Uncommon Common Sense

The essence of conservatism is common sense, which is why I support increasing parcel taxes to fund increased urgent care coverage. In fact, it’s a pleasure to choose where and how much of our tax money goes for a good use. Regardless of age, income, family size, or the other factors that divide and separate us, expanded urgent care coverage benefits us all now and our futures as we face the needs of aging. Alice and I want to live here as long as we can; there is no better place we want to move to.

Concerning common sense, the Keystone XL pipeline should be approved. Pipeline or no, Canada will produce and ship oil from its oil sands somewhere, somehow. A pipeline is safer and more economical than trains, boats, and trucks, and won’t be routed through town centers. One negative is that pipelines produce far less plant-feeding CO2 emissions than other means of transport. Another is that the Keystone oil will displace heavy oil from the Middle East, Venezuela, and other areas that do not have Canada’s substantial greenhouse gas regulations in place. For those who are thick as oil sands, please note that my negatives are dripping heavy sarcasm, just as foreign oil producers are dripping oil all over their pristine landscapes.

California has many droughts: in 1953; in the late 1950’s early 1960’s; the mid-1970’s; from late 1986 to early 1991; and several since 2000 including another five-year drought from 2006 to 2011. However, Californians have been extremely lucky “since the past century was among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.” 

Common sense indicates we should be aware of all this, but obviously we’re not since California’s population centers are far from its water sources and growing rapidly.  It’s not climate change, it’s history.

Huge Benefits of Fossil Fuel

In our many and varied travels, Alice and I have seen the benefits of fossil fuel use, and the struggles to survive without it. For example, in Tanzania we saw a village that recently was aided by Rotary clubs donating a manually operated water pump, a great improvement over the previous need to carry water jugs great distances from the river. However, its users still hand-pumped the water, then carried water jugs instead of turning on a faucet in their homes.

We have many colorful pictures of women walking by the road with jugs, baskets, or bundles balanced on their heads, and not just in Africa. In Guatemala, India, and in rural areas of Southeast Asia bundles of firewood as well as jugs of water being carried by women and children were common sights. In these areas, the vast majority of the population relies on traditional biomass and waste, mostly firewood and dried cattle dung, for heating and cooking. With increasing populations, the walks to gather fuel get longer, and the air in homes and villages exceed our “spare the air” standard every day.

Given these observations of living lives without the abundant, easily accessed energy we take for granted, I wasn’t surprised by a recent study that found that “(T)he benefits of fossil fuel energy to society far outweigh the social costs of carbon (SCC) by a magnitude of 50 to 500 times.” 

It’s common sense, which unfortunately is not commonly found in the developed world. We would like to preserve the lives of peoples of the developing world in an imagined pristine Eden, and they would like to live like us.

We don’t want to live like them, yet are surprised they don’t either. With economic freedom, Bill Gates thinks by 2035 they won’t have to. 

Polar Bear Prosperity

It’s fund-raising time for natural climate change deniers and a photo-shopped image of a polar bear on a tiny ice floe in a vast ice-free ocean was used as their “poster boy” 

Brad Keyes at The Conversation defended its use: “The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’—and readers’—attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty.”

Pity the polar bear. Global temperature was up 1°C, Arctic summers were 5°-8°C warmer, and Arctic summer ice was virtually gone. This occurred annually for thousands of years 130,000-115,000 years ago during the Eemian interglacial, and hit its peak 125,000 years ago. And the polar bear survived.

The polar bear also survived during the recent Holocene Climatic Optimum, 9,000-5,000 years ago, when Arctic temperatures were similar to the Eemian period, with substantially less sea ice than the present. And the polar bear survived.

None of these facts of polar bear survival during previous warmer, lower sea ice periods, seems to have sunk in with the natural climate change deniers. Recent periods of greater warmth, higher sea levels, and lower Arctic sea ice should register something in their feverish minds: our current warming following the Little Ice Age, the coldest period since the end of the Ice Age, is modest and unremarkable compared to previous warm periods. Within the past 10,000 years, the Holocene Climatic Optimum, and the following cooler Minoan, Roman, and Medieval warm periods were all warmer than the present. And the polar bears survived them all.

In fact, the polar bear population quadrupled 1960-2000, and is up 10%-20% from 2000 to the present. 

Surviving? They’re thriving.

My Very Interesting Radio Interview, 2005

Over eight years ago I was interviewed on one of our local radio, and this is the link to the interview.

Our 2013 Christmas Letter

Merry Christmas and the Happiest New Year!

     Some Christmas letters you dread writing, but know one day you must. This is that one. 2013 was a cruel year for losses of loved ones. Alice’s father George was in great shape at 98½, but had a fatal fall rushing to play bridge. Several months later his older sister, Ruth, died on her 101^stbirthday. In between we lost our beloved Buddy Doggy just before his 16^thbirthday. In each of these losses we are comforted by the thought that each had long, active lives, and we were blessed to have them for so long in our lives.  Too many friends also passed away, leaving us cherished memories of times we shared.

Alice and I with George and Susan Dickenson in China     

With Buddy, such a sweet doggy

The past year we fed our travel bug lightly, and planned only one special trip, cruising up the Mississippi on the biggest steamboat ever, the American Queen. We arrived in New Orleans June 14 and spent nine days (mostly walking) experiencing this renowned city. On June 23 we boarded the American Queen and began one of our most relaxing and interesting trips ever. I sneakily booked the cruise before its official opening date to get us the premier cabin, the Mark Twain Suite. I loved its commodious 500 square feet, and Alice luxuriated in quiet privacy and a full-size bathtub. Each day featured memorable stops in places we knew only from history classes, books, and movies. Our cruise ended at St. Louis on the Fourth of July. The meals and entertainment on the American Queen were outstanding. Among many highlights, their Mark Twain impersonator may have improved on the original.  We spent a week bicycling St. Louis, and returned home relaxed and refreshed.

The Mark Twain Suite had a huge private deck

     Not long after our return I accompanied Alice to a writers’ conference in Fort Bragg. Alice has been totally absorbed in writing her memoir, The Lady with Balls, a title given to her by the Italian garbage men who used to run San Francisco Bay Area garbage collection and recycling. It’s a delightful story I can’t do justice to in this letter (unless I make this a Christmas book), but we’ll let you know when it’s published. I’m researching and writing about how global warming is natural, not human caused, but Alice’s book is a lot closer to publication than mine. While Alice attended classes, I visited the animal shelter and found Radar, reputed to be a McNab, a Border Collie mix developed just south of Ukiah in the late 1800’s. Radar will be two on February 22, and loves to catch tennis balls every day on Cook’s Beach. Sometimes he even brings them back.

     The business Alice nearly founded forty years ago, Vulcan Incorporated, continues operating very successfully; Vulcan just purchased another building for office activities and new products development, and expanded their larger building purchased several years ago for manufacturing and warehousing only.

     In February and March we’ll be in Argentina, Antarctica, South Georgia Island, and the Falklands. We start with a week in Buenos Aires, followed by a 21-day cruise on the 148-guest National Geographic Explorer. This will be another “trip of a lifetime,” but totally different than our first trip of a lifetime, the four months we biked in Germany, England, Ireland, Isle of Man, and Wales in 1998. After all of our travels, we still have most of the World left to see. 

     Next August we will celebrate our 25^thAnniversary with a romantic one-week stay in San Francisco, but after Antarctica and before then, we hope to have visits with friends and family. 

Alice, Michael, and Radar

AP Report Destroys Rapid Sea Level Rise Panic

An Associated Press article about Typhoon Haiyan (Man, nature share typhoon tragedy blame  – Death toll much higher because of flimsy building, growth in vulnerable areas, by Seth Borenstein),  inadvertently let the biggest cat out of the alarmist bag concerning our California coast. “(T)he Philippines has seen its sea rise nearly half an inch in the past 20 years, about triple the global increase.” This is an increase of only 2.5 inches per century for the Philippines, and less than an inch per century globally.

These numbers are in marked contrast to the projections of 18 to 66 inches of sea level rise by 2100 made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Even the UN’s lowest estimate hasn’t been seen since shortly after the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, when sea level was over 400 feet lower and huge ice caps were melting rapidly because average global temperature was up to five degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now.

Average sea level rise for the past 120 centuries since the end of the Ice Age has been over three feet per century, but has averaged around zero per century the past 10,000 years. In the face of facts that sea level rise does not appear to be significant at the moment, and with nothing that suggests a rapid acceleration this century, San Francisco Bay Area planners are still developing plans to cope with a five-foot increase by 2100. Neither climate change history, physics, or current meteorology supports such a need. All that is fueling their actions is unwarranted alarmism.

Natural Climate Change Deniers "Hoist on Own Petard"

The following is my weekly letter to our local weekly newspaper, the Independent Coastal Observer (ICO):

A local natural climate change denier (NCCD) assured ICO readers that she knew what I would write before I wrote it, just as I knew that natural climate change deniers would attack people or organizations, but not use science. Another (NCCD) erroneously wrote that I get my facts from the Heartland Institute, but he is “hoist on his own petard.” Had he actually followed the “tinyurl” links I provide in my letters, he would find them linked to peer-reviewed studies. In fact, in my last letter I linked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Chapter12, Table 12.4 of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report), in which the IPCC admit their climate alarmism is very unlikely.

About their report I wrote: “Alarmists also ignore the IPCC’s own low-probability estimates for climate change catastrophes. The IPCC now believes that in the 21st Century, Atlantic Ocean circulation collapse is ‘very unlikely,’ ice sheet collapse is ‘exceptionally unlikely,’ and catastrophic release of methane hydrates from melting permafrost is ‘very unlikely.’”

Of all the scientific studies I reference I put the least confidence in the IPCC’s. Although the chairman of the IPCC has stated repeatedly that its report is based solely on peer-reviewed literature, a check of all 18,531 references in the 2007 report found that 5,587 (30%) were not peer-reviewed. The most egregious of the 2007 report’s “grey literature” (non-peer-reviewed studies) was the thoroughly debunked prediction that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, based on an interview published in 2000 in New Scientist (Christian Science Monitor).

The NCCD concluded his letter by requesting I “use and cite only non-biased sources.” Sorry, Mr. NCCD, I‘ll continue to use IPCC and governmental records (less hurricanes, tornados, and droughts; flat global temperature; slower sea-level rise and glacier retreat), even though they are biased, whenever they contradict alarmism.

Wouldn’t you?