Worries Come True

Be ware of rant - sorry.

In an earlier post this last winter, I complained about the lack of snow. I mean, this is Alaska. We're SUPPOSED to have tons and tons of snow every winter. When we first moved out here, it was common to truly avoid stepping off the packed trail unless you had snowshoes. If you stepped off the trail and went in only to waist deep or so, it was considered a low snow year, but still no great cause for worry.

Then Vice President Al Gore, apparently a fierce environmentalist, came to power in 1993, and it suddenly became all the rage to clean up the world. I followed this - kinda - there was really no avoiding it, and to a certain degree, I agreed with the concept. It's only right to take care of our world; it's the only one we have. I do my very best to make sure my little piece of it does not collect so much as cigarette butts.

But then clean-up evolved from global cooling in the 70s to global warming scare it is today. But since I see no sign of coastal cities preparing for those drowning years, I have always had my doubts. And since my life is so weather-dependent, I do try to keep up as much as possible.

The trend I've seen here is that the winters seem to be warmer than what they were say 30 or 40 years ago, but for the most part the temperatures seem to follow a normal path through the winter. Maybe some winters are slightly warmer than others, but then some winters were also slightly colder than others too - over all, there was no change that I could see.

Then Obama came to visit our state back in August of '15. Of course it was all over the news, and in reality I was really ashamed of our president. To be seen standing with two girls, he and both girls holding up fish, but he using thick rubber gloves? That is not a picture to make me proud. The man is a wimp. I don't have much respect for him, but that's not the issue of this post. Then in September of that year, he was on the Bear Grylls survival show where his greatest risk was to drink a little glacier water. I mean, it was almost an insult to the show. The point of the show was to discuss how badly the glaciers were receding. That show, and every other documentary I have ever watched to date involving either the glaciers receding or the polar icecap breaking up, failed miserably to convince me that there was an issue.

To me, the issue with the ice cap can be directly blamed on the fleet of ice breakers they use to keep the shipping lanes open. And glaciers - well, they come and go with the season just like they are supposed to do. Now, don't get me wrong, some glaciers aren't doing so well, but all things change. No. The trouble with the glaciers, and by weather-related connection, the ice cap, is directly related to precipitation coming down as snow. As long as there was enough snow, the glaciers would do just fine.

But those seeking to further the global warming/global change issues can't have status quo when it comes to snowfall in Alaska. That would not further their drowning of coastal cities agenda. I believe Obama managed to accomplish two things during his visit. One was to somehow force Alaska to sign up for his health care farce - we had been holding out until his visit. Another was to look into the glacier issue.

He was not gone from this state for even a week when jets started flying over in force, and they were flying over in a grid - a very obvious square criss-cross pattern. I drive to work in a boat. the sky is wide open to me. I saw this with my very own eyes. The next day or two, and more or less from then on, the air stank.

Now cloud seeding has been around for years. They started trying to modify the weather down in the mid-west way back in the 60s, and they wanted to enhance snowfall in the Rockies too, all in an attempt to replenish the reservoir under the whole nation. Rivers were drying up, and nearly all the farms now used sprinklers to water their crops. The whole country was drying up. Was it working? I don't think so, but what do I know.

What they did up here - with such stinking concentration seemed to do one thing. We had a nasty flood that fall - the worst I've seen for over twenty years. The damage to the area was extensive, but we recovered. We washed the river mud out of our building and we repaired the damage, and we carried on. That winter we still had about 2 or 3 feet of snow here, but other damage had been done too. For the first time in a while, the Iditarod Sled Dog Race was forced to start in Fairbanks due to lack of snow. It's happened in the past - no biggie. Life goes on. So what if several businesses, who'd spent thousands of $$$ to get ready for the big race, lost out on all that income. My life is not the only life that revolves around the weather. For that race to start in Fairbanks two years in a row, due to lack of snow, is unprecedented. Those weather-control dudes had to have been having a field day, celebrating with champagne and caviar.

Thanks to stinky air all through the summer last year, we here on the river were blessed with not just one flood, but four. Lodges were forced to ship guests to town and some closed early. At the lodge where I work, my boss remained open, but he was calling guests right and left, telling them of the issue and offering to rebook them for next year - their trip had already been paid for so it was covered. Again, mega loss of business, but the global climate 'change' was paramount. They simply had to starve those glaciers until they went away.

Now, thanks to all their efforts, and more to the point of this post, I should have been able to go to work on the 15th. Take a look at those pictures. See all that sand and where the water is? All that sand should be under water by now, or at least very close to it. Spring melt off almost always causes a near flood to start with - it makes launching the boats easier. This year, even after the ice in the rivers had gone away, there was not enough water to even float a boat, let alone go anywhere, and here it is, very nearly a week later, and I'm waiting for the water to come up. Don't get me wrong, it was coming up a couple inches a day until day before yesterday when it rained. I was lazy that day; I didn't go check the river in the rain. I went yesterday instead. Much to my dismay, the water went down a couple inches. Now, to add to my dismay, last night it frosted. Frost here tells me the mountains are still frozen. At this point that is my only source of river water.

I can see making it rain on dry farmers, but the agenda here is purely political and it makes me want to shoot someone. I am so angry about this, and I feel so impotent.

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Global Warming Hoax

Before you get your hackles all in a burr, no, I haven't read up on all the latest studies. In fact it's been a long time since I looked into the issue at all, shy of watching the occasional TV program on the issue. All I know is what I can see right here at home. Is the world warming up a degree or two a year? I have no idea. It doesn't seem like my winters are getting any shorter or warmer, but what is happening is someone (and I do mean a person or persons) is trying to alter the weather patterns, and for us here in Alaska, it's not a good thing. We aren't a farming state suffering from drought. That's not to say we don't have farms here in Alaska, we do, though I couldn't tell you what is grown.

What's been happening is (or seems to me like) they (the elusive they) are seeding the clouds now two falls in a row (at least), causing it to rain buckets from roughly August through September. Now that is normally our rainy season so no one will take much notice, but lately, I've been worrying that all our precipitation is falling in liquid form and not so much of the snowy variety.

For two to five years in a row it has flooded dangerously here - not at my house; I live up on a high hill - but down on the river damage to the lodges is becoming of great concern. Too high a cost to keep repairs up and businesses will close (and I will be out of work). The last lodge I worked at is losing their front yard by the foot and very soon the river will be running under the lodge itself. Need I speculate for you what will happen to that lodge then? Already some of their buildings are on state land behind them. They just can't move back any more. The lodge where I work now is still recovering from the flood five years ago as they continue to work to replace floors and jack the guest cabins up out of the mud. Admittedly, some of those projects are things that should have been done years back, but that flood did other kinds of damage too. Next summer I'm going to need to take a scrub brush to some lower walls. Wood grain hangs onto silt pretty well.

Back to the farce of global warming

Rain in the fall is a norm, but I will bet that it probably messes up the harvest, especially if it comes down like twice normal. That's not the issue. You see, their whole proof is based on the receding glaciers, and if you think about it, it's snow that created glaciers, and it's snow that maintains them, so if it doesn't snow, the glaciers run out eventually. So it equates that if you can suck all the precipitation out of the air before winter sets in... Well, you see what my logic is. I don't pretend to know anything about weather models, so I have no idea how it all works. I just know what I see, and this is what I think.

For two winters in a row, we've gotten a pitiful amount of snow. This is Alaska. Our whole winter is geared toward winter sports and activities. There's the Iron Dog, and the Iditarod. There's even a winter biking race on the river and a I think there's a hiking thing as well. That's not to mention entire businesses geared to promote and support play. If snow goes away, all that goes away too. Though it might seem kind of funny in a way, I'm sick and tired of hearing how everyone down in the lower 48 is getting the feet of snow we are used to while we eek out an inch or two. It's December. It's after Christmas, and we have less than a foot of snow on the ground. Once was the time when this much snow was already on the ground by the end of October and four to five feet of snow was on the ground by now.

So, next time you hear about receding glaciers, look into how much snow has fallen in the area as opposed to how much rain has fallen earlier in the season.

Oh, and the seeding thing - I know it's seeding and not just random jets flying over because random jets flying of is just that -> random. Seeding - especially like we've been getting lately, is planes flying in a grid. Yes, I really mean a grid - multiple planes flying back and forth in one direction, and other planes flying back and forth in another direction. By the time they're done the sky looks like someone strung a pig wire fence up there that slowly dissipates. Oh yeah, and the worst part about that is when that crap reaches the ground, it stinks.

Once upon a time the air up here was actually sweet smelling. It's been months and months since the air has smelled like that.

Now, the really concentrated seeding - when I finally put all of this together - happened like three days after Obama toured the state last year. I know that this whole global warming thing is a multi-million dollar thing, so they gotta keep it going somehow, but they really need to lay off. Give us back our snow. If the globe is warming up a little each year, it will happen one way or another, but putting an entire state out of business can't be a good thing.

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The Sounds of Silence

The Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools", said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence

You know how sometimes a song just springs up in your brain and sticks there? Well this one did that to me today as I was walking down to the boats to get a can of gas. Though the lyrics don't really fit the circumstances, the title sure does. Silence. The sounds of silence was everywhere. Not a peep. Not a squeak. Not a rustle.

When I go on these walks, I like to stop and just listen and look around from time to time. I do, after all, like my life and my surroundings. Most times there's the chitter of little birds as they fluttered from tree to tree in search of seed pods waiting to drop next summer, or those that didn't drop last summer.

The only sound I heard was the far-away hum of some sort of motor. It might have been a snowmachine, or a generator; it was too far away to tell - almost too far away to hear at all. I might not have noticed at all if it weren't so quiet otherwise.

Though I didn't see or hear anything, I did see a few tracks. A martin came down from the rough vicinity of the guest cabin, ran along the trail for a few yards and then was off further east. Then I saw moose tracks. Sometime yesterday or last night, he came up the trail and then circled around the edge of our yard, eating the small tree branches and whatever brush tips he could find, before wondering on, also in an easterly direction. Who knows how long either of them kept to that direction. Down at the boats, an ermine made lacy loops along the bank in search of a route down onto the river. It looked rather comical; I wish I could have seen him.

I do love my walks and taking in my world, but I do wish it would warm up a little. Or maybe I should say, I wish it would warm up a little more. I woke up to -28F (-34C). It was -11F (-24C) when I went for my walk and that was the heat of the day. For us to get a runway packed, it would be really nice if it would warm up above 0F for a few days. If this is Global Warming, I think someone needs to go back to the drawing board.

Global Warming

Is it about warming, or even about weather change like they claim, I don't know, but things are different lately. Everyone's interested in the polar bears and the glaciers melting. At first, I couldn't see why everyone was so worried, I mean, my winters seem to be colder every year.

For years, 'normal' winter was an average of ten degrees above zero Fahrenheit to ten degrees below zero, with cold spikes in November and February where it might get as cold as -30ish (F), but those spikes lasted only two or three weeks and it was back up, and then it would warm up into the 20s and 30s and snow (sometimes a little - sometimes a lot), and then back down to average. Come the latter part of February, the longer days start having an affect on the heat of the day, and by the end of March things start to melt.

Lately, the November cold spike kinda went away, which put freeze-up off until much closer to Christmas - really kind of a pain for me, but we can't control the weather. And the rest of the winter has been really quite cold, spending most of the time down around -20 if not colder. You know it spends a lot of time down around there when 0 to 10 above feels like a nice day.

Once was the time when a hot summer day was 70 degrees (F), and those days didn't show up until July. Any more, 80 degrees is fairly common and sometimes warmer, and they've been known to show up in May, if only for a few days. I still start melting at 70, and long before it gets to 80 I'm searching for dark corners and shade, and wishing for a root cellar.

Some time ago I friended this guy on Facebook who was all for dams and culverts to divert water to Californian farmers. Not that I have anything against farmers, I like oranges, when I can get them, and I'm all for everyone making a living. But my discussions with him prompted me to think about the cycle of weather.

Water evaporates, becomes clouds, and once enough accumulates up there, it comes down in some sort of precipitation depending on the time of year and the temperature. The more evaporation, the more precipitation, which, in this case, means more snow. It takes snow to make glaciers and the ice caps at the top and bottom of our globe. Not that I know how all this works, but in my thinking, running water and thrashing waves in the ocean are going to evaporate more efficiently and faster. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm not getting the whole picture.

When I brought this concept up to said friend, our conversation stopped. He said he'd look into my theory, but he never got back to me. So, are dams and culverts to blame? Probably not; I'm certain there's far more to it than that, but my train of thought leads me to think that 'global warming' isn't really such a bad thing. Warm air holds more moisture, more moisture in the air means more snow coming down, more snow means more of a nice white covering on the tops of our glaciers, which will slow down their melting. Glaciers were formed because there was more snowfall than melt during the turning of a year. So we want more snow, and we won't have more snow if we don't have more, wetter, precipitation.

What do you think?