Monday, December 26, 2011

Income Inequality is Caused by the 99%



It is an inconvenient truth that income inequality is not caused by the 1%, but by the growing segment of society which lacks marketable skills and education. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 40% of babies are born to single moms and each year half a million teens have children. Are Republicans the only ones who think this is a problem?

A study in Sweden found that single-parent children were twice as likely to have serious health problems, addictions, mental illnesses, and to commit suicide. This was not a right-wing hate study. Of course, other studies have found the same problems here which are contributing to a rapidly growing underclass that requires ever-increasing support services such as day care, Medicaid, housing assistance, and remedial education, to name just a few chronic and increasing problem areas. Will these problems go away if we avoid looking at a primary root cause? That’s what we’ve been doing, and it’s only getting worse.

Unemployment is bad at 8.6% (12% in California), and only looks like it is getting better because of seasonal hiring. However, good jobs go unfilled because Americans don’t have the education, skills, or required willingness to work. Many high-tech, high-paying jobs go begging unless businesses can hire foreign workers. In Wyoming (3.5% unemployment) over 16,000 high-paying energy jobs go unfilled because Americans are unwilling to relocate and work hard. Fifty years ago in Point Arena many of us worked at jobs that only illegal immigrants will take now, which depresses wages for unskilled and undereducated Americans, including college graduates.

The cartoon “Zits” summed it up nicely: Jeremy wants to major in music theory to “totally justify playing in a band while racking up $100,000 in student loans and graduating with minimal marketable skills.” Unfortunately, he’s not alone.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Our 2011 Christmas Letter


Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah

Writing our annual Christmas letter is a challenge, but physically getting them all folded, stuffed, addressed, and stamped should be an Olympic event. I just mailed out the last of 360 cards. The easy part is recording our travels, which were compressed into the last half of the year so we could fulfill our “presidential” obligations in the first half – Alice in her Book Club, and me in Lions. We finished our terms, then headed to the East Coast in late June for almost a month. We saw three Broadway plays: War Horse (a moving World War I drama with life-size and lifelike horse puppets, now a movie), Priscilla Queen of the Desert (funny and entertaining gay musical), and Book of Mormon. Great reviews, lousy musical – Alice says she liked it, which I guess shows you don’t need memorable songs and dances anymore to have a hit on Broadway if you do it in the infantile, raunchy South Park style. There is nothing brave or daring about ridiculing a small, peaceful religion like the Mormons. I would have been impressed if South Park did The Book of Islam, and showed Mohammad at his mythologically inspired best. 

We did the Fourth of July in Bristol, Rhode Island, and toured Connecticut, and especially enjoyed the Mark Twain Museum. Hartford was a revelation; I never knew how Hartford had been such an important city in the Industrial Revolution in America.

Next we went to exotic Bakersfield for a Combs Cousins Reunion. I only know a few of my almost fifty first cousins – and innumerable second cousins – but it brought back memories of how Pop used to keep in touch with everyone.

We spent all of October in southeast Asia – The Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Although we were there during the big floods, we had a great trip. In retrospect we would liked to have spent more time sightseeing in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are amazingly energetic and capitalistic – our kind of people.
Laos
In 2013 we’ll be going to Panama and Costa Rica for certain, and hopefully to Colorado for Alice’s aunt’s 100th birthday celebration.

While we’re home here on the Pacific coast among the redwoods, our typical day begins leisurely – no alarm clock. I feed Buddy and brush his teeth, then run a few miles. Alice has breakfast, listens to talkradio or recorded Great Courses lectures, reads the newspapers, then hopes  for time to read books and to write her own. Lately she’s had to put in quite a bit of time on her business, Vulcan Incorporated (manufacturing and distributing industrial baling wire), but still makes sure to swim in her pool, or bicycle in the hills and down to the cliff above the ocean. Then we share a two-mile walk to the beach with Buddy, and just before going to bed we all take another mile walk so Buddy can do his nighttime piddles and poo. Buddy is 14 1/2 now, and all this exercise is probably what keeps him going.


Alice and Buddy on Cook's Beach

In between exercise periods, we do our club activities, work at the computers – Alice on spreadsheets for Vulcan, planning our trips, emailing friends and family, writing her autobiography – when Alice read a bit to her eldest daughter and three of her grandchildren, they wouldn’t let her stop - and me researching natural climate change for my anti-Al Gore book – we keep very busy for retirees.

We wish you a safe, sane, happy, and prosperous New Year!

Alice, Michael and Buddy

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Mainstream Media is Hateful to Occupy



Criticizing Occupy activists is considered hateful, judging from responses to recent criticisms of Occupy in our local weekly newspaper, The Independent Coast Observer. Now it looks like the left-leaning Press Democrat should also be tagged “hateful” because of their November 28 editorial, “More muddled messages from Occupy folks”, which noted that the attempt to disrupt “Black Friday” shopping damaged Santa Rosa Occupy’s credibility and focus.

Occupy Wall Street’s national shopping boycott failed spectacularly, as Black Friday sales were up a record 7%, showing OWS has no clout as a national movement.

The ultra-left San Francisco Chronicle was “hateful” two weeks ago when in an editorial “Oakland says ‘enough’”, the Chronicle opined: “Oakland leaders finally acted decisively to remove a sprawling and unruly camp from the city's central downtown plaza. It was the right move, one that San Francisco should consider in responding to a similar tent city that's taken over an Embarcadero park.”

In another “hateful” editorial, the Chronicle concluded: “The Occupy movement is no longer  associated with protests over income inequality or Wall Street misconduct. Now it's about squalor and public safety, thanks largely to its nonexistent leadership and disorganization.”

What does OWS want? Income redistribution no doubt; having government take the rightful property of one group and give it to another, also known as theft. “When you take from Peter and give to Paul, you can count on Paul’s support.”

The rest of the OWS message is the usual Liberal hodgepodge of special interest issues, made particularly incoherent by its lack of leadership and direction. As OWS camps become full-time homeless camps and OWS activists flee their squalor – and Winter rain and freezing – the backlash by the media, municipalities, and weary voters will cause the Left to wish Occupy Wall Street never happened.

And as a coherent movement, it hasn’t.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Main Stream Media "Hateful" to Occupy


Criticizing Occupy activists is considered hateful, judging from responses to criticisms we local conservatives make in our local weekly newspaper, the Independent Coast Observer. Now it looks like the left-leaning Press Democrat should also be tagged “hateful” because of their November 28 editorial, “More muddled messages from Occupy folks”, which noted that the attempt to disrupt “Black Friday” shopping damaged Santa Rosa Occupy’s credibility and focus.

Occupy Wall Street’s national shopping boycott failed spectacularly, as Black Friday sales were up a record 7%, showing OWS has no clout as a national movement.

The ultra-left San Francisco Chronicle was “hateful” two weeks ago when in an editorial “Oakland says ‘enough’”, the Chronicle opined: “Oakland leaders finally acted decisively to remove a sprawling and unruly camp from the city's central downtown plaza. It was the right move, one that San Francisco should consider in responding to a similar tent city that's taken over an Embarcadero park.”

In another “hateful” editorial, the Chronicle concluded: “The Occupy movement is no longer associated with protests over income inequality or Wall Street misconduct. Now it's about squalor and public safety, thanks largely to its nonexistent leadership and disorganization.”

What does OWS want? Income redistribution no doubt; having government take the rightful property of one group and give it to another, also known as theft. “When you take from Peter and give to Paul, you can count on Paul’s support.”

The rest of the OWS message is the usual Liberal hodgepodge of special interest issues, made particularly incoherent by its lack of leadership and direction. As OWS camps become full-time homeless camps and OWS activists flee their squalor – and Winter rain and freezing – the backlash by the media, municipalities, and weary voters will cause the Left to wish Occupy Wall Street never happened.

And as a coherent movement, it hasn’t.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Democrats' "Science" Of Belief

An Independent Coast Observer (our local weekly newspaper, Gualala, California) reader says not believing in evolution is not believing in science, and that this should be a litmus test for voters. Interestingly, since studies show a higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans doubt evolution, I support them not voting for a candidate who believes in evolution.

Here in Northern California, not believing in science defines Democrat. Among many local unscientific belief systems are opposition to genetically modified foods and irradiation of food (and Smart meters), belief that organic foods are better, and of course, belief in catastrophic man-caused global warming.

Voluminous and rigorous scientific studies confirm that genetically modified foods (GMO) taste better, last longer, produce more using less fertilizer, pesticide, and water, and provide more healthful nutrition. A study concluded that opposing attitudes towards GMO, rather than science, were the determinant factors. Similar studies have shown that irradiated foods are better and safer, but again attitudes trump science.

Two years ago, the British Nutrition Foundation said exhaustive research by the Food Standards Agency confirms its advice that 'organic food offers no benefits over conventionally produced food in terms of nutrition'. Aside from psychic reward, the significant additional cost of organic food wastes resources. Organics also pose health threats; for example, an E. coli outbreak in Germany this year resulted in 3,900 cases including 908 instances of severe kidney failure and 52 deaths.

This week Al Gore underlined the desperation of Warmistas by presenting a 24-hour “Gore-bore-athon”. Given that global temperature have been flat for fifteen years, sea level increase became decrease, and accumulated tropical cyclone energy has fallen to its lowest level in thirty years, Al abandoned global warming and grasped “climate wierding” (all severe weather events are caused by man).

Dr. Tim Ball, Climatologist, noted: “Gore is taking normal events and claiming they are abnormal.”

And that’s unscientific.

Where Has All The Greenland Ice Gone? London Times Atlas Clueless

The London Times Atlas recently created an incredible error, one that is hard to explain by rational analysis. According to its publisher, HarperCollins, the atlas is "turning Greenland 'green' because the new edition has had to erase 15% of Greenland's once permanent ice cover". Scientists immediately jumped all over this. Were it true, sea levels would have risen a bit more than three feet in twelve years, instead of less than the half-inch observed. This Guardian article Times Atlas ice error attempts to make lemonade from this lemon, but ends leaving the sour taste of advocacy science.

This is the comment I posted to the Guardian:
As Greenland ice supposedly shrank during the past 15 years, the obvious question is where did the water go after the ice melted? To answer "the sea" may seem as obvious as the question, but wait! Slow sea level increase has recently become sea level decrease, and the missing water must be somewhere. It's not in the oceans.


Quietly, without blaring headlines, in many inconvenient areas of the Earth, ice caps and glaciers are growing. Indeed, simply Googling "Greenland ice growing" produces links to many recent studies of ice cap and glacier growth worldwide. Antarctica as a whole is gaining ice. Ditto Greenland. And glaciers in Asia and North America too.

Of course, nothing is as simple as Al Gore and the Warmistas tell us. Historically, tepid water intrusion from the Atlantic into the Arctic caused a huge reduction of sea ice. This then became the source of the water vapor which was carried over the Hudson Bay area and produced incredible snow fall, feeding the ice cap that eventually extended over Canada and the northern United States. In the process, sea levels fell over 400 feet, eventually cutting off the Atlantic flow into the Arctic (the shallowest ocean) and ending the Ice Age just 12,000 years ago. Sea levels have risen an average of over 3 feet per century since, much greater at first, slowing to about 6 inches per century the past 1,000 years.

Recent sea level rise has mostly been caused by man, but not by warming. Enormous pumping of ground water and draining of lakes for agricultural needs has resulted in "de-watering," the taking of water from the land and depositing it in the seas. At the same time, de-watering causes land subsidence, leading to the appearance of sea levels rising as lands sink.

Recent ocean cooling, giving the lie to significant warming, can also play a part since colder water is denser and has reduced volume. Oddly, a recent study attempts to explain that the lack of warming the past 15 years is a result of heat being sequestered in the depths of the oceans. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the world wide ocean temperature monitoring system (ARGOS) has not shown this heat being sequestered.

So far observational science refutes computer climate modeling. When this happens, the models must be changed or discarded, but Al Gore and his Acolytes cry, "Throw out the observations."

Thursday, September 15, 2011

The "Tinkerbell" Effect

By noting that the Arctic ice cap has shrunk 22 percent since 1979, Mr. Jacobs exemplifies the “Tinkerbell” effect and “young earth” philosophy, since regular satellite imaging of the polar cap only began in 1979, and Arctic ice was near a maximum then (remember the “global cooling” hysteria of the 1970’s?). 1960-70’s cooling followed an earlier warming period reported in The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington, March 29, 1958:


“... (everybody knows) existing glaciers — like those in the Swiss passes and Alaska — are melting. How could new ice hulks creep in upon us while weather experts are announcing that even the North Polar ice caps are thinning? And … weather records show the weather has been growing warmer over the years - so warm in fact that certain glaciers are melting fast enough to raise the level of the world’s oceans. Can such signs really foreshadow the coming of a new Ice Age?”

Dr. Maurice Ewing, in 1958 one of America’s leading oceanographers and geophysicists, produced this study. Read the complete, fascinating report on one of my blog posts.

Very recently, scientifically speaking: “Multiple proxy records and climate models indicate that early Holocene temperatures (about 8,000 years ago) were higher than today and that the Arctic contained less ice…”

Even Warmista scientists admit that doubling atmospheric CO2 could only raise global temperature one degree Celsius, but that additional warming will come from “positive” feedbacks (which climate science proves never existed because positive feedbacks would have caused unstoppable run-away warming).

Warmistas, who think Al Gore invented climate science, are in denial about its basics: it’s always changing, change is natural, and all this was happening before 1979. Mankind contributes only 3% of CO2 emissions, and it’s foolishly ignorant and arrogant to think that minuscule changes in a trace gas drive climate change. It never has.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

"Don't Miss" TV - Al Gore's 24 Hours of Reality

“Don’t miss” TV! Al Gore’s "24 hours of Reality" scheduled for September 14 and 15. Al says his Climate Reality Project “will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events and manmade pollution.” Alice and I just left the East Coast days before it was hit by a heat wave (relax, Al, 39 states’ heat records were set over 50 years ago) and I can see why, since the entire case of manmade global warming has collapsed around him, that he would take his movement into extreme weather because this is a much easier emotional case for him to make.


Al, everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.

They can’t - climate change is natural.

At any rate, global climate has slightly cooled for the past 15 years. A recent study says that this is because China has increased aerosols that block sunlight by burning huge quantities of coal (the very thing that increases atmospheric CO2 and supposedly global warming). However, since these aerosols were released in the Northern Hemisphere and there is little atmospheric mixing between hemispheres, it’s strange that there is slight warming in the Northern Hemisphere where the aerosols supposedly cause cooling, and cooling in the Southern Hemisphere without benefit of aerosols. Of course, other studies indicate overall aerosol levels haven’t increased for several decades, so the whole thing becomes warmist alarmists taking a fishing trip to a wading pool desperate to catch something to correlate to the lack of warming.

Still, even without warming, Al Gore and His Acolytes continue to point to every flood, drought, heat wave, snow storm, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, &etc. as proof of the evils of warming, even as they explain why there is no warming.

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Be Really Bold, Obama

President Obama challenged Republicans to extend payroll tax cuts and increase infrastructure spending. “(Republicans say they) are the party of tax cuts,” he said.... Show us what you got.”


To start, Republicans won’t cut taxes on Social Security when it is already in deficit spending, and do another stimulus plan when the last abjectly failed.

To really accomplish something, Obama should propose ending the mortgage interest deduction. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “just three (heavily Democrat) metro areas - greater New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - receive more than 75 percent of the subsidy…The bigger the mortgage and the higher one's income, the bigger the deduction. A person in the top tax bracket of 35 percent who borrows $1 million can get a tax break of $17,500… households earning less than $75,000 get less than $200… More than three-fourths of taxpayers do not itemize, and so don't claim the deduction at all. Those who rent or have paid off their mortgages, most of them seniors, get no benefit.”

While Obama is being bold, he should also propose stopping the exclusion of employer-paid health insurance from taxes, which is the biggest federal tax subsidy.

And to be really bold, he should propose replacing the IRS with a national 15% sales tax. Much higher economic growth would result from eliminating the tax bias against work, savings, and investment. That one act would eliminate every unfair tax subsidy, be they for the wealthy or corporations, plus it would eliminate the unproductive economic drain of tax accounting and reporting.

Since I’m a CPA, real estate agent, and anti-tax hawk, my positions on these issues put the good of our country above my personal welfare. I’m one of Biden’s “barbarians”, one of the “sons of bitches” Hoffa wants taken out.

Thursday, September 01, 2011

Blowin' in the Wind - Tropical Storm Irene

Hurricane Irene was not nearly as windy as the politicians and warmists proclaiming it a harbinger of our climate future. As always, such talk inspired me to seek truth in science studies and climate histories. A 2011 study of 2,200 years of North Carolina’s Barrier Island storm history (the area most affected by Irene) concluded that climatic conditions of both the Medieval Warm Period (850 to 1350AD) and Little Ice Age (1350 to 1850AD) compared to the present show "a general decrease in storminess" reflecting "more stable climate conditions (and) fewer storm impacts, and a decrease in the average wind intensity and wave energy," which suggests that the mean temperature of the past century has been neither as cold nor as warm as it was during the LIA and MWP, respectively.


In 1938 a Category 3 hurricane struck Long Island, killing between 682 and 800 people, damaging or destroying over 57,000 homes, and causing property losses estimated at $4.77 billion (2011 dollars). It’s still the most powerful, costliest, and deadliest hurricane in New England history.

Earlier, in 1815 a Category 3 hurricane hit New York City directly, causing extensive damage and creating an inlet that separated two Long Island resort towns into two separate barrier islands

In 1821 a Category 4 storm created the highest recorded storm surge in Manhattan of nearly 13 feet.

The 1869 Saxby Gale decimated the Maine coastline and the Canadian Outer Banks

In 1893 a Category 2 hurricane directly hit New York City, causing a great storm surge that pummeled the coastline, completely removing Long Island’s Hog Island resort.

Irene, a tropical storm when it reached New York which never made landfall as a hurricane, is much ado about nothing; panicked politicians and whacky warmists – excuse redundancies – foolishly hitched onto this global warming bandwagon.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Democrats "Played Chicken" with Debt Ceiling Many Times

At least four times during George W. Bush’s presidency the Democrats “(played) chicken with the full faith and credit of the United States of America.” In May 2002, debt was within $15 million of the statutory limit. Raising the limit passed by one vote in the House (of 209 Democrats, 206 voted against).


In May 2003 debt limit legislation passed the Senate 53 to 44, with only one of 45 Democrats voting for it. The day it passed, debt was $25 million (or 0.0004%) below the limit.

On October 14, 2004, debt was again $25 million below the limit. The Treasury employed accounting tricks used in the previous two years to keep under the limit. Treasury Secretary John Snow informed Congress, just before the election recess, that available measures to avoid breaching the debt limit would be exhausted by mid-November, and the government would default.

Again, it barely passed. Senate Democrats voted 42 of 44 against, and 193 of 195 House Democrats voted against (it passed by 4 votes).

In 2006, Secretary Snow continued using tricks to avoid default. A debt limit increase was narrowly passed, with all 48 Senate Democrats (including Obama) opposed.

On the matter of the “essential” rural airports, all thirteen are served by better highways than Highway 1, and most are about half as far from a major airport as Gualala. Democrat Majority Leader Senator Reid’s airport at Ely, Nevada, population 4,255, served 227 passengers in 2010 (federal subsidy $1.8 million) at $4,107 per ticket.

Alamogordo, New Mexico, with Democrat Senators Bingaman and Udall, is subsidized at $3,127 per ticket for 376 passengers in 2010, and is the same driving time to Albuquerque as we are to San Francisco International.

By funding these “essential” airports, Democrats buy reelection with our money.

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Democrats Throw Our Money "Up in the Air"

The ICO editorial “Up in the air” (August 5, 2011) seemed familiar. I found “playing chicken with the full faith and credit of the United States of American” or variations used by White House press secretary Jay Carney at least six times. The next Democrat talking point in the editorial was that “Congress bailed out of Washington for vacation, leaving the Federal Aviation bill sitting in the ‘to do’ pile.”


Actually, the Republican House passed an FAA funding bill two weeks before their “vacation,” and inaction on passing it was due to the Democrat-controlled Senate. Normally the Senate would pass their FAA bill, and the differences between the House and Senate bills would be reconciled. But Dem. Senator Jay Rockefeller blocked it at a cost of $300 million in lost taxes to save little-used Morgantown airport (75 miles from Pittsburgh, PA).

More Democrat talking points were in a Huffpost article and appeared summarized in the ICO editorial, which referred to Republicans not funding “Essential Air Service that keeps vital rural airports open.” Since the US has 14,695 airports (133 more than the total of the next nine countries), what makes these essential?

The thirteen “essential” airports are in “strategic” Democrats’ districts, courtesy of unabashed pork-barrel spending. For example, John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pennsylvania (67 miles from Pittsburgh), cost $200 million to build and serves less than 30 passengers per day, each subsidized $147. Its $8.5 million radar has never been used. A military unit that was stationed on it to make it more “essential” only flies helicopters. The alternate runway was just repaved with $800,000 in stimulus funds, although the primary runway is hardly used.

One airport in Senator Reid’s Nevada receives EAS subsidies of $3,720 per passenger. That’s way “up in the air!”

Monday, August 01, 2011

Obama Wins Big!

Obama declares victory! House Democrats voted 95 for and 95 against, and Republicans voted 174 for and 66 against, so the debt ceiling will be increased $2.1 trillion. California Democrats voted 14 for and 20 against; California Republicans were 16 for, 3 against. It’s not only a great day for Obama, it’s a great day for California Democrats.


Obama and Democrats have already identified that the Tea Party are the big losers: they only got $2.4 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, when they wanted $4 trillion. What utter failures!

Obama knows that with a few more victories like this, the outcome of the 2012 election is assured.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Wind Farm Slaughter

For nine years, 1989 to 1998, I lived in sight of the Altamont Pass wind farms in California near Livermore. Often none of the turbines were turning, but when they did, they killed about 5,000 large predator birds per year, and large but not counted numbers of bats. This slaughter appeared to be done with impunity, and for what seemed to be little benefit in terms of power generated. I saw some information that the wind farm generated at less than 30% of its rated capacity, and that the power it produced fluctuated constantly, requiring back-up supplement by natural gas and hydroelectric power generation.


In contrast to the lax regulation of bird and bat kill, I recently read about very high fines assessed against Texas oil companies for the deaths of a few common water birds in storage tanks.

Why the one would be treated harshly, and the other leniently, makes no sense. The wind farms are causing horrendous environmental damage for no value – in fact they are an expensive waste of taxpayer and ratepayer money.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Scientists Predict: Another Ice Age Is On The Way - in 1958!

The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington, March 29, 1958

Scientists Predict: Another Ice Age is on the way (Article by Leslie Lieber)

(Those who were hardest hit by last month’s snowstorms may think the next ice-age is already upon us. Others may think it will never come. Whatever you think, it would be comforting to pay no attention to the weather forecast presented on these pages.


Unfortunately Maurice Ewing and William L. Donn are not men to be taken lightly. Dr. Ewing ranks as one of America’s leading oceanographers and geophysicists, its top authority on the world beneath the sea. President of the American Geophysical Union and director of Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory, he has personally designed much of the equipment now used in underseas exploration.


His colleague, Dr. Donn, is Associate Professor of Geology, Brooklyn College, and Chief Scientist, U.S. Atlantic Island Observatories Program for the Inter- national Geophysical Year.

The two scientists point out that the full scientific presentation of their new theory, with graphs and weather charts, has already been made in scientific journals, but say “we have been pleased to co-operate with Mr. Lieber in presenting to the general public some of the highlights of our ideas.”)



Two leaders in their field say the enormous glacier that buried half the world 11,000 years ago is due back and present a startling theory to prove it.

Eleven thousand years ago — give or take a thousand years — the last of the great ice-age glaciers which blanketed the American continent from Northern Canada to the banks of the Missouri River began its retreat from the face of the earth. Known as the Wisconsin stage, it rang down the curtain on four separate Ice Ages which had come and gone during the preceding million years.



Since that time, mankind has been too busy with the problems of everyday living to worry about the staggering possibility that another continental glacier might be in the making. Undoubtedly our Neanderthal ancestors lived in the same ignorant bliss during the warm interludes between Ice Ages. The last thing they suspected was that their temperate weather would ever end. It did, though — in glacial onslaughts which drove them either into local caves or on long treks southward.

Modern man’s hunch that the Ice Age has gone for good is based on what he firmly believes to be common sense. How, we ask, can a new Ice Age possibly be shaping up when everybody knows that existing glaciers — like those in the Swiss passes and Alaska — are melting? How could new ice hulks creep in upon us while weather experts are announcing that even the North Polar ice caps are thinning? And what about the fact that weather records show the weather has been growing warmer over the years - so warm in fact that certain glaciers are melting fast enough to raise the level of the world’s oceans? Can such signs really foreshadow the coming of a new Ice Age?

The answer is very definitely yes — if you listen to two leading oceanographers, Drs. Maurice Ewing and William L. Donn. As a result of extensive research, these eminent scientists believe, in short, that the earth is passing through an interglacial period and that the cyclic phenomena which produced continental glaciers in ages past are at work producing another Ice Age. Its advent may be a matter of thousands of years. It could also conceivably be upon us in a few centuries.

Now how can slightly warmer climate and rising sea levels foster a cataclysm as drastic as another Ice Age? First you must understand just how a glacier is formed.

The glaciers that once blanketed a great part of the earth did not, as is popularly believed, gradually spread out from the poles, nor were they caused by a sudden plunge in the earth’s temperature during the Pleistocene Age.

Continuous Snowfall

Glaciers, Dr. Ewing explains, are created purely and simply when more snow falls than melts. Sub-zero temperatures are only one factor. Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Islands, for instance, share the same frigid latitude. But snow-covered Greenland lies under a perpetual blanket of ice whereas the Arctic Islands, with only light snow precipitation, are not glaciated.

Drs. Ewing and Donn reason that the great Ice Ages were produced by practically continuous snowfall coming from some rich source of moisture which has now been shut off.

It is becoming known that the thickest ice concentration during the glacial periods was in the Hudson Bay region. The Ewing-Donn conclusion is that the snow clouds must have gathered their moisture from the Arctic Ocean.

In other words, the Arctic Ocean in the Ice Age was itself free of ice, and offered thousands and thousands of square miles of water surface to winds blowing towards Northern Canada, Europe and Siberia.

The Ewing-Donn theory holds that the barrier standing between us and another Ice Age is a steadily thinning layer of about six feet of ice covering the Arctic Ocean, Should it melt completely, the birthplace of glaciers would be reopened. The weight of evidence from both American and Russian scientists is that the Arctic is warming appreciably. This could mean that all the conditions which led to the four ice-cycles of the last million years are still in operation.



There is an agent which, during past epochs, has repeatedly been able to melt the ice floes of the Arctic. According to Ewing and Donn, that great defroster is not the sun, but the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Whenever the tepid Atlantic has found a passageway into the Arctic, it has melted ice faster than the frigid air could form it.

As of this moment Ewing and Donn feel that this ‘hot-water faucet” has been turned on.

Why is it that the warm waters of the Atlantic can reach the Arctic Ocean now — for the first time since before the last glacial stage? It is possible because of the considerable rise in sea-level during the past few thousand years. Normally the Atlantic can’t flow freely into the Arctic because it must pass through several narrow bottlenecks between Greenland and Norway. (Denmark Strait and Faeroe Channel) So shallow is the ocean floor between the Arctic and Atlantic — much of it less than 50 fathoms - that little interchange occurs. But with a rise in sea-level the influx of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic increases many fold.

This traffic is not just one-way. There is a mutual interaction between the two bodies of water: the Arctic seas, swollen by their own melting ice, flow southward into the Atlantic, cooling it.

Some years ago Professor Harold Urey of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography discovered a revolutionary method of determining the temperature at which deep-sea shells were formed. Scientists now know, for instance, that a temperature decline in the surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean, due to the influx of cold Arctic water, was a prologue to the last Ice Age. From 90,000 B.C down to 11,000 years ago it plunged eight degrees Centigrade, a very significant decrease.

Dramatic Discovery

The fact that the temperature of the ocean is definitely tied up with ice ages came to light when sediments were cored out during various oceanographic cruises on the Lamont Observatory s research vessel Vema, In ancient ooze Ewing and Donn found marine evidence that an abrupt change in marine life took place in Atlantic and Caribbean waters approximately 11,000 years ago, at the precise time the Wisconsin ice stage was ending. What was this new development? The organisms dramatically changed from cold-water types to warm-water types.

In other words, something had happened (simultaneously with the disappearance of glaciers) to warm up the Atlantic Ocean. The only explanation is that its supply of “icewater” was blocked. What had happened? The Arctic Ocean had once again become covered by ice. The Canada-bound winds no longer found moisture there to stock up on.

And on the American continent, the snow-starved ice sheets gradually wasted away.

Examination of sediment from 11,000 years ago in the Arctic Ocean seems to show the reverse side of the corn. With the Atlantic no longer able to penetrate, the marine fauna switched from warm back to cold-water types. In other words, the pendulum had finally swung the other way, ending an ice cycle.

Just as high sea levels cause glacial periods, so do low sea levels result in a return to the kind of bottleneck that shuts the Arctic off from its warm-water source and ends the glacial period. Lower sea levels are caused when amounts of ocean water become locked in glacial ice.

How The Glaciers Started

Thus sea level has controlled the glacial- interglacial cycles of the past million years, and in turn, the glacial conditions have controlled sea level.

But, how did it all begin? What started these cycles? Much scientific evidence now exists for the startling theory that the crust of the earth can slip, and change its position relative to the interior. Such slipping would cause different places on the surface to be at the poles in different geological periods. There is also evidence to suggest that before the glacial period of the Pleistocene Era the mid-Pacific Ocean was at the North Pole and the South Atlantic was over the South Pole. To have the poles thus situated in open sea would prevent the formation of polar ice caps, since free interchange with warmer equatorial waters would keep them relatively warm.

The North Pole is now situated over the isolated Arctic Ocean, the South Pole over the Antarctic continent. With the poles no longer in freely circulating water and the cooler temperature of the higher latitudes isolated and concentrated, they became sources of cold polar air. Ewing’s and Donn’s startling theory is that this is what started the glacial period, and that as long as the poles remain thus isolated, glacial periods will wax and wane as the sea level rises and falls.

In case of another Ice Age, millions of those living in the most urbanized areas of Europe and the United States would have to flee southward.

But as bad as things would be, another Ice Age would offer tremendous compensations: the major desert areas .of the earth — 12,000,000 square miles —would again become arable, fertile, well-watered lands.

Should another Ice Age strike, the man who controls the Sahara could rule the earth! — The End