those lakes did not exist, the landscape would still be likely to find water, because the easiest route for air to replace the rising air is up the the river valleys. It is far harder to replace the air by pulling it up and over high mountain passes. Therefore, air is sometimes drawn from the humid Gulf of Mexico up the Rio Grande valley, or from the humid Sea of Cortez up the Colorado valley.

But you will notice I said, “sometimes.” On other occasions the air up the river valleys remains bone dry. Despite evaporation from reservoirs and from irrigated farmland, it remains a drought. Any rain that does fall makes long and beautiful purple streamers from the cumulus which fade, falling into the hot and dry air, and never reach the ground.

Although the rain does not reach the ground, the downdrafts associated with the wind do. As a young bum, attempting to write the Great American Novel on a portable typewriter in desert campgrounds, I had to keep an eye on the cumulus, for a calm, mild morning tended to be hit by a blast of wind around lunchtime, and such wind has no respect for piles of typing paper sitting on picnic tables without heavy rocks holding them down. A sign such a downdraft was imminent was the purple streamers appearing on the bottom of clouds.

These streamers, called “virga” by meteorologists, were called a word that meant “lady rain” by the Navajo sheep herders. When the clouds grew especially purple, lightning bolts could travel down the edge of the virga, hitting ground never wet by rain and igniting forest fires. These fires were so much a part of western ecology that some pinecones evolved to only drop their seeds when scorched by forest fires.

When the virga grew thick enough to actually reach the ground the situation could become dramatically different. Rather than “lady rain” it became “manly rain”, which the ranchers called “gully washers”. Dry gulches which had gone years never seeing more than a trickle of water abruptly became raging torrents.

At one campground I frequented I watched, during a 36 month period between 1984 and 1988, a sand dune be slowly extended across a gully by the persistent winds. This worried me, for I imagined the dune-dam might, in some future flash-flood, redirect the gully’s water right through the campground and wash away my tent. But I needn’t have worried. The dune was gone in five minutes, when the raging waters came down that gully.It made me understand the “flash” in flash-flood. The torrent was over in forty-five minutes, yet undid the work of three years of sand-drifting.

Spending so much time outdoors did seem to awake some sort of ability in me to forecast, but it seemed to be more like intuition than any intellectual science I could compile facts and figures about, and could use to produce a paper to be peer reviewed. Also the intuitive talent seemed to involve the immediate future more than the long range. I would never pretend to be able to forecast whether the summer would be droughty or not. The shepherds and ranchers might be willing to speculate, but some felt speculating might “hex” the weather; one might irk the gods if one pretended to understand them.

Meteorologists seem to be on better relations with the angels God charges controlling weather with; (either that or they just get used to being put to shame by the pranks of such “lesser” gods, zephyrs, and tricksters). They do make an effort to understand what makes some so-called “monsoons” wet and others be dry. The dynamics are different from Asia’s monsoons, and as far as I can tell there’s much more work to do before we understand them, and therefore the forecasts are often wrong.

To me there seems a great distinction between those who comprehend the magnitude of the work that needs to be done, and the fools who say “the science is settled” and who blame “Global Warming” for all the variety weather amazes us with.

My own experience with western weather was based upon the fact that, because I wrote nothing I could sell, and also because I found it very hard to write and also hold a job, I needed to find the lowest rent possible, if I intended to write. Cheapest was to sleep in my car, but the extreme discomfort (and the fact it often was illegal) tended to discourage that option except when absolutely necessary. Next cheapest was to sleep at a campground, which in those days only cost $25.00/week. However, I learned firsthand one was unwise to attempt this too early in the spring or too late in the fall. In mid-October one should seek a camper or a $60.00/week motel unit, and hide indoors from Blue Northers and cold and wet weather until mid-May. It was in mid-May that the winter storm track seemed to retreat north. Then the “monsoon” started to develop, with dry “lady rains” at first, and the thundering “manly rains” later. June tended to be hot and dry and July saw the heat build a better chance of gully-washers.

Weather radars were often unhelpful, as they could show rain without indicating whether it was lady or manly. But they did show peculiar systems that I called “ghost-fronts”. Though fronts did not appear on maps, they seemed to be faint remnants of storms that traveled along the winter storm track during the summer, after they pushed south and became extremely weak. At times they formed small hooks of clouds, or even spirals, as they drifted across the desert from the Pacific. Not much rain reached the ground from them, but they did prove that moisture could make it over the mountains. This moisture, basically riding the weakest and southernmost westerlies, met the weakest and northernmost trade winds, basically coming up the Rio Grande from the Gulf of Mexico, which also had to transcend mountain blockage to enter the Colorado Valley. The easiest route was up the Colorado River itself, though neither westerlies nor trade winds tended to go that way. I therefore decided to do a bit of b.s.ing, and proclaimed the south wind was created by the suction caused by so much air rising over the blazing hot deserts. Often there is low pressure just sitting over the Southwest for weeks on end, not due to any storm, but rather because it is so very hot.

A final factor meteorologists, mechanics and engineers need to consider seems unlikely in a desert: It is the remnants of tropical storms.

Atlantic hurricanes can head up the Rio Grande at Brownsville, and Pacific hurricanes can curve north and head up the coast of Baja California or the Sea of Cortez, eventually funneling moisture up the Colorado River valley, and , while these systems are weakened by the time they reach the deserts, they give surprising amounts of rain to areas that usually see little. When you read that blazingly hot desert communities such as Salton Sea or Palm Springs receive average of four inches of rain a year, you need to understand the average is lifted by such events; in fact they usually receive less, but occasionally receive far more.

Such events may be rare, but they are common enough to have a page in Wikipedia devoted to a “List of California Hurricanes”, though in fact it is largely a list of remnants. The very cold waters off California is death to hurricanes, and they fall apart with amazing speed as they approach from the south. Even so, the remnants are something engineers need to be aware of, for history warns us that a sequence of such remnants can afflict the Southwest. For example, in 1939 four occurred in four weeks:

• September 4–7, 1939: The remnants of a hurricane brought over a year’s worth of rain to parts of southern California.
• September 11–12, 1939: The remnants of a hurricane from the Gulf of California brought rain to parts of California.
• September 19–21, 1939: The remnants of a tropical cyclone brought rain to California.
• September 25, 1939: The 1939 tropical storm made landfall n ear Long Beach.  Winds were near 80 km/h (50 mph) and rain was near 12 inches (300 mm). At sea, 48 people were killed. On land, 45 were killed in flooding as an intense thunderstorm immediately preceded the tropical storm. This is the only tropical storm recorded to make landfall in California during the 20th century.

Considering we have such clear records of past events, it would be difficult to call a current event “Unprecedented”. My ten-year-old granddaughter could find the above picture, if my elderly internet abilities were weak. One could even find examples of “close calls”, where massive force five hurricanes threatened California. (Although such hurricanes always weaken greatly as they cross over cold waters, if they crossed quickly enough, a force five hurricane might still retain the strength of a strong force one, or weak force two.)

Such a storm would be truly “unprecedented” in terms of the brief historical record, but there is also a recent geological record which clearly shows such rare events have occurred in the recent past, and therefore meteorologists are always wary of massive hurricanes that blow up in the warm waters south of California ‘s cold waters.

By the way, the storm shown above was Linda, in 1997. In the warm waters south of California it exploded to a power that scared meteorologists, for it had a central pressure down around 26.64 inches (902 mb) and sustained winds of 185 mph. Lord knows how high the gusts were, but the winds were higher than many tornadoes, and even if it weakened and was only half as strong when it hit hit California it would have caused havoc. However it did not follow the path shown on the lower right of the above picture. Rather than slicing right it hooked left, and dwindled to a depression as swiftly as it as it had exploded to a force five hurricane. Despite the fact its core completely missed California, its outer rain bands caused mudslides east of San Diego, and its enormous waves washed away a house and killed a surfer.

Before you laugh at the way the meteorologists worried about Linda, be aware that, even before Linda faded, a new storm, Nora, was spinning up to its south, and Nora did slice right rather than hook left. Nora avoided much of the Cold water off California and used warm water in the Sea of Cortez and, though it did weaken greatly, retained enough strength to come north through Arizona as an actual tropical storm , with tropical force winds. Considering tropical storms need warm oceans to be created and to sustain themselves, to have one over a desert is a bit bizarre, yet Nora was a weirdo. One mountain in southwest Arizona saw a foot of rain, and, considering the landscape is officially “desert” and gets around three to four inches per year, the gully-washers produced by Nora there must have been surreal.

In any case, I only bring these examples up to demonstrate such unusual rainfalls are by no means “unprecedented”. They may be flukes, but they are a reality, and meteorologists deal with such strange realities. One thing they have noticed is such flukes seem to always happen when an El Nino is building in the Pacific.

And guess what? This past summer an El Nino was building in the Pacific. So it seems only natural that meteorologists would keep an eye out for tropical storms that might effect the desert Southwest. Even an amateur like myself did. But the media? It was still pounding its flabby drum and promoting panic about mega-drought, or maybe it was mega-floods, but in any case was mega-something.

Enter a tropical wave from stage right. Even before it crossed Mexico one of my favorite hurricane forecasters, Joe Bastardi, casually mentioned this wave might become a storm like Nora in 1997.

Bastardi is a peculiar mix of bombast and humbleness, and he can’t figure himself out, so I don’t try. I just am amazed by his insights. For example, one time a tropical wave was just coming off Africa and he published, “Houston, we have a problem.” Roughly ten days later that wave was a hurricane (Rita?) hitting Houston, but rather than gloating Bastardi was berating himself because he missed some detail and the storm’s landfall was the wrong side of Houston. Or, for another example, another hurricane carved from the gulf across the American southeast, weakening to a tropical storm, and was heading out to sea off Cape Hattaras, where 99% of all hurricanes head for Europe, but Bastardi said this storm was different. He said it would loop a clockwise loop and hit Florida and enter the Gulf of Mexico and then perhaps hit New Orleans. Initially such a zany forecast seemed preposterous, but that is exactly what this storm (Ivan?) did. But Bastardi did not give himself time to gloat over such an unbelievable forecast, but rather castigated himself intensely because he was incorrect about the storm’s intensity. Apparently he thirsts more for correction and improvement than for flattery, which I agree is a good thing, but I take this time to praise him because he deserves it, and also to explain why I listen to him when he has intuitions.

If you look back at posts from that time on his blog at Weatherbell, you will see that even as Hilary was forming Bastardi was posting the track of Nora in 1997. Therefore, as Hilary quickly strengthened just as many storms have strengthened over those warm waters, and then headed north towards California, there was no reason to call the storm “unprecedented.”

So why do they do it?

Next the weather bureau caught on, and predicted Hilary would strengthen greatly and then weaken greatly, as west coast storms always do, but that, if it came north fast enough, it might retain hurricane strength as a minimal hurricane . It stated no hurricane had hit California since they had west coast offices (which wasn’t until 1940, after the Long Beach Tropical Storm surprised everyone in 1939.)

So what did the media then report? They certainly didn’t bother to report that the storm would weaken greatly coming north, but did report it was strengthening to force 4. This created the panic the storm was strengthening as it neared, when the weather bureau was quite clear it would weaken. Then the press also reported this was “unprecedented”, as no hurricane had ever hit California. Then they added this was likely due to climate change or Global Warming or your vehicle, unless it was electric.

Why do they do it?

The media wound up looking like a cat with lots of feathers but no bird, as Hilary was a bit of a dud. It was not far enough west to be like the 1939 Long Beach storm, or far enough east to drench Arizona like Nora in 1997. It split the difference, was too slow to retain hurricane winds, and lost some moisture over the mountains of Baja California. It did drench some desert communities, and was a greater gullywasher than a desert thunderstorm is, but was nowhere nearly as bad as the weather bureau worried it might be. This actually pleased the weather bureau, which would (for the most part,) far rather err on the side of caution than to see people put in danger by a storm which surprises forecasters.

There were some cellars flooded, and some cars had engines ruined when foolish drivers drove in waters too deep. The media, meanwhile, did its best to get dramatic pictures and promote panic about Global Warming.

Perhaps the most dramatic video I saw portrayed the moment a stream which had been dry for decades abruptly faced waters charging down from the mountains, and those waters picked up every twig, stick and log that had fallen for decades, and flushed it all downstream. As the waters progressed, they picked up more and more wood, until you could not see water at all. All one saw was a tremendous amount of wood, coming around the corner of a canyon in the distance and bearing down on the cameraman, who wisely moved off the bridge he stood upon.

At this point one tends to hear a lot of second-guessing about the mechanics and engineers who designed the flood-control channels, (only budgeted enough to handle once-every-fifty-year storms), who perhaps did not foresee such amazing masses of driftwood, nor such wood’s ability to plug up even large culverts as swiftly as beavers. In any case the desert received a years worth of rain in six hours, and bridge abutments were washed away, but more annoying was what was brought in, which was mud. Yet this was expected, especially below areas where the soil was destabilized by forest fires, (and there were even road signs warming of such mud, weeks before Hilary arrived).

And the mud did mess up golf courses which were constructed on flood plains where it would have been unwise to build houses, (though perhaps such messes could be called a water hazard and sand trap all in one, by dedicated golfers.)

And some are tempted, of course, to test limits, and do build on flood plains.

However it wasn’t as bad as the media seemingly hoped. No one died, and in many places, though the media screamed they had received a year’s worth of rain, it amounted to only three inches. (It is a desert, after all.)

In places like Palm Springs there were actually far more people out and about, as Hilary passed through. Usually, the streets are deserted in the heat of the day, with temperatures often up as high as 115 degrees (46 Celsius). But the deluge dropped temperatures to a balmy 86, (30 Celsius), and the breezy rain didn’t stop people, who actually seemed to find the conditions refreshing.

Many went out in the rain simply to frolic in the delightful refreshment, which returns me to my original subject, which is why the media feels it must horrify everyone. Why can’t people focus on the technical details which interest mechanics and engineers. Why get so distracted…

…oh….yes…blonds.

If you look back to the third paragraph of this post you will see that I stated that when a scientist was feeling sorry for himself, he may be susceptible to bribes. I stated, “Money may not slake his (or her) thirst for Truth, but may gratify his (or her) hankering for blonds.”

This is true for humanity as a whole. We tend to pervert our healthy instincts. It is healthy to nourish our bodies, but we can turn that into gluttony. Rest is good for the weary, but we can create sloth. Even breathing can be turned, by certain forms of yoga, into euphoria so addictive it makes heroin look like chump change. And reproducing our bodies perhaps leads to the wildest perversions of our healthy instincts.

Considering we all tend to be tempted off course in this manner, one way or another, the smartest response is to, “confess sin and receive an assurance of pardon,” and the stupidest thing is to be “given to sin.”

I like that word “given.” If you are given away, some hand is letting go of you. What is that hand? I think it is the hand of Truth.

Truth is the most agreeable of agreeable things, and this is especially true when you are frank, and confess you lost your train of thought because a beautiful blond walked by just then. Truth pardons that because it is truthful. It may not be high minded, and in fact may be lustful, but it is the truth. Maybe you blush to the roots of your hair, but Truth embraces you. You have stood by Truth, so Truth stands by you. Truth also helps you get back on track, and remember where the rails led, before you lost your train of thought.

If you are scornful of honesty the derailing becomes serious. You are “given to your sin”, which is a way of saying you have lost hold of what separates men from beasts. If your sin is sloth, you can’t overcome your laziness. And so on. Until you can’t even tell if you are a man or a woman.

Becoming lost in this manner tends to be a gradual process of degradation, full of self-delusion. We imagine we are making progress when we are actually pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage. This seems to occur because there is something in the human spirit which craves freedom, and which knows when it is enslaved by some sort of addiction, and therefore we tend to alternate by being repelled by our addiction and being seduced by it. We make New Year’s resolutions and then fail to keep them. Back and forth; back and forth; restlessly going nowhere like pacing tigers.

The savior is Truth, which has been there all along, but we have failed to grasp it. Ambiguously, control comes through giving up control, but the ego craves power. Once the ego thinks Truth can be disregarded the ego becomes lost and the craziness of the power-mad appears.

A simplistic escape from the debauchery of the craziness is to enlist in some discipline. It does not matter much if it is a religion or a branch of the military, it is helpful to have some sort of drill sergeant bellowing at you, making you do what you don’t want to do. However, this tends to be the tiger walking one way in the cage, and the repression is accompanied by a longing for freedom. As soon as the soldier goes on leave or the sailor’s on “liberty”, the debauchery reappears with a vengeance. The fifty weeks of work leads to the wild two-week vacation, after which you’re wasted. This is the tiger walking the other way in the cage.

This is all avoided if one clings to Truth like a small child clinging to a father’s leg in a crowd, but people can’t believe it can be so simple. Also it offends their pride to be so small, so much like a little child. They’d much rather swagger. So off they go, either to boot-stepping discipline or to a wild party.

In the desert southwest the biggest party is the “Burning Man” gathering, held on a playa in Nevada. Originally this was a celebration of artists who simply wanted to be artists, rather than being burdened by the discipline of dishwashing, (or whatever other job they did to get by). It was an escape from the discipline that responsibly pays the bills. Originally it was held on a beach by San Francisco, but fires were made illegal on that beach, so they moved to a playa in Nevada, which has a certain irony, as “playa” is a Spanish word for “beach”.

In the American Southwest the word “playa” has evolved to mean the bed of a dry lake, an area which is usually very flat, and paved by a crust of dried minerals like a pavement, perfect for campers and RV’s to drive over. All sorts of artists would arrive and become “artistic”, which involved some genuinely inspired genius, (and discipline), but also a fair amount of promiscuous decadence. To be free of the chains of breadwinner discipline involves what people call “cutting loose”, and this tends to mix heaven with hell.

Then there came an infusion of amazing amounts of money. The people of Silicon Valley also wanted a break from the dreary discipline of “writing code” and from figuring out how to cram ever larger amounts of memory onto ever smaller chips. Some of these people were so rich they could blow a million dollars on a party. Some money went for drugs. (“Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you make too much money.”) But some went for sheer fun; for huge and silly artworks, for preposterous costumes and excellent music; and for dancing like mad. The parties became events one needed to attend; a sort of proof one was a fashionable person who went where the “in crowd” goes.

However a playa, as a dry lake bed, may, when the climate reverts to a wet phase, revert to being a lake. If it so much as starts this process, the pavement-like surface reverts to mud, which slows the party down. This was a known hazard of the “Burning Man” celebration. Here is a picture of the situation in 2014:

If such a damper could happen before, it cannot be called “unprecedented” if it happens again. In fact, as former-Hurricane Hilary had brought so much moisture north, and dumped it in the deserts, it followed that the so-called “monsoon” would have more moisture to work with, when it came to building thunderstorms. One might have even forecast a greater than average “probability” that the Burning Man would be afflicted by a damper, and even a swamp.

Which is what happened.

My granddaughter could likely find better pictures, but the above is from a decent post about the debacle, found here:

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/burning-man-2023-descends-into-chaos-after-rains-leave-73000-campers-stranded-2276495/

The media went wild over the prospect of doom and gloom. Just think! 73,000 people stuck in the mud, miles from safety! Surely this was a Global Warming disaster! To their apparent disappointment, the media only could report a single person died, (when they stepped in front of a bus). There was nothing to report in the way of starving and thirsty people, miles from food and water, resorting to desperate deeds. In fact there was little negativity at all. But there was also very little reporting of the positive way people actually responded to the challenge.

I did a bit of digging, and to me it seemed the situation was an example of the American selfishness going “Yippee”, but being smacked in the nose by a rolled-up newspaper, whereupon an unexpected resourcefulness and self-reliance appeared, and things worked out better than any could have expected. In fact many delighted in the challenges, and some even felt the party was improved by mud.

Undoubtedly the situation involved a degree of danger. Initially even Fraudulent Biden was alerted to the potential of a national disaster. But there was no disaster. I find this a little bit wonderful. I like to hear the tales of individuals who disentangle and extract themselves from disasters, but this was not a few individuals. This was 73,000. It was as if the Titantic sunk and everyone survived.

Surely there is a tale here that would be good to be told, but the media does not want to tell it. They cannot free themselves from pacing like the tiger in its cage. They can see only one response, when those who “party hearty” get in trouble, and that is to bring back the drill sergeant. The government must step in and clout its discipline left and right. That is the only way the 73,000 can be saved. So, you can imagine how offended such a government is, when the 73,000 can’t be bothered filling out the applications for government assistance, and simply save themselves.

History seldom shows such escapes from the tiresome to-and-fro pacing of the tiger. For one sad example, when German faith was shattered by their defeat in World War One, their society fell into despair, deep debt, depression, hyperinflation that wiped out lifetime’s savings, and an abandonment of hope that led to the faithless immorality enacted on the stages of Berlin, (where part of one stripper’s grossly pornographic act was to publicly inject herself with heroin). Yet this decadent backlash only prompted the opposite backlash of Hitler’s extreme discipline, an insanity worse than the worst seen on the sick stages of Berlin. The tiger paced from insanity to insanity, from boot-camp to shore-leave to boot-camp, without escape. There were the ninety-seven bad ideas without ever the three good ones. What made the “Burning Man” different? How did they avoid repeating history?

Witnessing this, I again felt something was missing in my vocabulary. My mind went back to my misspent youth, when I would have been in a hurry to be “in with the in-crowd”, and to say, “I go where the in-crowd goes.” I wanted “to be a nonconformist like everyone else.” It is in many ways embarrassing to look back at old diaries and see what a copy-cat I was. However, after too long working the dullness of a Real Job, I wanted to cut loose and be free. (To be honest, sometimes “too long” was one day.)

Now that I’m a tiresome old coot, I tend to skim through the artworks on display at an event like the Burning Man, and silently check off the copy-cats. For example, there are only so many ways to portray sad polar bears regarding burning oil rigs, before the politically-correct sameness overwhelms the best surrealist efforts, and the revolution seems less than revolutionary. In fact to be truly revolutionary might gain a disapproving glance at “Burning Man”, for it might portray Polar Bears savagely killing and devouring cute baby seals, or oil rigs saving millions from freezing and starving.

However the spirit of “Burning Man” is largely accepting of any and all, and even so-called right wing conformists are welcome, as long as they don’t mind it if they never get central stage.

One thing I noticed about conformists was that they want to look like they are not conforming. They like the idea of being first, at the forefront, and revolutionary, but under examination much of what they do is not new; it is merely opposite. If short hair is in fashion they move towards longer hair, and if long hair is in fashion they move towards shorter hair.

When young I was forced into seeing the absurdity of fashion for a couple of reasons. The first was that I was a year younger than my classmates, and still a boy as they all became deranged teenyboppers. In my eyes they went mad, as they abruptly didn’t want to go fishing. They developed an aversion to mud when I still wallowed.

The second reason was due a family downfall, and the fact that we became poor and my mother had to revert to Great Depression strategies to get by, and this included hand-me-down clothes. Patches were not in fashion back then, nor were pants so worn that once a month I suffered the indignity of having the seat split right down the fanny-crack. It has been over forty years since I have suffered such embarrassment, but back then it’s regularity made it hard to be fashionable.

One tends to lose interest in a game one has no hope of ever winning, and for me this seemed true of the fashion game. I suppose I gravitated in the direction of being a slob. However back then there was something called “the dress code” which kept one from slipping too far from conformity.

Some “dress code” rules made no sense to me; blue jeans were not allowed while “school pants” were allowed, even when the “school pants” had patches and the blue jeans had none. However, for the most part the parameters of fashion were a given I didn’t question, even when I ridiculed them. One could poke fun at the parameters without actually stepping over the line. (“Mad” magazine was good at this.)

To a certain degree fashion was ludicrous, and appeared to have little connection with Truth. I saw this one winter when my family was at its poorest, and I was hunching about in a fashionable but threadbare coat shivering, and then my mother did some wheeling and dealing at a place called “The Children’s Exchange” and traded in three old coats for a single old coat I absolutely adored. It was a couple sizes too large, and utterly out of style, but well designed. Called a “Mighty Max”, it related to a simple truth. The truth was: It was winter and I was cold. But as soon as I put my Mighty Max on I wasn’t cold anymore. It was like being inside a warm pillow, or being hugged, and felt so good I could easily say to hell with fashion.

The fact that fashion was ludicrous was to a degree common knowledge, even to the degree that “status symbol” was a commonly used phrase, employed to poke fun at certain things, yet at the same time it could not be denied that some fashions simply attracted people. For example, one fashion of that time made cars heavier, more expensive, and supplied little aerodynamic lift, and yet there was something undeniable “cool” about cars with fins, so the fins got larger and larger for a while.

It is a bit of a sidetrack, but the fashion of big, bulky cars seems a typical example of the American “yippee” experience heading off through mingled greed and a spirit of fun towards the inevitable whack across the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. The whack took the form of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the resultant Arab Oil Embargo. Some of the lumbering American cars got as little as five miles per gallon, (and included a new trickery called “planned obsolescence”), while Japanese cars got over twenty miles a gallon and were wonderfully durable. As the price of gasoline doubled the American automobile industry crashed into deep trouble, and greedy people abruptly found themselves with empty pockets, and there was a fair amount of rending garments and gnashing of teeth, and 97 bad ideas for every 3 good ones. But…

…But in the end the American auto-industry came bouncing back. Somewhere in the background, behind all the frenzy and hysteria, the common sense of mechanics, engineers and scientists quietly faced the Truth, and Truth provided answers.

What I lack-vocabulary-for is words that describe the capacity Truth has to provide an escape for people who have landed themselves in trouble. Humanity usually has no one but itself to blame for the messes it gets itself into, and the blame-game only furthers the mess. The rich justify their greed as the poor justify their envy, and the situation tends to spiral downwards, unless the escape appears like mercy from the blue.

This mercy always comes as something as a surprise to those who have turned away from Truth, and accept the pessimistic cynicism that surrounds being “given to sin.” Yet over and over history demonstrates Dark Ages giving way to a Renaissance. What is the difference in thought that separates darkness from such dawning of light?

In my mind the difference is perhaps illustrated by a quick comparison of Paul Ehrlich and Norman Borlaug in the year 1970.

Paul grew up in a sterile suburb while Norman grew up on a working farm. Paul’s father was a shirt salesman, skilled at making people buy what they often didn’t need, while Norman’s father, as a farmer, produced a necessity. Paul went to college and studied obscure butterflies, while Norman studied how to continue a process that mankind had followed for a thousand generations: Choosing the best seeds to plant for the next year’s crops. (Neither corn nor wheat, as they now grow, exist in nature, and both involve seed-selections other than natural selection.) Paul’s study of butterflies attracted few investors, and he needed to grovel for funding and grants, while Norman’s study bore immediate results, and not only attracted investors by increasing crops, but attracted conservationists by making it less necessary to chop down wilderness to increase farmland, because old farmland became more productive.

At this point it might seem Paul was destined to be poor and Norman to be rich, but Paul was interested in fame and fortune more than butterflies, while Norman was interested in improving the productivity of crops, and only cared for fame and fortune when it involved getting funding to further his study.

At this point Paul, perhaps using salesman-charm learned from his father, pulled off a remarkable career-switch. He switched from butterflies to being a prophet of doom and gloom. For some reason he had the charisma to make pessimism exciting, and abruptly made very good money basically stating most of mankind was going to starve while choking in its own pollution, within twenty years. He appeared on the most popular late night TV show of those times (Johnie Carson) roughly twenty times, and likely wasn’t asked once about butterflies.

Meanwhile Norman was making sure most of mankind stayed fed. As Paul appeared on Johnie Carson and enchanted the public with what was tantamount to a scientific-sounding sensationalism, (sort of like a good teller-of-ghost-stories by a campfire), Norman was at the center of the “Green Revolution”. The very nations Paul stated were hopeless became self-sustaining and even exported food.

At this point one discerns a difference, and draws a distinction. Even if one gives Paul the benefit of the doubt and states he was warning people of a worst-case-scenario, what he proposed seems brutal for a man once enamored by butterflies. He proposed foreign aid be cut off to “hopeless” countries, and that their people be “allowed” to starve. He proposed the males of India and Pakistan be castrated, to prevent population growth. He proposed that, even in the wealthy west, people who chose to have large families be penalized, even if their children were well-fed, happy, and well-educated. He himself chose to have a single child, but then did not chose to be castrated. (He chose a vasectomy, I suppose so he could continue enjoy sex, without the inherent responsibility.) And he made this behavior pay, even to a point where a University sought him out, as a “famous person”, and offered him a cushy position which had nothing to do with butterflies, (which he knew a thing nor two about), but rather about “sustainability”, (even though time proved he was an ignoramus on the subject).

Meanwhile Norman was so consumed by his work that, when his wife informed him that he had won a Noble Peace prize in 1970, he thought she was joking and went on with his work.

And how about me, in 1970? Who did I hear about? Sadly, Paul got all the press, and Norman little. I was so convinced we would run out of oil by 1980 that I changed my life in accordance, and even convinced my mother to invest in solar panels. (In my own defense, it was to heat hot water, which makes far more sense than using solar panels to generate electricity. I think something like 90% of Israel now uses solar power to heat their water.)

Then, of course, we did not run out of oil in 1980, and I felt like I had been a fool. The changes I had made to my life were changes that I needed to reverse, and, because admitting I am wrong is not easy for me, reversing course was not an easy process. But Truth demanded I do it, so I did it.

Did Paul do it? Did he set a good example and make my life easier by admitting his gifts as a prophet were nil? Paul was so wrong that he qualified as a false prophet, and in ancient Israel he would have been led to the edge of town and stoned to death, but fortunately he was in America, and all you get here is a rolled up newspaper whacked across your nose.

What truly amazed me most was that Paul refused to admit he was wrong. How was that even possible? He predicted a billion would have starved by 1990, and worse. None of it happened. How can a person be so wrong and not admit it?

He had various excuses, which basically boiled down to “My ideas are right, but it is taking longer than I thought for them to manifest.” Meanwhile he kept his position as a famous person at his university, and continued to make decent money giving talks as a famous person.

To me it looked like he was stuck on stupid. I was reminded of a line in a hit song of those times, “Every form of refuge has its price.” If he had stayed with his study of butterflies he would have been like a honorable starving artist, but he blundered into a cozy situation and became addicted to it. Dishonorable. (But I notice that, in his old age, he has returned to studying butterflies.) (But not for profit.) But back at that time Paul seemed to me like a sort of sell-out. His dumb ideas had made a mess of my life, and I had suffered through following his bad advice, but he was too weak to suffer, and instead stayed cozy. He was living the good life as I endured The School Of Hard Knocks. I suppose some envy was involved, but he lost any respect I had for him.

But how about Norman? Did I switch sides, and become a follower of Norman? No, because I never heard of Norman, despite the fact he’d won the Noble Peace Prize. The media didn’t salivate over him the way it did over Paul. There was little sensationalism involved in cross-breeding strains of wheat, and yet Norman may have quite literally saved a billion people from starving to death. That should generate a sensationalist headline or two, but the media prefers a Paul, saying a billion would die. And that is the difference.

I brought up Paul and Normon because they exemplify the difference between dishonor and honor, between being “given to sin” and being “given to Truth,” and between being basically harmful and being basically helpful. It boils down to difference between lies and the Truth.

Thinking about this difference is no small matter. It currently involves the whole world. World War Three (so far) is occurring on an intellectual level, and involves the differences which I’ve brought up, sort of as a sub-topic while discussing droughts and floods in the American Southwest. But this “difference” can’t be dismissed as a mere sub-topic when it infuses, invades and in some ways poisons even topics as innocent as talking about the weather in the American Southwest.

When I began this post I thought it would consist of a pithy comment about how some sensationalism had been refuted by the “mega-drought” becoming a “mega-flood”, but the post, (and my life), have not gone as I intended. Events have occurred which give one pause. Such pauses tend to elongate my posts. My posts become repositories of my thought, as I am forced to stop and think. Hopefully readers will have forgiven me as this post became long winded, but there is much to think about.

I also am arrogant enough to think some ideas in this post are worth sharing, and, though I am far from finished thinking-about-things, now seems a good time to cut this post short and tie up lose ends.

At one point I describe my granddaughter as a nine-year-old and another as a ten-year-old. This is not an inaccuracy, but rather is evidence of how long it has taken me to write this post. This post was started as snows started to melt, and now they are starting to fall again in the mountains of the American Southwest. The “monsoon” (or “monseen”) has past, and we now watch the winter systems.

If you are rooting for a mega-drought, you will be disappointed to learn a weak low did manage to kick some significant moisture into southern California.

This rain approached 3 inches in some locals. In most areas it was less. However the sensationalist media reported it as “once every thousand year rains.” People seemingly said, “Ho hum”, and went about their business, as the media showed flooding in low places,and rains moved from California to Arizona.

Why does the media insist on making such a big deal of what is a very wet day, but not really that great a problem? Are they stuck on stupid?

This immediately embarks my mind on two long-winded sidetracks, right when I stated I was going to cut this long post short. In a nutshell they would describe:

1.) How people get trapped by a situation they find cozy, and learn that “every form of refuge has its price.” It is up to the individual to decide if the price is worth paying.

2.) How such a trap can become an addiction which compromises ideals, and creates a hypocrisy which mingles lies with Truth, until the worsening dependence results in morality so muddied people don’t know what Truth is any more. Describing this would lead to further sidetracking, and involve many pages describing how a perverted form of Islam came to form an unholy alliance with communism, based upon the legitimacy of lying.

(Hint: The Byzantine’s were so corrupt and so cruel that, in specific situations involving imprisonment and torture, Islam allowed lying, however this narrow window, basically an exception-to-the-rule, has been expanded grotesquely into what seems to be a general strategy, making the word of some Mohammedans worthless; if their lying is allowed their treaties are worthless. However accepting deceit as a political strategy has allowed their worst to ally with communists, even when communists are mistreating Mohammedans.) (I think both sides are well aware their alliance is an expediency, and that as soon as they are done exterminating everyone else they will turn on each other.)

I was struck by an awful irony, for, it was while contemplating the fact 73,000 escaped calamity at the “Burning Man” festival, other young people, singing and dancing and rejoicing at another festival, were utterly unaware of another calamity approaching them in para-gliders. Though many escaped the atrocities enacted by Hamas, many did not. The vileness was so pronounced that the “difference” gouges the page and obliterates the paper; to even mention “hitting a dog on its snout with a rolled up newspaper” seems wrong.

However the same principles apply, albeit in a warlike setting. Humanity creates a problem that demands a response, and one prays for leaders like Churchill, able to weed through the 97 bad responses for the 3 good ones.

Finding the three good responses is not possible if one uses cancel culture to disallow second opinions. Instead one stays stuck on stupid, and something about such stagnation gnaws away at the human spirit. When solutions based on Truth are prevented, bad festers in the manner hatred festered in Gaza, until, like a boil, the pus bursts forth, at which point the headache and discouragement of psychological warfare becomes the horror of actual, physical wars and genocides.

The founders of the United States were not unaware of the evil mankind is capable of, and it was to avoid that evil that the American Constitution was devised to prevent any one person gaining the power to silence others. Freedom of Speech was vital, and resulted in amazing progress. To cancel Freedom of Speech is to cancel progress, which makes it absurd that those who are most interested in censorship call themselves “progressive.”

The problems of the progressive movement are that progressiveness was one of 97 bad ideas that sprang out of a crisis the world faced 175 years ago. At that time the agrarian system was facing challenges, and people were going hungry due to the potato famine and other woes, but Truth provided answers, one of which involved the start of the industrial revolution, which involved home industry being replaced by factories, people moving to cities, and eventually new crises. This became a general upheaval all over Europe, called the generic term “The revolution of 1848”, though in fact it involved many different situations in many different places, motivating all sorts of deep thinking and attempts to find Truth. This is a continual process, in essence a revolution which has continued to this day, except for one particular stagnation that refused to change. That is communism, which calls itself a revolution, though I don’t see how, considering they’ve gone 175 years without changing.

How can they prevent change? This is how: They call changing a “counterrevolution”, and do everything possible to prevent it from occurring, including lying. They call any idea that differs from their own a weed they must remove from their garden, but their gardens are barren, and are proof that the worst weed of all is communism itself. They are the antithesis of progress, for, I repeat, by calling any who differ a “counterrevolution” they have gone 175 years stuck on stupid, and are the epitome of sameness, and are about as opposed to revolution as you can get. Revolutionary? One does not change things for the better simply by wearing a Che Guevara hat; that is merely a fashion and an example of a tiger pacing in a cage. Nor does one change things for the better by being a so-called militant, and, (though praised by propaganda in the mainstream media that calls you “a peaceful protester”), revealing your true colors by burning the storefronts of hard working entrepreneurs, attacking the police that protect you, or even paragliding into “raves” to commit atrocities. Such behavior only proves one is an useful idiot foolish enough to serve as cannon fodder for equally idiotic people who are older and a few brain-cells wiser; wise enough to work behind the scenes where they won’t get shot, or won’t get shot until things really get out of hand and they face what Nicolae Ceaușescu faced on Christmas 1989.

In conclusion, one does not change things for the better, in any way, shape or form, by warping or denying the Truth.

The founders of the United States wrote its constitution based on the premise people respected Truth and would not lie. However communism extols lying. Therefore a communist can place their hand on the Bible and pledge to uphold the constitution of the United States, and their word means nothing. Their intent, if true communists, may be to destroy the United States, and yet they can say with dewy eyes how they respect the Founding Fathers, and also the Father of all, which is Truth. Afterwards they can laugh up their sleeves, “Heh, heh, heh! What suckers and chumps these losers all are!”

History seems to show us that, whatever short term gains such scoundrels may gain by denying Truth, in the long term the result is downfall. Sometimes it is merely the downfall of that particular individual, a Macbeth at his tragic end, but other times it involves the downfall of entire empires. No matter what glories of God they may have shone with in their past, the rot of corruption can crumble their knees, and they fall. The United States is not above such an end. Past glories do not guarantee a future that is spared being ignoble.

History also shows such downfalls do not create a worldwide Dark Age, for if Truth is suppressed in one place another place benefits from the first place’s insistence upon staying stuck on stupid, for the second place allows Truth to lead them, and they spring up as a surprising new power in the world. In fact our very word “renaissance” is historically closely associated with the final downfall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. In like manner, the fall of the United States can’t make Truth be untrue. Truth will simply burst forth someplace the power-mongering politicians never suspected it would. As they suspiciously regard Hungary, Poland, and India as hotbeds of counterrevolutionary dogma (IE: Truth) the next center of a new nation which astonishes the world might be Window Rock, Arizona.

Personally I hope I don’t live to see the downfall of the United States, although the behavior of many politicians in Washington D.C. does reek with a disgraceful, ignoble stench. To call them “The Swamp” is apt. They are shameful, but my hope is that this merely represents the entire nation getting whacked in the nose by a rolled up newspaper, after going “Yippie” too long (in many ways, but don’t ask me to go there, for I am concluding this post.) My further hope is that my nation retains its capacity to utilize Liberty and seek out the three good solutions from the ninety-seven less-good suggestions.

I’m still waiting.

The agony I feel is shared by fellow Americans, and was expressed so well by an unknown who called himself “Oliver Anthony” that his YouTube post became an overnight sensation. After two days it was well past a million “views” on YouTube, and past six million a few days later. People made a big deal of these numbers, and the people who like to think they control Truth because they attempt to control the media (and Free Speech) were wonderfully disconcerted, for they had not given this young man permission to speak.

The people perturbed by six million views can only be more perturbed by the fact that after four months this low-budget production now has over a hundred million views. (To be precise, 105,602,279 at 11:30 PM EST on December 23, 2023.)

Admittedly such a song is largely heart, and, while pointing out the head-oriented reality of certain problems, offers little in the way of solutions. However it does express a lack of faith in the solutions offered by “rich men north of Richmond”. (IE: Politicians in “The Swamp” of Washington D.C.). In essence it states the ordinary person is aware the liars are lying, and it is causing them anguish.

Although I do love music and think the power of the heart is superior to the power of the head, I am dissatisfied with merely moaning and groaning about the idiocy of the “progressives”. I want to meet them on the low level of intellect, and clash horns like the goats they resemble. (Meaning no offense to my goat Lydia).

However the liars increasingly seem to avoid any actual intellectual discussions. Why not? Because that might allow Free Speech, which might allow a “counterrevolution”, which they dread. This proves they are afraid of Truth. Why? Because they are addicts. They would sell their grandmother’s false teeth for their next fix, but they are not addicted to heroin, but rather power and all its perks. They so enjoy the cushy privilege which power has seduced them with that they fawn and bleat and bow to a king other than the King who is called Truth.

Over and over this has led to the fall of great empires originally uplifted by Truth. The fall can be prolonged agony; the fall of the Byzantine empire saw the rise of the Ottomans, and Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, but after a time the Ottomans too suffered the increasing rot of corruption until they were called “The sick old man of Europe” and were nearly wiped from the map, at the end of World War One. Only “The Young Turks” saved them from becoming a people with no nation, (like the Kurds). And in the American southwest the charcoal in the ruins of the Hohokan city of “Snaketown” in the year 1100 suggest how the mighty can fall even here.

And so it goes, and an individual feels small and ineffectual in the face of such prolonged downfalls. What can a lone man do?

Stand by the Truth. We may be small, mere motes of dust in the sunlight of millenniums, but it is not our job to be the Truth in its entirety. Truth can take care of itself. We need to take care to be truthful in the small spaces allotted to us, and that is enough. Maybe we will see our small efforts in some backwater had the power of a pebble to start an avalanche, and simply by cross-breeding strains of wheat on farms, far from the mainstream, we will start a “Green Revolution” and save a billion lives, or maybe not. In any case, it is not the individual who actually saves the billion lives. It is the compassionate side of Truth.

In the darkest winter night
Look for unexpected Light.

Merry Christmas!

ARCTIC SEA ICE –The 2023 Maximum and the Ilk of Al–

I thought I’d begin with a picture of actual sea-ice, looking out to sea from the top of a bank building in Barrow, Alaska. Barrow is located north of the Arctic Circle, and, while they still experience night, they already experience a sliver of twilight even in the darkest hours, as they move towards the midsummer days when the sun never sets.

The Barrow webcam is an interesting site to visit, for the sea-ice usually breaks up in the summer, and boats attempting the Northwest Passage stop there. At the moment, however, the sea-ice is “fast ice”, which means it is fixed to the shore and motionless. This is not always the case. Some years you can watch it go grinding by, westbound some days and eastbound others, and even move away from shore, exposing open water, before crashing back, heaping ice on the beach. Back in the day, when we actually discussed such matters, Alarmists and Skeptics would cherry-pick which images to copy and use. Alarmists would sensationalize pictures of the open water as Skeptics countered with pictures of the ice piling up on the beach. It was good fun, and between the two sides you glimpsed an accurate picture of what was actually going on. I miss those days.

I especially miss the pictures of the sea-ice. That was what attracted me in the first place. In a heat wave in New Hampshire in July it is good to contemplate sea-ice. Only later do you start to realize the stuff rivals clouds, in terms of sheer beauty. And back in those days there were pictures from the two “North Pole Cameras”, and various drifting “O-buoys”, and from the websites of crazy dudes attempting to ski to the Pole, or paddle to the Pole, or traverse the Northwest Passage on a rubber duck. Then the pictures oddly all vanished. I miss them.

The maximum “extent” was on the low side this year. It did display a reluctance to fall and now is higher than recent years.

However, during the moment of the maximum, the sea-ice extent was nearly “the lowest ever”, yet there was a disappointing lack of fuss among Alarmists. I miss that as well. Why the lack of hoop-la?

I wondered if any Alarmists had awoken to the fact that cancel-culture cuts both ways, and they too are getting the ax. Like the loyal teachers who taught Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, perhaps even some of the most faithful Alarmists are getting purged by the following “Cultural Revolution” of “Cancel Culture”.

Sea-ice Alarmists were very important ten years ago, and were flattered for their opinions, but now nobody cares, (in the same manner that formerly-newsworthy lesbians now get media’s cold shoulder, for daring to say there is a difference between women and men.) It is hard to have been popular, but to fall into disdain and disgrace. Everyone cared, but now nobody cares.

But I care. I believe in the two-party-system. Without the left eye the right eye has no depth perception. I miss those annoying Alarmist trolls.

I suppose one reason they have been hushed is because their forecasts have failed.

The above article was after the low-sea-ice summer of 2007. 2007 set a record, but the “history” the “record” was based upon only went back to 1979. If you went back to even 1976, 2007 might not have been a “record”. This led to wonderful debates between Alarmists and Skeptics. I miss them.

My own Skeptic path has been to go further and further into the past, and to see that, while we may not have always had satellites, we do have some early data about when the arctic sea-ice was extensive and when it was not. And we even have some very interesting early Nimbus satellite data showing gaping areas of open water north of Bering Strait, way back in September, 1969.

I used such early satellite data, along with the non-satellite data gathered by the Polaris debacle in 1871 and not gathered by the Franklin debacle in 1845 (because they all perished) and wonderfully gathered by the Parry expedition in 1819 and even by Barantsz in 1596, as ammunition in my debates with Alarmists. But I also enjoyed peering into the wonders of what men did in the past. The more I studied history the more I was amazed.

However the odd thing about cancel culture is that it goes the other way. It allows less and less history. Just as Stalin purged his closest confederates

And just as Mao sent the loyal teachers, who taught his way, to reeducation camps far from schools, using their own students, (the “Red Guard”, whom Mao later also sent to reeducation camps,) as enforcers, many Alarmists are now discovering they too are unwelcome midst those they taught. They have been around too long and know too much. About what? About Arctic Sea-ice.

What do we know? Well, we know it will not be gone by the summer of 2008, to begin with.

Dire warnings get old. It is like the tale of the boy who cried wolf. Even if the wolf comes, no one listens any more. And I did notice a lone voice stating that this year’s low sea-ice maximum meant the wolf had finally come. His theory was that the arctic had a sort of “reserve” of cold, but the “reserve” had been used up, and now, at long last, we’d see the sea-ice vanish this summer.

Sigh. One more dire warning, when all other prior dire warnings have busted. All I can say is that this wolf-crier better have a darn good reason behind his Chicken Little hysteria. But…when I probed I saw nothing…..behind the vague idea of a “reserve.”

To be vague in this manner is a bit of an insult to those true scientists who have suffered hardship gathering actual, specific data in the Arctic, and know about all the nuances involved. They know how the sea gets layered in terms of temperature and also salinity, and also what disturbs such layering. They know how currents flow at various depths when things are “normal”, but they also know nature has a sumptuous variety which makes “being normal” downright rare.

We are always attempting to reduce chaos into a predictable pattern, and it is a noble endeavor, but for every rule there is an exception. We do our best to figure things out, but reality throws a wrench into the mechanics of our theories. A true scientist actually delights in seeing his theory destroyed by chaos. It is like coming up with the theory no man can walk on water, and then meeting a Man who can do so. Is your theory so important to your ego that you do not want to meet such a Man?

Cancel culture does not want to meet even the most ordinary and boring and stultified scientist. In fact, cancel culture makes even the stultified look alert. Cancel culture is a broom that sweeps the stage clean of all actors, and asks us to gaze at a stage with a spotlight with nothing in it, like a big, bright zero.

I would far rather look at a Chaos that can walk on water, than gaze at a big, bright zero.

Chaos is a reality that constantly tests you and keeps you on your toes. The big, bright zero states the tests do not exist and there is no reason to stay on your toes; there is no such thing as the reality of such testing.

Such tests cannot exist? Why? Because “the science is settled”, and nothing is allowed to challenge it. There is nothing new to be discovered. Progress has reached the finish line, and is over. Oddly, the people who believe they know it all, and further learning is unnecessary, and progress is “done with”, call themselves “progressive.”

Progress is not “done with”. Life is an advancing stream. Yet some attempt stagnation. They tend to be people who “have it made” in some mundane manner, who cling to their brief moment “at the top”, which is an absurd thing to attempt. The very word “top” is dependent on a “non-top” to attain its importance. It requires a “non-top” before it is attained, and the assumption would be that such a mountain peak would involve a “non-top” afterwards. To stay forever “on top” is like climbing Mount Everest and then making the peak a plateau. True, you might not have to come down, but what a horrible plateau that would be! People do not climb mountains to stay there. At 29,000 feet nothing grows, and you can’t breathe for long without an oxygen bottle. And nothing is green. After reaching the top of Mount Everest sane people want to climb down

To ridicule the idea of staying “at the top” further, forgive me for being crude and physical, and for simply bringing up the fact that the one physical event many call the “best” of all physical events is sexual orgasm. It tends to be brief, but…..suppose you could stay there.

How long would you endure those convulsions of the physical body before you started to say, “OK, enough is enough.” ???

I will leave the answer to that question for others to contemplate and discuss, simply suggesting that it may be worth climbing certain mountains without intending to stay on top.

(There is a highly unromantic assertion that a man’s first thought after orgasm is, “Now, how do I get out of here.”)

However the entire premise behind cancel-culture, and “settled science”, and all the balderdash which society is currently being bombarded by, is that certain boobs in high places have “arrived at the answer.” And their smug certainty is so firm that they are set in cement, and they deem themselves beyond all reproach. They think they are beyond improvement. They think they are at the pinnacle of progress, beyond which is no more progress.

Now, if such leaders actually had achieved such a God-like status you would think their ideas would stand the tests of time, and the tests of skeptical critics. The fact is, they haven’t and they don’t. With each passing year the Malthusian premises much of their grim prognosis is built upon is rendered laughable and blown to smithereens, but they have invested too deeply and cannot give it up; they refuse to come down from their positions of power.

With each passing year the sensationalism which made Ehrlich’s, “The Population Bomb” such a good read when I was a teen in 1969 looks dumber and more stupid. Ehrlich thought humanity was too ignorant to solve its problems, and shortages were inevitable, but it was he who was the dumb and stupid person, and the shortages involved his brains, his inability to think up solutions, and his lack of faith that others would be gifted with inspiration even if he himself refused to open his mind.

Every problem Ehrlich stated could not be solved has been solved. His pessimism was unfounded. We didn’t run out of food. The “Green Revolution” made India an exporter of food, and obesity more of a problem than starvation. We didn’t run out of copper wire; fiber optics was invented. We didn’t choke with the smoke from burning coal; smokestack “scrubbers” were invented, and coal became “clean”. And on and on it goes.

To me this suggests that, for every problem mankind is faced with, God provides an answer, often using a small group of people or even a single individual to serve as His conduit. In some cases the answers are spectacular; for example, in the case of the Green Revolution it has been suggested that the work of Norman Borlaug saved a billion people from starvation. But in most cases the answers are quiet and often unnoticed. God’s conduits are all around us, for every person is born with a gift.

To me this also suggests that the pessimistic ideas Ehrlich preached were not “of God”. At best they may have been warnings or concerns about possible dangers, but worry can be a danger in and of itself, especially if the solutions you propose as an “answer” are as drastic as Ehrlich’s were. He basically proposed the castration of the male populations of India and Pakistan. That was his solution to a worry that wasn’t real. No starvation occurred, and both nations soon were exporting grain. Where some people accuse little old ladies of being prone to excessive worry, I think this historic example proves intellectually smug men like Ehrlich (and Al Gore) are the true culprits.

This moves us on to the subject of the “Club of Rome”, who were a group of wealthy men operating in the same intellectual gloom Ehrlich operated in. While I remember 1969 as the “Summer of Love” there were some extraordinarily cynical types active back then, with much more money and free time than was good for them, planning out a brutal future for humanity, for “humanity didn’t know what was good for it”. However these fat-cats in their comfortable club thought they had “arrived at the answer”. They had no faith God could, and would, provide a less drastic answer, a more loving answer.

What amazes me most is that even when reality proved their premises were incorrect, they stuck to their guns. Even when humanity solved problem after problem without their help, their egotism crowed that their help was crucial. If humanity would not starve as they predicted, they would damn well create starvation, just to show ignorant slobs who was boss. And why? Because only a starving humanity would be desperate enough to accept the dunderhead, medieval social-order they proposed.

What has this to do with sea-ice? Very little, and the truth of the matter is that I originally fled to the North Pole to get away from what struck me as pessimistic and cynical and ungodly. I was an escapist. I had no desire to argue about religion or politics with anyone, and assumed weather was a safe subject.

But so all-pervasive is the poison of cancel culture that even a basically withdrawn person like myself can’t duck their tentacles. They pick a fight with you, and when you cheerfully agree to beat their brains out with Truth, they cancel you. You get shadow banned:

Believe me, none of this was what I wanted when I began discussing the wonderful world of sea-ice. In many ways it is all a side track and off the subject. What do I care about the Club of Rome and their silly idea they can make life better by making it worse? Why can’t they just stay in Rome and do what Romans do, and leave the North Pole alone? I have no interest in such boobs. But apparently they are interested in me. (Why else would they cancel me?)

It reminds me of a situation one might see at a nightclub. A person might arrive because he or she is very interested in the music, and especially the saxophone’s. They are not as interested in the player as a person, as they are interested in the saxophone, and they sit down to study the nuances of the songs. Then a second person thrusts themself into the first person’s field of vision and asks them to dance. The first person politely declines but the second person persists. Eventually the first person is bound to become annoyed, but the second person is a pest and even insists they are in love with the first person. When whining and groveling don’t work, they threaten.

In this situation the second person’s desire is not love, for if they loved they would at least pretend some interest in saxophones. Rather their desire is infatuation, disconnected from reality and divorced from Truth. It is is a preconception that exists without regard to the first person’s attributes and interests, a sort of hypothesis without foundation, a selfishness demanding to be the center of attention, wanting to be a boss but actually enslaved, captivated by a preconceived desire that isn’t even real.

Such infatuation is sheer imagination. It’s like a worry that doesn’t happen, like Ehrlich’s insistence India was going to see widespread starvation in the 1970’s, or Alarmist’s insistence all sea-ice would melt by the summer of 2008. And the joke of such witless infatuation is that the more the infatuated insist they are the boss the more they prove they are enslaved.

I am like the person who went to the nightclub to study the saxophone, only I want to study the sea-ice. I have no desire to be captivating; I wear no make-up and dress like a slob; I don’t want to be the center of attention, and want the sea-ice to be the center of attention, but these cancel-culture idiots get in my face and insist that I dance with them.

The last twenty paragraphs have been my form of dancing. Sorry if it resembles judo and karate chops. Now hopefully we can work towards getting back to looking at sea-ice. Unfortunately this involves dealing with the stumbling block put in place by Al Gore.

I’ve quoted the premise that the sea-ice would be gone during the summer of 2008. This premise has been proven incorrect, and as it went down in flames some of the Global Warming theory that spliced into it has also gone down in flames. But not all. Some good ideas sprung from the discussions, as is usually the case when people have a civil meeting of minds. But first I’ll go over what went down in flames.

What went down in flames was the idea that the consequences would be “catastrophic” if sea-ice melted. This idea suggested a “feedback loop” would get going once a “tipping point” was passed. Less ice would result in warmer water which would melt more ice, resulting in more warm water and even less ice, until there was no ice at all to cool the planet, which would allow warming to get out of hand. This did not occur. There was no acceleration of how much ice melted. In fact the exact opposite occurred. Rather than more ice melting more ice formed. This in itself was a total repudiation of the “Death Spiral Theory”, and caused sensible people to look for other causes for the warming. The warming was real and could be documented, and must have some cause. Unfortunately some in power were not sensible people.

Chief among those who were not sensible was Al Gore, whose interest in science was genuine, but superficial. At Harvard he majored in government, not science. However he did take a class taught by Roger Revelle in 1968-1969 which excited Gore by introducing him to the idea of Global Warming. He also heard ideas about the future of computers and the internet that excited him. Therefore, when he first ran for Congress, Gore was seen as a breath of fresh air, an innovator. And he may very well have had the best of intentions, but his focus was on government and not science, which led into the swamp of power, rather than up to the highlands of Truth.

The thing about science is that it is never completed. One may indeed reach a point where elements are identified, and hydrogen is identified as the smallest and most simple atom, but that only opens the doors to what atoms are made of, and to the whole world of sub-atomic particles. (The closest thing to an absolute I know off is “absolute zero”, which turns out to be a temperature which can never be entirely achieved.) Scientists never really feel science is “settled”, and this is is especially true of science that is not simple and which involves multiple variables, such as Meteorology.

As “the grandfather of Global Warming”, Gore’s guru Roger Revelle does not strike me as a man who had the slightest desire to “cancel” in the way Gore has advocated. Quite the opposite. He wanted to increase research in all areas, and Global Warming was actually a minor focus, compared to the geology, oceanography, and meteorology he enthusiastically pushed. And by “pushed” I mean to say he himself couldn’t always do the research himself, but he wanted to put others in a position where they could do the research.

For example, as a scientist working with the navy during the A bomb tests on Pacific islands he looked beyond the immediate effects, and arranged study of the longer term effects on atolls, right from the start. Not only that, but he saw that such violent explosions would allow geologists to better understand the earths crust through “seismic studies”. One can only imagine him explaining to men of a hawkish, military mindset they should delay an A-bomb test even a day, so geologists on the far side of the planet could ready their seismographs, but he did such things.

Then he moved from those events of the 1940’s to being very involved in the buildup to a beautiful moment in human history, the “Geophysical Year” in 1957. What was beautiful was that scientists stated politics could be damned; the Cold War could be disregarded; the increase in human knowledge mattered more than petty fights between Capitalists and Communists, and to an amazing degree scientists used all the technological advancements progress put at their fingertips to discover things without caring at all about politics.

Perhaps the most notable discovery was that “drifting continents” was not some hare-brained theory of a glassy-eyed geologist, but an actual reality proved by “sea-floor spreading” along a mountain range that ran along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean called the “Mid-Atlantic Rift.” Yet no one got all that rich from this huge scientific advancement, (and no politician tried to use the discovery to panic the public and sell curly light-bulbs and electric cars). Those were more innocent times.

Riding the crest of this wave, Roger Revelle next set out to create an entire institute of further discovery in California, and there he perhaps first saw the rot setting in, for after working so hard to create the institute, he assumed he would be its head, but (perhaps due to antisemitism) the petty politics of academic creeps bumped him out of the picture. He did not run the institute he created. Which coincidentally placed him across the continent, and in a position to influence Al Gore, at Harvard.

However, though by then Roger Revelle surely was made aware of the petty politics of academic creeps, he apparently saw such bad behavior as the lower side of human nature, which had no effect on the higher side of scientific discovery. He continued to support a wide variety of research, involving many curiosities, only one of which was the increase of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere. Although he is called “The grandfather of Global Warming” he in fact simply wanted further research to be done. He found the idea of CO2’s effect on climate interesting, but only months before he died in 1991 he stated, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”

By this time Al Gore was already running for vice president. Part of his personal platform was that he cared about the environment. To some degree he had bought-into the Malthusian mentality of Ehrlich and others. He was apparently convinced we were destroying our planet, and he wanted to save it. Very noble. However it is at this point Gore veered sharply from the sanity of Revelle, for Gore did justify “drastic action”.

This actually came up in the 1992 vice-presidential debates, along with Revelle’s quote, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time,” and Gore’s response was to say the quote was “taken out of context.”

I’m sorry, but there was very little “context” involved. Either you have “scientific base” or you don’t. Yet where Revelle was very involved with the “scientific base” Gore was only interested in a “political platform.”

That occurred over 30 years ago, in 1992, just after Revelle himself died, and in those thirty years I don’t think Gore has done a thing to build the actual “scientific base” for “greenhouse warming.” How could he? True science, with true research, would have undermined his political “platform”. Once you adopt an, “If you are not for me you are against me” attitude, you have abandoned science.

Even back 1992 there were major truths which lessened the status of CO2 from a “major” to a “minor” contributor to climate change. For example, even then it was known that historical increases in CO2 didn’t precede historical examples of warming, but rather followed the warming, which would suggest warming increased CO2, and not vice versa. This was a full ten years before Gore was involved with the movie, “The Inconvenient Truth,” where Gore insists that CO2 caused the warming. Gore cannot plead he “didn’t know.” In essence, Gore lied.

The actual inconvenient truth is that Gore had a great teacher, and Gore knew damn well that Revelle believed research should involve a wide splay of topics, but Gore had shifted to a political mindset that grotesquely narrowed the focus. Basically it was narrowed to, “Are you for the environment, or against it?” It took a vast, and multifaceted, reality and reduced it to, “Are you good and on my side, or evil and my foe.” What Gore apparently didn’t understand is that such an attitude, in such a situation, is evil in and of itself.

In a sense Gore enacted, or at least supported, what amounts to the exact opposite of the International Geophysical Year which Revelle supported in 1957. Rather than increasing the funding of many topics, Gore sought to cut the funding of any and all who were not “on his side.” Considering his side was “wrong” (sea-ice didn’t vanish in 2008) he was cutting the funding of any and all who were “right”.

One example involved the study of geology in Northern Greenland. The area is fascinating because, due to isostatic rebound, the land has risen faster than the seas have risen. In most other places the shorelines of past times have been hidden by seas which rose hundreds of feet when ice-age glaciers melted, however in Northern Greenland the ancient shoreline was lifted above the current shore. I personally was fascinated because along this ancient shoreline were traces of charcoal from the fires of ancient people. Why not fund further study? There were things to be learned!

It can be expensive to conduct research in a place where there are no airports or towns within hundreds of miles, but someone funded the beginning. The results were amazing. Surely further funding was due. But Gore and his ilk quashed the research. Why? Because apparently an ice-free Arctic Ocean creates a shoreline geologically eroded very differently from an ice-filled Arctic Ocean, and this study suggested the Arctic Ocean 5000 years ago was ice-free and yet the world didn’t suffer any dire consequences. That didn’t fit the “platform” (or “agenda” or “narrative”) that Al Gore wanted called “truth” even if it wasn’t true. So, because he had the power of the purse-strings, he cut the funding of that wonderful research.

Perhaps the most shocking display of Al Gore’s nasty funding-cutting meanness involved the brilliant scientist Dr. William Gray, a contemporary of Revelle’s who might be called, “the Grandfather of modern hurricane forecasting”. He had been doing excellent research as head of a university department in Colorado since 1984, and in 1992-1993 Al Gore, as the new Vice-president, sought his support concerning drastic action to combat Global Warming, and Bill Gray was open and honest and stated what Revelle had stated, basically that CO2 was a minor and not a major influence on climate. Al Gore promptly cut his funding, not merely for a year or two, but for the rest of his long life.

What was Bill Gray’s crime? It was to seek for a reason for the warming seen in the seas by studying the seas, rather than studying the effects of a trace gas in the upper atmosphere. Where Gore claimed he already had the answer, (banning fossil fuels). Gray was more humble and wanted to seek an answer. He wanted to study “thermohaline circulation”, and was scornfully advised, “Stick to hurricanes, Bill.”

So here we are thirty years later, and we still can’t explain the warming of the oceans. There are some good theories, involving things such as the sun and volcanic activity, but there has been a dearth of actual research, because Al Gore preferred a “platform” to preferring actual study and hard work. To be brutal, Al Gore prefers to stay stupid.

This is fine, if it just involves depriving himself. People have the right to believe whatever they want. However, at first through the power of the purse strings, and now through actual censorship, Al wants to keep everyone stupid.

This demonstrates the evil of seeking power without being grounded by Truth. It is like the effect the “ring of power” had on innocent Hobbits, in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. And in a sense Al Gore, who once began so idealistically concerned about the environment, has been reduced to a Gollum, killing whooping cranes and right whales with his wind turbines, enslaving children in lithium mines and shredding the Freedom of Speech, becoming a horrible parody of his own idealism. (And here we could go on a long sidetrack about the insidious effects of power, and how we should pity men so unmanned, and of antidotes to the addictive poisons they’ve ingested, but it all boils down to sticking to the Truth, which returns me to the subject of sea-ice.)

Sea-ice, as a focus, has actually backfired on true believers in Global Warming, for any who focus honestly upon the topic soon (or, in some cases, gradually) become aware sunlight and air are not the greatest factors, when it comes to melting the sea-ice. This cuts the legs right out from under the “Death Spiral Theory”.

How so? Well, what melts ice is heat, which either comes from sunlight or from warmer molecules bumping against colder molecules.

Sunlight only has a significant effect for around sixty days when the arctic sun is at its highest, and during this time the melting at the top of the ice is significant. In June more heat beats down at the Pole, during the 24 hour day, than beats down at the equator, during a 12 hour day. However soon that time passes, and by late August the sun is so low at the Pole that, even though it still shines 24 hours a day, it arrives at such a shallow angel, with the sun down towards the horizon, that most of its heat is bounced back to outer space, and the meltwater pools at the surface of the ice start to freeze over. However the sea-ice continues to melt, from the bottom up, usually past the middle of September. Some of the biggest areas of open water appear after the sun has ceased to have an effect.

This blows a big hole in the idea that the melting comes from above. CO2 can do whatever it wants in the upper atmosphere, and it has little effect at the surface where sea-ice actually melts. In fact, air temperatures at the Pole during the summer have gone down as CO2 levels in the atmosphere have gone up. Air temperature, and radiance from above, (whether it is sunlight or the bounce-back of greenhouse gasses) are not the boss, and are in fact minor players, when it comes to melting the ice.

This makes sense, when you consider that air is so thin, compared to water. Air at 33 degrees only has scattered molecules to bump against ice and lose heat, whereas water at 33 has a whole army. Air temperature is swiftly changed by passing over water, as the water is only slowly changed by even the coldest air passing over it.

It is a matter of numbers. If a law of thermodynamics states that “heat cannot pass from one body to a hotter body”, heat must be passed from warm molecules to colder molecules, and who has the most molecules? The air or the water? The water utterly overwhelms the air. Therefore we should study the water, not a trace gas in the upper atmosphere. Which is what Dr. William Gray suggested we do, all those years ago, and is what Non-doctor Al Gore demanded we avoid.

I would like to suggest we listen to the late Dr. William Gray, and study what he wanted studied, rather than listen to a Gollum named Gore.

Alarmists like to say the sun doesn’t matter and volcanoes don’t matter; only CO2 matters. Yet there are far more curious correlations involving the sun and volcanoes than there are involving trace gases.

One correlation (which I originally thought was stupid), suggests that a gentle sunbeam could cause an earth-shaking volcano. Ridiculous. However, as the sun passes through various sunspot cycles it sometimes passes through times described as a “Quiet Sun”, and during such times the Earth’s geology is not quiet at all. Call it coincidence if you will, (and it is true “correlation is not causation”), but when the sun gets quiet the lava starts to flow.

Roughly fifteen years into the period of Quiet Sun called the “Dalton Minimum” layers of volcanic ash in ice-cores in both Greenland and Antarctica show tremendous volcanic eruptions occurred only five years apart. One layer we can identify as Tambora’s in 1815, but the second is a mystery. The eruptions apparently had a huge effect on the climate and the sea-ice in the first half of the 1800’s. I posted an article on WUWT which stimulated a wonderful discussion in the comments, back in 2013:

1815, 1816 and 1817; A POLAR PUZZLE

The suggestion is that solar forces effect the earth in some way that links a decrease in sunspots on the sun with an increase in volcanic activity on earth. Obviously more research is needed. But the eruptions I mentioned are obvious because they throw ash into the air for all to see, yet they only amount to around a quarter of all eruptions on earth.

Deep sea eruptions are different, and less obvious. If the oceans warm or sea-ice decreases, would it not make as much sense to look down as it does to look up? I briefly discussed such a possible eruption two years ago:

ARCTIC SEA-ICE –Volcano Under The Ice?–

I was hoping to stimulate a lively discussion, and was somewhat surprised at the silence that ensued, which may have influenced the (somewhat caustic) tone of a second post I wrote regarding the effect of undersea volcanoes on sea-ice eight months later:

ARCTIC SEA ICE: Undersea Volcanoes In the Arctic; Part 1

While I did receive some good geological information from the commenter “Stewartpid” after this post, it was also at this time I became aware that “shadow banning” was seriously effecting my “visibility”, as a blogger. I suppose I should have been flattered by the attention, but I was also dealing with what we all were dealing with, (basically a highly unscientific and political over-reaction to the China Virus), and like many small businesses my livelihood was on the line. Survival took both brains and brawn, and I had little left over for sea-ice posts, and for wondering about the effects of deep sea volcanoes on the thermohaline circulation.

Yet there is something about wonder that cannot be denied. I’ve read that even in Hitler’s death camps the doomed somehow formed orchestras and played Beethoven. And my own small mind, in its small way, keeps playing with ideas involving geology and oceanology and meteorology, even when I’m under the kitchen sink because I can’t afford a plumber. This may explain the jet of water squirting into my face, but never forget Newton was foolish to sit under an apple tree without a helmet, but good came out of that apple bonking his brain.

I got bonked this past spring by an observation which refuted my earlier tentative hypothesis. Unlike Al Gore, I am not threatened when proven wrong, but rather am interested in what is being revealed.

While I no longer am able to jot down all my observations here in my posts, I continue to make them in a hasty way, swiftly glancing at maps and graphs when I find time.

There were a number of things I observed this past winter that fit in with what I expected. For example the increase of sea-ice in the East Siberian Sea, including some multi-year ice, fits in with what I’d expect when a La-Nina reinforces a “cold” PDO for three years, (though perhaps the sea-ice increase was less than I expected.)

Also, at the start of the winter the sea-ice was not heading down through Fram Strait, but that changed and there was a lot flushed south the second half of the winter, at times crowding the north coast of Iceland. This interests me due to the fact fishermen of the pre-satellite era portrayed the waters north of Iceland as too dangerous to venture into, but it is unclear how thick the sea-ice actually was. This past winter seemed to demonstrate the ice can be less than 15%, and appear as “open water” on some modern maps, but still be enough to make fishermen leery of sailing such waters. After all, if you are a fisherman sailing in the gloom of winter and thick fog, you don’t dismiss sea-ice for being bergs far smaller than the glacial monster that sunk the Titanic, nor do you pis-tush waters only 1% ice-covered. You don’t want to slam into even one, lone berg, unless it is small enough to fit in a cooler. Fishing is a gamble in the Atlantic winter even without bergs. I put this awareness into my understanding when I look at pre-satelite maps concerning sea-ice coverage, such as this one from 1923.

The above map was produced without satellite data or even airplane data. It utilized the wisdom of a fisherman with “fifty years experience.” The fact he survived is proof he was more cautious than other fishermen, yet even in his caution he would risk sailing places he would not risk sailing at an earlier date, because sea-ice had retreated in 1923. However you should note that in both situation “A” and situation “B” he would not call the north coast of Iceland ice-free and safe to fish in.

Those same waters would not have been safe to fish in this past winter, though modern boats likely have harder hulls. But the amusing thing was how the sea-ice came and went, on modern maps, because it flirted with arbitrary guidance invented by virtual reality’s mapmakers. For example, if 15% was a dividing line, and the sea-ice shifted from 16% to 14%, the ice would vanish, as if it melted away in its entirety. Other maps tend to average things out, so a single monster berg a hundred feet thick averages out to an area, much bigger than the berg is, averaging one foot thick, but even in such averaging maps sea-ice can be there one day, gone the next, and return the third. You need to take all such things into account, assessing the actual state of the sea-ice, whether you are a fisherman risking the North Atlantic, or me working under my kitchen sink. And one thing which was apparent was that sea-ice was surging south more than usual, even along the north coast of Iceland. (A NRL map showed sea-ice along Iceland’s north coast, albeit briefly, and I’ve never seen that before.)

As the ice came down the east coast of Greenland in large amounts it did what cold water cannot do. Ice stayed at the surface whereas cold water sinks. Therefore it could move above warmer waters, even creating mini-“freshwater lenses” that, due to salinity, could move over warmer waters. So I watched to see if the Atlantic showed any signs of cooling. At first it did not. This made me wonder what was keeping the Atlantic warm, and my mind wandered to sea-floor volcanoes. There has been an increase in sea-floor seismic activity which matches the increase in sea-surface-temperatures, and is a better match than CO2 is, when looking for a reason for recent temperature-rises world-wide. But of course there have been too few studies done. All we have is the seismic records, and coincidental increases in SST.

One aspect of the past winter was that my area was largely spared big storms, as each low pressure area tended to stay small as it passed over us and to only blow up when it was well out to sea. It was a wonderful year for bombogenesis and the super-storms that boggle the mind, though they all occurred out where only men on ships notice. A few lashed Iceland heading north, and then tended to pass between Norway and Svalgard, and the powerful north winds behind them was one reason sea-ice was pulled south through Fram Strait. Also, when they first developed, these same north winds almost never reached back to my area, but did bring very cold air down into the Atlantic through Baffin Bay, down the west side of Greenland. As blast after blast of frigid air hurtled south “heavy freezing spray” warnings were over and over posted for fishermen south of Greenland (too much freezing spray can capsize a boat) and I expected the sea-surface temperatures to eventually reflect the constant blasting. To my surprise the water seemed unaffected. Instead it was the air that was affected.

This returns me to what I mentioned earlier. Air has few molecules while water has a whole army. Water easily warms air, while air has a harder time chilling water.

I’ve often noticed this, as arctic blasts head towards my area in the autumn. They often must pass over Hudson Bay, and it is amazing how swiftly below-zero air is lifted past the freezing point, passing over the waters. In effect, as long as Hudson Bay remains unfrozen, we in New England enjoy a maritime climate like Ireland’s. However Hudson Bay is shallow, and in late November or early December the entire bay freezes over with astonishing speed, and suddenly the blow zero air is not warmed as it bears down on my area. Our climate snaps from Maritime to Arctic.

This has led me to wonder about the kinder and warmer periods of the past. They are called “optimums” because optimism was ruling. People didn’t fear Global Warming. They rejoiced. And one element must have been that even shallow seas such as Hudson Bay were so warmed by summer that it took longer for them to freeze over, and peoples downwind enjoyed a maritime climate longer into the early winter.

One can see this occurring even now, in the marginal seas around the edge of the Arctic Sea. As long as there is sea-ice, the water must be ice-water, and by definition at the freezing point. But as soon as the ice is gone the shallow, coastal waters can warm remarkably. Then, when winter descends, for a time these summer-warmed waters can create a local maritime climate. However as soon as the sea-ice flash-freezes across the surface, the local climate switches from maritime to arctic.

To me it seems fairly obvious that what made Greenland far more hospitable, to the first Vikings settling there, was that Baffin Bay, and perhaps waters to their north in the Arctic Sea, were warmer. The maritime climate persisted deep into their winter, lasting so long that the soil didn’t freeze deeply enough to be called permafrost, and melted early enough the following spring for graves to be hand-dug in places that now would require a jackhammer.

This suggests that water has more influence than CO2, and causes high dudgeon in Al Gore, and among his ilk. How dare I suggest such a thing!

Well, I dare, because it is obvious, even to a bumpkin working under his kitchen sink. However other things are not so obvious, and need an occurrence to bop me on the head like Newton’s apple.

One thing, (among the many things that Al Gore and his ilk would never fund, though they deserve study), is the simple fact climate “optimums” do not last. Mankind’s history sees Golden Ages give way to Dark Ages, and often the darkness is colder. What causes the merciful climate to have no mercy? What causes the land that allowed us to be fat to suddenly beget famine?

If one truly cares how harmonious mankind is, as he dances with his environment, one should study the environment. One should have the common sense to know we do not boss about the weather, but rather are more or less victims of the weather. Therefore the best way to avoid being a victim is to study what the weather may be about to hit us with. The idea we can control the weather through prayer meetings or rain dances does honor God, who may compassionately respond, and the idea we can control the weather through carbon credits and electric cars and curly light-bulbs does honor Al Gore, who has lost his hold on compassion. (I assume he once knew of it). However it is better to accept the weather than to control it. If we could control it we’d likely screw it up. (It is said (by me) that Atlantis sunk because a lazy wizard wanted to sail his ship over a mountain, rather than take the long way around it.)

If environmentalists really cared about the environment they would not shadow ban and censor the very people who most want to study the environment. And that can include boobs, such as myself. And I want to know why the oceans have gotten so much warmer the past thirty years.

This seems important because the temperature of the air has not risen in a steady manner, matching the steady rise of CO2, but rather has closely matched the ups and downs of sea-surface temperatures, (which for the past thirty years has mostly involved ups). Despite much tweaking of data, it is basically impossible to demonstrate any connection to the warming of massive amounts of sea-water to a slight variation, one molecule in ten thousand, in the upper atmosphere. Try as proponents of Global Warming will, they can’t get around the fact water itself is a greenhouse gas when it becomes water vapor, warmer oceans create more water vapor, and the greenhouse-effects of water vapor mask and basically negate the greenhouse-effects of CO2. In other words, the oceans control the atmosphere to a far greater degree than the atmosphere effects the oceans.

I was thinking about this last winter as I watched the amazing sequence of super-storms blow up in the middle of the Atlantic. Each storm was preceded by a blast of arctic air over warmer waters. Initially the cold air was sinking, and acting as a lid pressing down on a growing layer of warm and humid air created right at the surface of the sea. But warm air wants to rise like a hot air balloon, and if the water vapor in that air condenses it goes from taking up a square foot to taking up the space of a droplet, which creates low pressure, which makes the rising air lighter and rise faster, and bombogenesis occurs with shocking speed. In other words, rather than the air effecting the water the water enormously alters the air, turning a clear, cool, sunny day into a raging storm. Joseph D’Aleo explained this process eloquently in a paper years ago.

This demonstrates that rather than the atmosphere warming the oceans, with one molecule out of ten thousand in the upper atmosphere, it is the uncountable army of molecules in the ocean that are stupendously altering the atmosphere, uplifting gargantuan amounts of heat and greenhouse gases (IE water vapor). And where are these super-storms headed? Towards the pole.

So, as best I can, I watch the storms head north. I observe.

As the storms head north they move over colder waters and become colder themselves, and one very obvious effect is that the chilling makes the water vapor condense. Enormous snows fall from such storms onto the icecap of Greenland or the peaks of Svalbard and Norway, feeding huge glaciers, or are dumped into the sea, but this also means there is less and less moisture left in the storms themselves. When one of these storms penetrate the Arctic Circle I have dubbed them (in an attempt at humor) a “Ralph”. But one thing I’ve noticed is that all the Ralphs tend to be dry. They may look large in terms of isobars, but they only drop a dust of snow. The arctic regions are basically a desert.

This makes sense, when you consider how little moisture cold air can hold. In fact I’ve heard the old-timers around here comment, “It’s too cold for snow”, which seems to suggest even laymen appreciate that cold air tends to be dry and hold little moisture. However, when a Ralph invades the Central Arctic, very cold air at minus ten is clashing with even colder air and being chilled to minus twenty, which causes tiny remnants of moisture to be wrung out as a dust of snow. As this vapor goes through the phase change from vapor to liquid, and the second phase change from liquid to solid, it releases latent heat as actual heat that can be measured with a thermometer. This causes spikes in the DMI polar temperature graph, which nicely document the passage of Ralph after Ralph.

Some of these spikes can thrust up fifteen degrees, but that turns out to be far less grand that it sounds. First, it is still far below freezing and can’t melt any ice. Second, the heat is swiftly lost in the dark winter night to outer space. Third, fifteen degrees at the Pole is a weakling compared to even a half a degree at the equator, which baffles many people who don’t take the time to think.

Think of it this way: If you drop the temperature 15 degrees at the Pole you can only precipitate a dust of snow, but if you tried the same stunt at the equator, dropping the temperature 15 degrees, you’d be washed away by many feet of rain. Furthermore, that vastly larger amount of water in the air would free up a vastly larger amount of latent heat. In conclusion, a degree at the Pole is simply not the same as a degree at the equator. It is like comparing apples with oranges. Yet polar temperatures are given the same weight as tropical temperatures in Global Warming calculations. Big mistake. But people pretend it isn’t glaring.

It takes a while for a bumpkin like myself to comprehend a degree at the equator is utterly different from a degree at the Pole, but I can do it. How? I assume it is because when you work with a misconception it is like turning a wrench the wrong way while working under a sink. Water squirts into your face and informs you that you are mistaken. So you reverse your direction.

Al Gore should reverse his direction. His ilk should reverse their direction. However they believe they are loyal and steadfast to a “platform”. They believe they are steering by a star, but it is a flickering candle’s flame and they are moths. I watch them and fear this will not end well.

When things fail to add up, using your old preconceptions, doors open in your thinking which allow new ideas, which may also be preconceptions and also prove wrong, but you are covering a lot more ground than people who haven’t had a new idea since 1969.

Watching all the bombogenesis in the mid Atlantic last winter made me wonder if the increased seismic activity beneath the seas was causing the mid-Atlantic rift to release more lava, which might warm the water above, generating more storms. Not that I had any time to research such an idea. Like I said, I barely have time to make my kitchen sink work, in the stress of these times. Nor do I expect any help from Al Gore. If he will not fund even brilliant scientists, and his ilk somehow find the time to shadow-ban even an obscure blogger like myself, hindrance is what I expect. But still I wonder, even while battling the hindrance.

And here is where I got blind-sided by a thought that never would have occurred to me without help from outside.

The outside help occurred because I seek the best guess on what the future holds in terms of running my Childcare business, which involves exposing small children to the outdoors, walks in the woods, planting in the dirt, and other things, all of which involves exposure to the weather. So I have need of good long-range weather forecasting, and find Weatherbell to be worth paying for. They are not always “right”, but have a way of presenting their forecast that allows for the possibility they might be “wrong”, and do so in a way that allows me to also take the “wrong” into account. It is utterly different from Al Gore, who can never be “wrong”.

In any case, while for the most part they stick to basics, occasionally they venture an aside of a more theoretical nature that perks up my ears. One time Joseph D’Aleo wondered about a warm area of sea-surface-temperatures appearing east of New Zealand, and whether deep-sea lava might be involved. Another time Joe Bastardi pointed out that the warm sea-surface-temperatures in the North Pacific matched the seismic region of earthquakes and volcanoes called the “ring of fire.” So I know they contemplate such things, but it is not a center of their forecasts. What blind-sided me was an aside by Joe Bastardi that went completely against what I expected. And what was the aside? It was that, rather than seismic activity increasing, to match the increase in mid-Atlantic storms, seismic activity had dropped off dramatically. It had plunged.

When Joe Bastardi posted the above graph my immediate response was denial. It had to be a mistake. Some glitch in the data. (And for all I know maybe it was.)

It was painful to have my pet theory challenged. However I have lived a long time and seen a lot of my pet theories go down in flames, and have discovered it is not good to be stuck in your ways, and is better to be knocked free of the ooze. Otherwise the swamp’s quicksand may suck you down. Standing your ground may be glorious in certain situations, but often it is better to roll with the punches, as chaos hits stagnation with ever-newness.

Once I got over my shock, the above graph’s dramatic fall in seismic activity did make sense in a way, because the sunspot cycle was at a maximum. Even though the maximum was low, befitting a “Quiet Sun”, the sun was far more “noisy” than it had been. If a quiet sun did make lava flow, the noise of a sunspot maximum should stop the lava, at least for the short term. And then, with less lava down in the depths, there should be some sort of cooling, in the short term, in the oceans.

This seemed highly unlikely, for after three years of La Nina’s chilling the pendulum seemed bound to sway the other way towards warming, and there were indications of a warming El Nino brewing. However it was just then the North Atlantic south of Greenland, smack dab over the warm Gulf Stream, abruptly chilled.

This was a second shock. After all, I’d been watching this water all winter as cold wave after cold wave charged over it, never seeming to chill it a bit, and super-storm after super-storm sucked up colossal amounts of warmth and moisture to transport north, also never seeming to chill the water a bit (despite subtracting warmth). Yet now, with hardly any excuse, the water was chilled more than a bit?

To make matters all the more inexplicable, this cooling was not occurring over the mid-Atlantic rift where lava might flow, nor downstream of the rift, but rather seemingly upstream. Of course, there might be some deep current going the opposite direction of the Gulf Stream at that locale, but, (also of course), the ilk of Al don’t want to spend any money on such study. They would rather spend trillions on unfeasible alternatives to fossil fuels.

What has this to do with sea-ice? Well, if such an area of cooling appears smack dab in the middle of the Gulf Stream, then it is on its way across the Atlantic to effect Europe, and eventually to follow tendrils of the Gulf Stream right up into Fram Strait, where a slightly cooler current can be the difference in sea-ice melting or growing.

And what will the effect be? What is my forecast?

Fortunately (for me) forecasting is not a gift God has blessed me with. I’m off the hook, in that respect. My gift seems to be in my powers of observation. I note the oddities others may not have noticed, and hand them information they may find useful, or may disregard. In the real world of how the clouds move and how the waters swirl, I am like a foreign correspondent sending information back to the capital, for the wiser men to sift through.

However the ilk of Al have no use for such information. They apparently had some sort of wonderful revelation while smoking pot back in the Summer of Love in 1969, and haven’t entertained a new idea since. They distinctly dislike new ideas. How dare you!?

However the most disturbing, and also most beautiful, aspect of chaos is its ever-newness. Life tires us out, and we go to bed weary, yet when we wake ever-newness is in the sunrise and draws us on. Or perhaps the China-virus clobbers us, and we go to bed coughing and shivering with fever, yet when healing hits us with ever-newness we arise and breathe deep. Or perhaps winter grinds us down to despair and hopelessness, and then the ever-newness of April has dead trees budding, silent ponds shrill with frogs, skies creased by honking geese and day-breaks melodious with thrushes. Ever-newness is only disturbing if you want to stay stuck in your ways.

Truth is merciful, and constantly offering answers, but if you are of the ilk of Al, you refuse them.