Monday, December 22, 2014

Our 2014 Christmas Letter

Not long after Alice and I wed twenty-five years ago we made an agreement that we would live to be 110. With the way life has been going for us, we may have to add some more years to our agreement. As we age, our enjoyment of life and its experiences just keeps growing, our interests expand, and we want to experience as much of the future as we can to see how it all works out.

A park near our apartment. One of over 600 in Buenos Aires
(please click on each photo to enlarge it)

In February and March we went to Antarctica, but first spent a week in Buenos Aires in an apartment in the Palermo district. We took a city bus to the funky part of town, La Boca, but since our apartment was very centrally located and was walking distance to many interesting sights and parks, we walked all over the place. At the end of the week we joined our Lindblad/National Geographic Antarctic expedition group, and they took us to La Boca again and to other Buenos Aires sights, like the Casa Rosada - in my mind's eye I could see and hear Evita on the balcony signing for Argentina to not cry for her - and then we went to her grave.

Tango in La Boca
Maradona (soccer star), Evita, and a Tango singer in La Boca
The La Boca locals
Alice admires La Casa Rosada

Then it was time to board our flight to the end of the world, Ushuaia (hard to spell, even harder to pronounce), to board our ship, the National Geographic Explorer, and disembark across Drake's Passage to Antarctica with 146 other adventurous and hardy souls, and a willing crew plus a small army of very able naturalists. I was delighted that they, and some special guests on the voyage were all adherents to the National Geographic man-caused global warming religion, so I did not have to look far to find a discussion/argument.

On Antarctica!

The highlight guest was James Balog, whose film "Chasing Ice" was shown many times during our voyage. It's basically almost an hour of filming the Jakobshaven glacier in Greenland calving spectacularly. Very interesting, except Balog portrays it as due to man-caused global warming, and never mentions that this glacier retreated much farther before 1900 than after, which is known as lying by omission.

The stylish couple in Antarctica

The ice, the sea and land creatures, their unbelievable abundance, exceeded expectations. Besides Antarctica we enjoyed visiting South Georgia Island and the Falklands.

One of many humpbacks cruising by

A fur seal playing with fish-eating killer whales (the seal hopes!)

Alice admires elephant seals on South Georgia Island

There are about 300,000 King penguins in this colony

The drama of the ice

Palmer Station, Antarctica, showing direction to Point Arena 
(Chile, not California, darn it!)

On the Falklands, a rock hopper penguin with attitude

Alice indulged my climate change passion and we attended the International Conference on Climate Change at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The speakers and presentations were so good that Alice enjoyed it too, and we had a fun dinner with eldest son Bruce, his wife Lisa, granddaughter Leaha, and Lisa's children.

In July we again attended the Mendocino Writers Conference in Fort Bragg. It was enjoyable and productive for both of us, and contributed to the best news for us this year: Alice has completed the first hundred pages of her memoir "The Lady with Balls", which was what the Bay Area Italian garbagemen called her as she struggled to establish her (now) very successful business, Vulcan Incorporated. Alice treats writing like a very demanding job, and schedules her time accordingly. Her hard work and diligence shows in her work, and I would write more about her memoir but as Alice advises, "buy my book." I don't think you will have to wait until 2016 to do that.

I surprised and shocked myself by appearing in "Jekyll & Hyde, The Musical." Since I only sang briefly (and unplanned) in public once before, and my acting career ended on the Point Arena High School stage in 1960, this was a new and challenging experience that took a lot of time and work beginning with auditions in May and ending with six performances in November. I had a character part, the sex driven, pompous, arrogant Bishop of Basingstoke, and also doubled as a stablehand/brothel patron. As Bishop, I was Hyde's first murder victim and closed the first act lying dead onstage. I then helped open the second act as the stablehand lamenting the Bishop's death, and then quickly four more as Hyde warmed up to extracting vengeance on hypocrites. It was a wonderful experience, made special by the very friendly and supporting cast and crew. I hope doing other shows is in my future.

We have several things planned for next year already. In February Alice will have a new left knee to match her right one (replaced two years ago) (NOTE: Alice did not have this operation and is doing fine so far). She will have time to be fully recovered when we set out in June for an Arctic adventure - Norway, Greenland, and Iceland - on the same ship and in the cabin next to the one we had for Antarctica. Then on August 24, 2015 (Monday) we will have a Point Arena High School reunion. I promised to do it at our 2010 reunion, and it will happen (I hope).

Then we will join Alice's Reseda High School reunion group in October which will include a Mediterranean cruise beginning in Istanbul and ending in Rome.

As time permits we will also be attentive to our wonderful little dog Radar, working to improve his training and manners, which sometimes have slipped.

Radar at play

Alice and I wish everyone a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukah, and the best of New Years.


Monday, November 24, 2014

The Gualala Post Office Window Poster

Me in the middle, Bob Seymour on the right, Randi Olsen on the left,
Candy Deltorchio and Alice Seymour (1958?)

I made the rounds of the Gualala Post Office mailboxes. From the Lions’ box, a bill for rent of the Community Center; from the Banana Belt Properties’ box, an advertising flyer; and our box was crammed full with mail-order catalogues for Alice. As I walked towards the exit, I noticed the small paper poster with a photo on the window next to the door. I hadn’t noticed it on my way in, but even though I was looking at the reverse of the poster, I recognized the picture and knew what it was even before I got outside to read it.

Bobby Lee Harper was dead. Born January 31, 1931, died July 31, 2007.

The photo was one that Bobby was very proud of; Bobby in his Air Force blues, with Sophie holding their first baby. Bobby had three stripes on his uniform, the rank that was then called Airman First Class, so the picture was probably taken around 1955.

Bobby had enlisted in the Air Force in the late Forties, and he met and married Sophie, a Greek girl, while he was stationed in Europe.

Bobby was very short, a stretch to reach five feet. Sophie was shorter.

In 1963 the Air Force assignment system brought Bobby to Point Arena Air Station, the home of the 776th Radar Squadron, located at the end of Eureka Hill Road about ten miles east of Point Arena.
When Bobby arrived at Point Arena in 1963, the radar station was only twelve years old. It had been built to narrow the radar detection gap and help prevent a surprise Soviet Union bomber attack.

Before the radar station opened, younger brother Ron and I went with Mom one night a week to a small observation post on the hillside next to and behind the Point Arena City Hall and Fire Station. There we would wait and watch, and watch and wait, until relieved by another Ground Observer Corps volunteer. Fortunately for the volunteers, we never saw anything, and unless the Soviets had flown in low and with all their lights on, the volunteers couldn’t have seen anything anyway. On our many foggy Point Arena nights, the Soviets could have mounted searchlights on their bombers and put them on full power, and they wouldn’t have been noticed.

Unless their engines were so noisy that we would hear them inside our cozy observation post.

Happily, before the Soviets figured all that out, the radar station was activated December 1951.
Bobby was an NCO when he arrived, so he didn’t have to work as a “scope dope,” the guys who read the radar screens and worked long hours until automation replaced human effort and led to the radar base closure about 1980. By then Bobby had completed his twenty years and had been retired over a decade in Point Arena. Sophie was cooking in the Point Arena Wharf restaurant, and her fried lingcod with French fries was my favorite restaurant meal for many years.

When I came home from college, or on leave from the Air Force, which was often the same thing, I’d ask Pop, “Is Sophie cooking tonight?” If the answer was yes, we knew we would be at the Wharf for dinner.

Bobby and the airmen and their families who came before him had a deep and lasting effect on our little community.

During World War II our sleepy and insular coast received an infusion of strangers, primarily young Army men, from all over the United States. At the war’s end they all suddenly left, and things were sleepy and quiet again.

All that changed again in 1950, when the Air Force chose Point Arena as the site for a radar base. The lives of our local girls became much more exciting. Their pool of potential romantic involvements increased greatly, and was steadily renewed as the Air Force moved personnel in and out.

Sometimes heartache accompanied news of reassignment. Sometimes happiness and sorrow were mixed as some of our young ladies married airmen and moved away. Sometimes the Air Force lost, as several of their young airmen embraced local girls and returned to civilian life by getting jobs in our sawmills.

I think that only one of the airmen who left the Air Force to live in the area is still here.

We young men attending school and living in the Point Arena, Gualala, and Manchester areas felt the competition for female attention acutely. The airmen were older, already high school graduates, spun thrilling tales of travel and work in exotic lands, and of special interest to the young ladies, had steady incomes and ready cash.

Their interest in the young ladies of our area went deeply into our school system, down to and including some of my seventh- and eighth-grade classmates.

Some of the airmen brought young wives with them, and Point Arena was a bee hive as every available living space, or facsimile thereof, reasonable or not, was rented by a young family living here because of the radar station or the booming lumber mills.

I delivered the newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, to many of them.

I fell deeply in love with one of them the summer of 1954. Unfortunately, I was twelve, and Peggy was seventeen or eighteen, married, and was either totally unaware of or was amused by my infatuation. I first saw her when I was fishing with a hand-line from the Point Arena wharf, and had already caught half-a-dozen perch. She was wearing short white shorts, a white shirt tied at the bottom exposing her waist, and sandals, and had long light brown hair in a pony tail, and blue eyes.

She wore the same outfit, or a very similar one, every time I saw her.

She lived with her husband Jerry, who I never met, a "scope dope" who worked at the radar station. They lived in a rented trailer house in the trailer park that was recently built on the flat cow pasture next to Point Arena Creek, only a couple of hundred yards from the wharf. It was a nice little trailer park, except for infrequent times when storms caused Point Arena Creek to flood through it, or the one big storm that once pushed waves all the way up the road into it.

Even though I was only twelve years old, I was already a hefty 5’ 10”, about three inches taller, although her shorts, slim body, long legs, and thick sandals made her look almost as tall.

My hormones had just started to stir, and seeing and talking to her considerably accelerated the stirring process.

She asked me questions about fish, and fishing, and I’m sure I gave her the most exhaustive answers she ever endured about fish, about fishing, about the wharf, the ocean, the rocks, Point Arena, my school, and in fact, about anything and everything I thought might catch and hold her interest.

One of the first stories I told her cast me in a sort of daring, heroic role. The previous summer I bummed along with Sandy Sedler on his salmon-trolling boat, Rip Tide, and we went to the fishing grounds just off the Point Arena Lighthouse near Wash Rock. Sandy brought in salmon steadily through the day, but fog came in rapidly as we turned to head back to the wharf. Sandy used his radio-direction finder to triangulate our position from the nearby Loran station and his friend Roy Fox’s radio signal from Roy’s boat tied up at the wharf. We slowly worked our way down the coast we couldn’t see, finally turning landward at a point on our map chart that we hoped was directly west of the wharf. After what seemed like hours of slowly motoring towards Roy’s radio signal, Sandy said: “We should be able to see the light on the wharf by now.” I stepped out of the cabin to get a better look, then went back and told Sandy: “I can’t see the light, but I can hear Roy talking, and he sounds really close.”

In a few more agonizing moments we finally saw Roy’s boat, and tied up alongside.

When I finished my story, I was sure I had impressed Peggy.

However, remembering that time, with the maturity I can now bring to reflection, I doubt there was much I said that was all that interesting to her, but at any rate she said she would like me to teach her to fish, and I did.

Since hand-line fishing was all I knew, because I couldn’t afford a fishing pole, we rigged her a hand-line too. Peggy’s hand-line was just like mine, about a hundred feet of braided cotton line wrapped around a short stick. For sinkers we used old spark plugs the mechanic at the Union 76 station in town saved for us in a box in the engine tune-up area. The hooks were the inexpensive, black leaderless ones, and for bait we caught sand fleas under the rocks near the wharf, or cut up small fish we caught for bait that schooled among the pilings under the wharf. She soon did very well catching perch, sea trout, and an occasional cabazone, our best tasting rockfish. Peggy was from Alabama, like Bobby Harper, and already knew how to clean fish.

I hope she and her husband liked fish, because she always caught enough for them to have fish every day.

What can a twelve-year old country boy talk about that would interest a young lady? Fortunately, remembering how Pop talked to people showed me a way. Pop asked people a lot of questions about themselves, and then found things in common to talk about. I asked Peggy about her home town, and she told me her family moved from a farm when she was little to a big city with 10,000 or more people– a lot bigger than Point Arena and its 555 population – and her parents told her about growing up on a farm. It sounded to me like it had been a poor farm, with a mule instead of tractor, no electricity, and eating chickens the day they were killed because of no refrigeration.

When I heard about the mule, I told her how my younger brother Ron and I used a horse Pop borrowed from a neighbor to dig a full-sized basement earlier in the summer for the house we were building. I told her how we harnessed Prince, hooked on a Fresno scraper, and lifted the scraper arms to let it bite into the earth as Prince strained in the harness. Then Prince would skid the scraper full of dirt up a ramp out of the basement to a dump area where we would lift the handles and spill out the dirt. Ron and I completed the basement project by the end of the first month of summer vacation, and later in the summer after the wooden forms were built, we would be working many hours each day “feeding” a cement mixer to pour the basement floor and walls.

I asked Peggy how she liked living in a trailer house, and she said it was nice; their rental trailer was new and comfortable. Talking about trailer house life inspired me to tell Peggy about my family’s trailer house. We had lived in a house in Bakersfield until 1947, then bought a trailer house and lived in several Southern California towns for the next two years.

Then in September 1949, we towed our trailer house to Point Arena and parked it by the old abandoned high school building, and after a few months more of living in the trailer we moved into one room of the old building. Peggy enjoyed my tales of living in one big room of the old abandoned high school building for our first three years in Point Arena. Ron and I had a bunk bed behind a partition at the back of the room. Mom and Pop had their bed in one corner, the kitchen and dining area was in another, and a couch and chairs was in the “living room” in the corner nearest the partition. The toilets were through a door at the back of the room and down the hallway. Mom cooked on a woodstove that also heated the room and provided enough hot water to halfway fill a galvanized washtub. All four of us quickly took turns taking our baths in the tub in the middle of the kitchen; Mom first, then Pop, then Ron and I took turns. It didn’t take long for the bath water to cool and get a bit dirty. Peggy laughed at the thought of four people taking turns bathing in a washtub on the floor. I laughed too, and dreamed of the day we would have our new house built, complete with bathtub and hot running water.

Pop had been the thirteenth of fourteen children, and was working as an oilfield “roughneck” near Bakersfield when Walter, one of his six older brothers who had a general store in Gualala, wrote us that “the sawmills are hiring.” Mom read Walter’s letter, looked at Pop, and said: “Honey, you just became a lumberjack.”

Point Arena was full of exciting news the week we arrived in 1949; the Pacific Enterprise had just struck Wash Rock near the lighthouse and was sinking. But the real big news then was how fast area sawmills were expanding to meet the post-war building boom. Soon Pop was working for Empire Lumber “setting chokers” in the Wheatfield Forks area on the south fork of the Gualala River. He liked the hard work, and learned quickly how machinery was rigged to bring logs out of the woods onto a landing, and then loaded on logging trucks to be hauled to the sawmills. In our living room he helped Ron and I rig a highline with our cherished, shared Erector Set so we could bring out logs too.

Peggy had been to the radar base on Eureka Hill and had seen the tall redwood trees alongside the road, and fully loaded logging trucks passing through town, so that gave me a chance to tell her anything and everything I knew about logging. Last summer Ron and I went to watch Pop work on the log pond at his new job at the Diamantine sawmill on Brush Creek, and Peggy was interested in how Pop worked the “sinker boat,” a small wooden raft with a hand-cranked winch that was used to bring the heavy, butt-end logs up from the bottom of the pond. Those were the redwood logs that immediately sank when they were unloaded from the logging trucks into the pond. Pop would locate the sinkers, hook them with tongs attached to the winch, and crank them up to the surface. Then he would use a long pole to put two “floaters” on either side of the sinker, screw a steel eye-bolt into the sinker, and use a piece of lumber and a rope to secure it between the floaters. Pop then pushed the three-log rafts to a chain conveyer that pulled the logs into the mill for sawing.

Peggy seemed really interested when I told her how Ron and I ate lunch with Pop and all the loggers in the cook shack. We sat on long wooden benches, and the equally long rough wooden tables were covered with lots of good food that never ran out. I would have been happy to make my whole meal of just the tasty biscuits with butter and jam, but Pop made sure we had some of everything.

Peggy told me that she didn’t remember much about life on the farm, although she helped feed the chickens and watched her father milk a cow. As she got older, her family told tales of how hard life on the farm had been, and how little money they had. That all changed when her family moved to the city and got jobs with steady incomes. I told her that even though we lived in town, we had a cow that Ron and I milked, and chickens, rabbits, and a calf we raised for beef.

I told Peggy that three years ago we bought our first “bummer” calf (a twin rejected by its mother) for $5 from Stogie Stornetta’s ranch. The calf was very cute, with big soft brown eyes, and Ron and I named him “Bosco.” Our chore was to feed Bosco after school, and he would run to the fence to greet us, and we rubbed his head as he ate. We fed Bosco powdered milk mixed with water in a bucket with a rubber teat, and we held the bucket firmly, braced against the fence, to keep Bosco from spilling it as he energetically sucked on the rubber teat. When Bosco got bigger, we stopped the milk and fed him hay and grain. I told how one time in a driving rainstorm part of the fence fell and Bosco escaped, and we chased him through the rain and wrestled him in the mud to get him back into his pen. Peggy laughed when she said she could just imagine how we looked, soaking wet covered in mud.

Bosco, like all calves, was very playful, and liked to bound across the field and do awkward, funny leaps. When I finished telling Peggy about Bosco, I think she noticed a sad look on my face, and asked: “Where’s Bosco now?”

“Bosco’s dead. One day after school we went to feed him, and he was gone. Pop said the butcher came and took him away.” We begged Pop to tell us when Bosco would come back, and then Pop told us: “He can’t come back. He’s dead.” I told Peggy how Ron and I couldn’t believe Bosco was dead and how we cried so hard we could hardly breath. Then Pop told us gently but firmly to stop crying, and pointed around us. “These animals aren’t pets, they’re dinner. Don’t give them names.”

Peggy looked sad, too. Maybe she was remembering animals she named on their farm, and knew that most of them probably ended up like Bosco. I guess a part of childhood ends when you realize that death is a part of life, that something as lively as you can become suddenly cold and still, existing only in our memories.

I forced a weak laugh, and said I call all the calves “Hamburger” now, and Peggy smiled gently.
“He may sound tough, but Pop’s really nice,” I said. “When people tell him that Ron and I are good, big boys, he says ‘Yep, they’re strong as an ox and nearly as smart.’ That’s the way he tells us he’s proud of us.”

One day after we finished fishing, and Peggy went back to her trailer, a high school guy told me: “I bet you’d like to screw her. I sure would.” I turned away, angry and blushing, and he laughed at me. I guess he was right, but I wanted to keep it a secret. I realized that I hated the thought of her “doing it” with someone. Anyone. Even her husband. Even me.

But now, more than ever I looked forward to going fishing at the wharf and talking with Peggy. We had fished together almost daily for over a month, then one day I fished for hours watching for her, and she didn’t come.

I never saw her again, or heard anything more about her.

Another Air Force family soon moved into her trailer.

Thinking about Bobby and Sophie, and their lives and some of the times we shared here, spurs memories.

Bobby’s gone, and his poster on the Post Office window announcing his death has already been removed.

The Post Office has strict rules about what and where and when things can be displayed.

Peggy was only here a month over fifty years ago, and then she was gone.

I hope she hasn’t had her poster taped on a Post Office window somewhere.

Not Peggy, not the girl in shorts with the long legs and the sweet, sometimes sad, smile.

Peggy and Bobby, and many others, live on in my memories.

At least until the day my poster takes its place in a Post Office window.


Monday, September 22, 2014

Imminently Ignorant Democrat Leaders

In my weekly ICO letter two weeks ago I noted that Governor Brown still wants to blow over $68 billion on his bullet train vanity project, that will then operate at a taxpayer–subsidized loss until some hopefully not-distant day when it's replaced by something that makes sense. For those who doubt it will operate at a loss, name me one major public transportation system that breaks even, and in the unlikely event one is found, I can list a hundred that don’t.

If Governor Brown looked at historical California drought records he would see that the past hundred years were unusually wet, and that mega-droughts have been the rule for over 1,300 years in California (http://tinyurl.com/no55jo8). We already have high-speed transportation between San Francisco and Los Angeles; it’s called air travel. While we don’t have an answer for the much bigger problem of endemic drought, a $68 billion investment in desalinization and water storage and distribution would go a long ways towards finding one.

Brown is far from the only highly ignorant prominent Democrat.

On MSNBC (http://tinyurl.com/lsnkz5n): “Hillary Clinton called out climate change ‘deniers’ at a clean energy conference in Las Vegas … Clinton began her remarks at the National Clean Energy Summit by laying out the problems climate change is already causing today, including extreme weather and droughts. ‘[These are] the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face,’ she said. ‘No matter what deniers say.’”

Government studies disprove that the US is experiencing extreme weather and drought, and government organizations provided the following charts. Drought since 1900 is historically low (http://tinyurl.com/nw37e5m). Precipitation is trending up (http://tinyurl.com/m5nlaxp). Land-falling hurricanes are at an all-time low since 1910 (http://tinyurl.com/ms48rtk). So are strong-to-violent tornadoes since 1954 (http://tinyurl.com/ojcytg5). And the annual heat-wave index since 1895 (http://tinyurl.com/otnq8gc).

Hillary, you are clueless.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Veterans Health Administration is a failed single-payer system

On Memorial Day I’m writing this to protest the shabby treatment of fellow veterans and to challenge Liberal support for a single-payer health system.

“The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is America’s largest integrated health care system with over 1,700 sites of care, serving 8.76 million Veterans each year.” It is a single-payer system and has often been held up as a model by Obamacare supporters. Paul Krugman, Vouchers for Veterans, The New York Times, November 13, 2011, put down Mitt Romney’s veterans health privatization plan by touting the VHA as a socialized medicine success story.

Two years earlier, another Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, wrote: “(The VHA) is fully government run, much more ‘socialized medicine’ than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.”

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote in 2009 that one of his favorite ideas was expanding VHA to non-veterans, and that the VHA was America’s best-functioning health system.

Nancy Pelosi was quick to blame the emerging VHA scandal on President Bush, speaking as if Democrats had no VHA responsibilities since Bush left office in 2009. 

However, in 2004 the left-leaning Rand Corporation found that: “(T)he VA system delivered higher-quality care than the national sample of private hospitals on all measures except acute care ... In nearly every other respect, VA patients received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment, and access to follow-up.”

The Rand Corporation reported that quality improved significantly 2007 to 2009, again during Bush’s presidency.

The VHA, like Obamacare, is another shining example of government incompetently competing with the private sector, and should be privatized. Our veterans deserve better treatment than politicians. 

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Embarrassed Experts

After our return from Antarctica, a letter writer was embarrassed that I dared argue with the “experts.” Following her lead, I will feign embarrassment for the experts on our trip, James Balog and Dr. Robert Bindschadler. They, along with many glaciology experts, are alarmed by the “collapse” of the West Antarctic Peninsula ice sheet. The source of my embarrassment is that none of the experts mentioned that this ice sheet has been retreating, often at a much greater rate, since the Ice Age ended over 12,000 years ago. Since then it retreated over 545 miles, including a phenomenal 190 miles in only 800 years (7,600 to 6,800 years before present), according to a 1999 study
Dr. Bindschadler is an expert researcher of the Antarctic Pine Island glacier. I doubt  ignorance prevented him mentioning that this glacier retreated similarly 8,000 years ago.

James Balog did most of his “Chasing Ice” work on Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier, a famously fast moving glacier that retreated 21 miles 1851-1964, and only 9 miles since.

Embarrassingly, all of these periods of previous larger glacier retreat were either not in their expert knowledge base, or the facts were inconvenient since atmospheric CO2 levels were then only 72% of current levels. I asked, and received no answer, how was current glacier retreat caused by increased CO2 when previous greater retreat wasn’t?

Mr. Wiesner writes we should only pay attention to the experts. Presently, the experts’ predictions for temperature and sea level rise are both embarrassingly far higher than observations. Karl Popper, Richard Feynman, and other critical-thinking scientists would have concluded the experts’ predictions have failed.

Charting a course of action “to save the World” based on failed concepts is illogical. Mr. Wiesner and Mr. Landecker, you do agree, don’t you?

Thursday, May 15, 2014

"97%" Surveys Aren't Science

The number 97% should have its own natural climate change deniers’ shrine. As I wrote following our Antarctic cruise, James “Chasing Ice” Balog and Dr. Robert Bindschadler, retired-NASA, both said that 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change due to human activities. They referred to the studies cited in the Ed. Note, page 5, 5/9/14 ICO. I rebutted the first mentioned, M. K. Zimmerman et al, both on the cruise and in the 5/21/14 ICO on my return.

The 2008 Dolan/Zimmerman study asked opinions of 10,257 Earth Scientists at academic and government institutions on two questions, and 3,146 responded. However, only 79 responders were included, meaning 97% were excluded.

Question one (paraphrased): Do you believe global temperature has risen, fallen, or stayed the same since pre-1800 levels? Of course it’s risen since the Little Ice Age ended about 1850AD, so I’m in the 97% too.
  
Opinions are not science. Clear, falsifiable (testable) conclusions based on real evidence are. The self-serving surveys the ICO Editor cited are anti-science; their fraudulent claim that “the science is settled” is the antithesis of the scientific method.

Far more than 3% of scientists disagree with AGW. Over 31,487 American scientists (including 9,029 PhDs) have signed their disagreement

A Legates study (2013) reviewed 11,944 papers on climate published 1991-2011 and found only 64 (0.5%) explicitly endorsed AGW.

Presently 111 of 114 (97%) global climate models significantly overestimate projected warming. Dr. Lüning finds that doubling CO2 only increases temperature 1.0° to 1.5°C. 

Karl Popper would have declared the models failures with such evidence. ()

Lewis and Crok found: “The [climate models] overestimate future warming by 1.7–2 times relative to an estimate based on the best observational evidence.”

With no global warming in 17.75 years; “If you can’t explain the pause, you can’t explain the cause.”

Thursday, May 08, 2014

Hold that tiger! Sea level rise far under experts' predictions

San Francisco sea level rise since 1854; highest in 1983

John Wiesner again cast cherry-picking “stones” in a purportedly scientific letter remarkably devoid of science. He said I avoid “an obvious upward sea level trend line”, although in previous letters I’ve noted that San Francisco sea level has risen 4.2” since 1854. My point is simple: since 1983, with unremitting atmospheric CO2 increases, sea levels for six West Coast cities have fallen, not risen.

CO2 up, sea level down. Simple, right?



In previous letters, I've illustrated ad nauseam that sea level rose over 400 feet following the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, that sea levels were higher during the four previous warming periods of the past 10,000 years – sea levels during the Holocene Climate Optimum (8,000-4,000 years ago) were up to ten feet higher – and that current sea level rise is a natural rebound from the drop in sea level during the Little Ice Age (1450-1850AD). 
Mr. Wiesner said I refuse to fit an RMS trend line. Although I can’t find such a refusal, I wonder why Mr. Wiesner hasn’t done it himself? Anyhow, I’m pleased to comply. For San Francisco, the mean sea level trend is 2.01 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.21 mm/yr. The other five cities’ trends are here. Projected increases per century: a modest 1.5” to 8”.
Warmists refuse to debate previous climate change with me; in fact, they seem to avoid all debate. While on our Antarctic trip, James “Chasing Ice” Balog and Dr. Bindschadler both publicly avoided debating previous climate change. You too, Mr. Wiesner?

For Brendan Mobert: I appreciate your comments (Alice agrees with you), but the “other side” owns global warming news (for instance, ICO), and mine doesn’t, so while I’m “riding the tiger”, I can’t get off even though I’ve beaten it nearly to death.

Saturday, May 03, 2014

Cherry Picking is the latest Alarmist Mantra


John Wiesner again cast cherry-picking allegations in a purportedly scientific letter remarkably devoid of science. He accuses me of avoiding “an obvious upward sea level trend line”, when my previous letter, and many before it, noted that San Francisco sea level has risen 4.2” since 1854. My point has been, and remains, that in the past three decades (since 1983) of unremitting increase of atmospheric CO2, sea levels for six West Coast cities have fallen, not risen.

In previous letters, I've illustrated ad nauseam that sea level rose over 400 feet in the past 12,000 years following the Ice Age, that sea levels were higher than now during the four previous warming periods of the past 10,000 years – sea levels during the Holocene Climate Optimum (8,000-4,000 years ago) were up to ten feet higher – and that current sea level rise is a natural rebound from the drop in sea level that occurred in the Little Ice Age (1450-1850AD). (Click here for more information about previous higher sea levels.)

Mr. Wiesner wrote that I refuse to discuss fitting an RMS trend line to the data. Although I can’t find any refusal, I wonder why Mr. Wiesner didn’t do it? I’m pleased to add it now. For San Francisco, the mean sea level trend is 2.01 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.21 mm/yr; San Diego, 2.06+/-0.20mm/yr; Los Angeles, 0.83+/-0.27mm/yr; Seattle, 2.06+/-0.17mm/yr; Vancouver, 0.37+/-0.23mm/yr; Victoria, 0.63+/-21mm/yr. Maximum increase per century: a modest 8”.

These are the links to the RMS trend lines:


Using another statistical tool, variation of 50-year mean sea level trends, five cities show a decreasing rate, and one (Victoria) shows no change, for the past half-century. My point, given recent and historical trends, sea level increase this century should be about 8”(or less), just like the past two centuries. 

These are the links to the variations of 50-year mean sea level trends: