It is climate change
Hank Porter’s brief letter about the current cold snap in the Northeast (February 14) illustrates the real difficulty very many people have with understanding the concept of Global Warming. The “global” part is hard enough to understand because we, as individuals, cannot directly sense anything in a global manner. We and our senses are localized and we use our senses to make sense of the world around us, so our very brains developed to perceive things in a localized way.
But even the “Warming” part is misconstrued. It doesn’t mean that everywhere on the planet will be warmer (quite the contrary), it means that the overall average temperature will be higher. Temperatures will still go up and down all over the globe, because our atmosphere is fluid, but the average temperature is going up. A drop of thirty degrees Fahrenheit over all of New England would create a bitterly cold winter storm for the residents there, but that is balanced by an almost unnoticeable rise of less than one degree, averaged over the whole rest of the planet (I did the math).
The name “Global Warming” is technically accurate, but intuitively misleading. “Average Global Atmospheric Energy Increase,” while a mouthful, is a better way to think of it. NOAA, NASA, the World Meteorological Organization, and every other reputable organization that is researching Earth’s climate agree that the average temperature of the atmosphere is rising. Heat is just energy. More heat means more energy and that energy can appear in many forms; Tornadoes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, blizzards, hail, scorching drought, flash-floods, polar vortices, higher tides and seas, etc. Weather is created by the clash of localized temperature variations. We will have all the same kinds of weather we’ve always had, and it will still differ from place to place, but with more energy it will be more energetic. Windier, wetter, drier, colder, hotter, and more unpredictable. Sound familiar?
An increase of eight degrees F, from one day to the next, in your town is not worth mentioning, but if the average temperature of the whole atmosphere goes up a little over seven degrees F (four degrees C), “powerful feedback processes that very likely will push the warming even higher could be set into irreversible operation” (http://www.the-earth-league.org/4-degree-report.html), possibly putting us on a path to become the next Venus, which has a balmy average temperature of 864 F. Don’t forget your sunscreen!
Peter Suddeth, Kelseyville
A sorry state
Citizens of Lake County: Beware of the secessionists among us! A small-but-vocal minority of states-rights libertarians are attempting to pack the county supervisors’ chambers with a cockamamie scheme to separate from the state of California and form their own state called Jefferson.
The state they’re proposing would be an impoverished rural backwater, lacking a major university, an international airport, a deep-water harbor, or a city of any significance. During a previous failed effort, separatists in 1941 actually proposed Yreka as the capital of Jefferson. Have you ever been to Yreka? Yikes.
They hearken back to the good old days of the Civil War, when West Virginia became a state by first seceding from the union, then seceding from Virginia to rejoin the union. And their example of West Virginia is actually an excellent case study in poverty, pollution, and poor health when a small, rural area cuts itself off from the larger, more prosperous, more functional state. Compare West Virginia to the rest of the country now to see just how bad it could be for Lake County to exit California. Here are Quick Facts from the most recent census: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/54000.html
Lake County already suffers from the dubious distinction of being the poorest county in the state of California. I care about my property value and you should too. We should be emphasizing our place at the heart of the prosperous Wine Country rather than considering joining the potato farmers to the north in a sentimentalized fantasy of bygone agrarian independence.
This entire State of Jefferson effort would be laughable if the secessionists didn’t take themselves so seriously. It’s little wonder that their propaganda is swaddled in half-truths and half-baked “patriotism.” On Tuesday a small number of libertarian malcontents swarmed the supervisors chambers, shouting about taxes and the 10th Amendment. Remind them of West Virginia and maybe they’ll go away.
Nancy Harby, Lakeport
Learn it
I really admire the inability of the American military and intelligence services to NOT learn from history. The first was the absolute stupidity of the Guantanamo incarceration of those fundamentalist Muslims, who were a threat to the U.S.
Major W.E. Mayer gave a talk in 1956 about the methods and results of dealing with American POW’s during the Korean War. No nation in history was as successful in dealing with political reeducation as the Chinese Communists. Did we adopt these techniques? Of course we didn’t and don’t. Incidentally, these techniques did not involve any kind of brutality. (Readers may still get a copy of this tape, I believe from the Pacifica Tape Library in Los Angeles CA.) Needless to say, we should employ these techniques, which have come to be called “brain washing.”
Secondly, the Sepoy Rebellion provides another example of how the army adopted and then abandoned one of the perfect means of dealing with fundamentalist Muslims in battle. Around 1900, General Pershing apparently had studied the Sepoy Rebellion. [Editor’s note: although this account has circulated for more than a century it may be apocryphal.] In 1857, Muslim soldiers rebelled against the British because cartridges were packed in pig fat. General Pershing took several Muslim’s who were terrorists and shot them. He let one Muslim observe the cartridges of the firing squad being coated in pig fat. The same man was also allowed to watch the mass burial of the executed terrorists in a grave with pig guts, heads, and other parts of the carcasses. The man was then let go. The rebellion ended since no Muslim can enter Paradise if his body is contaminated by pigs, which is probably a great relief to the virgins who are supposed to serve them.
Why don’t we follow policies that have been proved to be successful?
Charles Moton, Lucerne
Understanding
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scriptures they don’t understand, but for me, I have always noticed that the passages that bother me are those I do understand. —Mark Twain
Stacey Salvadori, Hidden Valley Lake
