Bacon and a Year Without Summer

Photo credit: www.pofta-buna.com

I’m placing the thickly sliced uncured bacon in the pan and, when it begins to sizzle, the marvelous aroma fills the house. It is a memory from my childhood when Grandma Elena would render bacon fat into lard in her tiny kitchen. It was a preservative for chunks of pork she would seal with wax in glass jars that would feed us for an entire year. It was stored in the cellar, the dank, damp, and constantly cool place. We did not need refrigerators and could not have afforded one anyway.

My dad eventually saved enough money when I was in 12^th grade and bought a small refrigerator for our tiny apartment in the city. It was empty most of the time because we did not have food to store, mom shopped daily and we ate what she purchased, no leftovers. We would cool a watermelon in the fridge in summertime or keep a small glass bottle of milk if we were lucky enough to have found the liter bottles sold in the government-run dairy stores.

Like everything else, shelves were bare as soon as the morning delivery was put on sale and the long line of shoppers dissipated with their laden expandable jute string shopping bags.  In winter time we had the window sill for cool storage with plenty of ice and snow.

I could have this bacon now every day if I wanted to but I don’t have to because I believe that I can find it any day in the grocery store and I don’t have to fight others for it like they do in socialist Venezuela.

We trust blindly that our local stores will always have a good stock of food every day. As a realist, however, I know that most grocery stores have enough stock for three days, but who wants to have negative thoughts when this country is so rich and the shelves are a cornucopia of abundance? We have fewer and fewer farmers, less than 3 percent, feeding 330 million. Nobody ever starves in America today but could they in case of terrible inclement weather?

What if we would experience another year like 1816, also known as the Year without a Summer?  Major food shortages occurred across the Northern Hemisphere due to the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies, preceded by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines. (Oppenheimer, Clive, 2003. "Climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption: Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815.” Progress in Physical Geography. 27 (2): 230–259. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1191/0309133303pp379ra

Volcanic winters are not something new, they have occurred across the millennia but nobody was keeping track then. Evidence of inclement weather disasters and probable food shortages can be found, among others, in studies of soil strata and in ice core samples.

Reports in the U.S. described a persistent “dry fog which turned reddish and dimmed the sunlight - it could not be dispersed by wind or rainfall.”  Scientists termed it a “stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.” It affected crops, particularly at higher elevations such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and even the garden state, New Jersey. In early June snow fell in Albany, New York, and in Maine. New Jersey’s crops were damaged by five continuous nights of frost.

Those who push the idea of an anthropogenic global warming conveniently leave out the historical data of the Vostok ice core samples taken by Russian, American, and French scientists. Global warmists have now switched to climate change which all sides agree that it does occur but it is not necessarily man-made. We should not confuse deliberate environmental degradation and lack of conservation of natural resources with CO2 gases emitted by humans and animals existing and breathing. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ice-core-data-help-solve/

The Little Ice Age that lasted approximately 500 years is another important occurrence worth mentioning that the global warmists conveniently leave out from their narrative. It caused tremendous agricultural hardship and famine in Europe from around the thirteen hundreds to the eighteen hundreds, affecting the Norse settlers and even Napoleon’s campaign in Russia in 1812 where they encountered such an unusual bitter-cold winter and a lack of food for which they were ill-prepared.  The culprit of the severe cold stretching over centuries was the diminished solar flare activity, a solar minimum, not CO2.

Long winters are not unusual in Russia or in the United States for that matter, it is the inability to have a long enough and warm enough growing season in order to produce sufficient food for its population.

Climatologists who argue when this cooling period actually began, dubbed Little Ice Age by Francois E. Matthes, are more definitive that it ended around 1850-1870. https://www.history.com/news/little-ice-age-big-consequences

In our 20^th century communist society, it was not the surprise of weather changes that we had to worry so much about but the unwise economic and agricultural central planning that bore no resemblance to reality or to the ability of humans to produce what was ordered and the fact that most food was used for export in order to buy industrial equipment needed for development. People starved, foreigners ate well, and the communist party had its factories that produced goods that nobody wanted to buy because they were so poorly made.

But we had bacon thanks to my grandparents who always raised a pig for Christmas slaughter, a beautiful animal that kept four-five families alive through winter, spring, summer, and fall until the next year.  If it was not for grandma raising this pig, raising chickens and ducks for eggs, keeping a cow for milk, and planting a garden, several families would have starved because there was not enough food provided by government in groceries stores for the size of the population. Communists do not recognize the law of supply and demand and are not particularly adept at planning centralized economies based loosely on Marxist ideology.

 

 

Lies and Dang Lies Environmentalists Tell

Alaska
Photo credit: Florentina Cimpian, 2014

“Romantic love is often blind. This is nowhere made more evident than in the environmental infatuation, if not worship, of a natural world which the modern greens will never be able to save no matter how totalitarian the movement becomes.” – R. Mark Musser, author

The green infatuation and Gaia worship were prominent in Hitler’s time. Musser talks about “the green Nazi motive of the Holocaust” in his book, Nazi Oaks. “Unbeknownst to many, the highway to modern environmentalism passed through Nazi Germany. By 1935, the Third Reich was the greenest regime on the planet.”

Environmentalists have been busy for quite some time misinforming the public in a targeted assault against civilization and economic development, private property, and our way of life, under the guise of healing the planet and protecting future generations. As we saw, many influential individuals have become rich beyond belief on the platform of anthropogenic global warming and of the alarmist eventual demise of the planet due to the melting of the ice caps and glaciers flooding the world and swallowing most islands and lands bordering the oceans.

Rep. Hank Johnson went as far as saying during a House committee hearing that he feared the Island of Guam would “become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize” from the weight of 8,000 additional Marines stationed in Guam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZczIgVXjg

Environmentalists told us and especially our impressionable children that polar bears were drowning when the ice floes melted. Never mind that polar bears are really good long distance swimmers and their numbers have quintupled. Even the Discovery Channel, a source most viewers believed to be scientifically accurate, irritated the public by presenting fake docudramas in an attempt to “save the sharks.”

The environmentalists assured us that solar power is cheap, clean, and friendly to the planet. But the energy is far from safe, clean, or cheap. The environmental damage to the desert tortoise and many species of birds is alarming. Workers at the solar plant called Bright Source Energy at Ivanpah Dry Lake, California, have named the birds that fly into the plant’s flow of concentrated sun rays “streamers.” The birds that burst into flames in mid-air leave behind a smoke trail.

Wind farms chop millions of birds, including rare and endangered species, and affect animal and human behavior and health negatively as confirmed by Mark Duchamp, President of World Council for Nature. In numerous instances around the world and in Denmark, farmers had to put down animals that attacked each other, had numerous still born, and gave birth to deformed puppies.  www.wcfn.org

When Ronald Reagan was president, the German environmental party, Die Grünen (the Greens,) was blaming him and the U.S. economy for the acid rain that was allegedly killing trees in Europe. A campaign sponsored by the Greens featured a button with a dying tree and the words, “Stoppt Sauere Reagan,” which meant, “Stop Acid Rain,” but the German word for rain is spelled “Regen,” not “Reagan.” It was a play on words, deliberately misspelled to point the finger in the wrong direction, certainly not based on any scientific data.

Rosalind Peterson, President and Co-Founder of the Agriculture Defense Coalition in California, addressed the United Nations on the topic of Geoengineering and Chemtrails.  She explained the weather modification programs covering thousands and thousands of miles using ground base chemicals that are shot into the air or dumped by airplanes, affecting microclimate and the growing season, and crop pollinators.  

Sulphur and other chemicals are dumped or shot into the atmosphere in geoengineering attempts to “help the planet and supposedly mitigate weather warming” but they are hurting agriculture crop production by reducing the amount of sunlight necessary for photosynthesis.

Peterson testified that persistent jet contrails exacerbate global warming because they trap heat and cause serious man-made clouds, changing our climate. She explained that “one persistent jet contrail can spread to 4,000 km and last for 20 hours.”

Persistent jet contrails were unheard of in the 50s and 60s and appeared in the late 1980s. “NASA studies show that part of our global warming problem could be attributed to these types of contrails and the jets that leave them.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5is16A8pfw

In addition to sulphur, nano particles of barium, aluminum, and strontium are sprayed in the upper atmosphere worldwide in a program called atmospheric geoengineering achieved by stratospheric aerosol (chemtrails). Ted Gunderson, the late former FBI Chief, made a passionate plea to stop the “death dumps” because they are killing trees, plants, sea, and animal life worldwide. He mentioned the two locations from which unmarked airplanes fly to do the dumps, Air National Guard in Lincoln, Nebraska and Fort Sill, Oklahoma. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR6KVYJ73AU&feature=endscreen&NR=1

“We have hardly any sun anymore and all of our trees are dying. When you hike through the woods and walk through your towns and cities, you will see that the bark on the trees is turning black, cracking, and in case of the oaks here in NYC and Long Island, the bark is completely falling off!”

It is a fact that wind and solar energy are “parasitic power producers” because they need back-up energy produced through the burning of coal, natural gas, or nuclear and hydro-power generation.

It is also a known fact that large wind and solar power plants can only be built with large government subsidies and the electricity generation is inadequate for our huge economy, it is expensive, intermittent, and unreliable. Many solar power plants have gone bankrupt around the world in spite of government subsidies.

The claim that global warming causes oceanic acidification can be easily debunked because there is insufficient CO2 in the atmosphere (0.04 %) to make a difference in the oceans’ alkaline pH of 8. In order to significantly modify the oceans’ pH, CO2 must come from other sources such as underwater volcanoes.

CO2 dissolved in tap water (seltzer water) is a weak, unstable acid. If you leave a soda can open, the CO2 dissipates and what is left is sweet colored water.

What about the “greenhouse gas effect?” Greenhouse gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone) are defined as “gases in an atmosphere that absorb and emit radiation within the thermal infrared range” in a process that is presented as the “fundamental cause of the greenhouse effect.”  It is believed by environmental science “consensus” that these “greenhouse gases affect the temperature of the Earth.”

Ka-Kit Tung, adjunct professor of applied mathematics at the University of Washington and Xianyao Chen of the Ocean University of China proved in their study published in Science magazine that 30-year global warming and cooling cycles are caused by sun-warmed salty water from the tropics, traveling along ocean currents. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/897

Upon reaching the North Atlantic, the saltier tropical water sinks due to its greater density. The process is called warm saltwater subduction. “When [the water] sinks, it goes straight down, and the sinking carries heat along with it.” According to the study, “about 90 percent of the Earth’s heat is stored in the oceans due to the atmosphere’s limited storage capacity.” We are currently in a cooling cycle. Oceanic currents seem to be a thorn in the anthropogenic CO2 global warming agenda. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-hid-the-heat-and-slowed-pace-of-global-warming/

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recognizes that oceans, covering 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, “play a major role in regulating the weather and climate of the planet.” Water cycles, surface and deep ocean currents, ocean density, atmospheric winds, oceanic convection, and the Earth’s rotation are variables affecting temperature, weather events, and climate. http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/oceans_weather_climate/welcome.html

While we are forced to cut back on carbon dioxide, the gas of life that plants need in order to grow and thrive, horticulturists add CO2 to their greenhouses in order to accelerate the growth of plants and vegetables.

The sun is an important variable that affects global surface temperatures and is conveniently overlooked by the global warming scientists.  During the 20^th century there was a record solar activity that has not occurred in 3 millennia which happened to peak during our global warming period.

“The climate models of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seem to underestimate the impact of natural factors on the climate change, while overstate that of human activities.”

The two sun events that have direct effects on the globe are solar flares, sudden increases in electromagnetic wave and particle emissions, and coronal mass ejections, erupting filaments at speeds of hundreds to thousands of km/s. Both disturb the “solar wind, the Earth’s magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere systems, causing geomagnetic storms when entering interplanetary space.” http://csb.scichina.com:8080/kxtbe/EN/volumn/volumn_6360.shtml

Carbon is not a pollutant, it is a chemical element and as such, it cannot be released into the atmosphere by itself. C02 is the gas needed for plant life and it is exhaled by all living, breathing animals. Methane is a gas released by all animals. Methane and CO2 are constantly belched by volcanoes on land and under the sea.

At the end of the day, all the rhetoric that environmentalists are bombarding us with every day, using different euphemism to play our heart strings has the common denominator of total control of our daily lives. Even John F. Kennedy made a speech on September 25, 1961 to the U.N. General Assembly, envisioning “satellites as key to global communication and weather control.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajbhi_IIX71Xt=34

The Washington Post publishes almost daily articles promoting global warming/climate change and demonizing those who are skeptics. Apparently “climate change deniers are short on scientific literacy.” We do believe in climate change – it has been changing for millennia. We just don’t believe the progressive version of anthropogenic global warming/climate change. It does not matter how hard the “Green Team” is trying to convince the “God Squad” that humans changed the climate. God and variables in nature are in control. (Washington Post, What, me worry about climate change, George Marshall, August 24, 2014)

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” It would be nice if progressives would remember this rhetoric they fancy before they spend the next trillion dollars we do not have that we must either print or borrow. (Washington Post, Jay Fisette, Cities fighting climate change may finally get help, August 24, 2014)

This summer has been so unusually cool; leaves are changing color already in August in Pennsylvania. Environmentalism is not about common sense, factual science, or saving the planet, it is an agenda of “consensus” pseudo-science and enslavement to the wishes of a few.  In the process of implementing this agenda, the politicians and global elites who heavily promote the global warming scam and pass legislation to force the entire planet into compliance are becoming millionaires and billionaires, using our ignorance and stupidity.

 

 

 

Abundant Energy Supply Strangled by Environmentally Driven Regulations

The Committee on Energy and Commerce convened on March 25, 2014 to hear testimony on H.R. 6, the “Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act,” introduced by Rep. Cory Gardner. This bill was precipitated by the Energy Information Administration’s statement that “America’s natural gas has been raising since 2006. EIA projects such increases to continue through 2040, and expects domestic production of natural gas to remain well above domestic demand.” 

Chairman Fred Upton believes that our natural gas surplus is needed by “our allies around the world” and we should engage in “a mutually beneficial trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG).” In his opinion, federal policy has not yet “adjusted to the new reality of American energy abundance, and in fact Obama administration red tape often stands in the way of the potential benefits of the energy boom.”

Besides job creation at home, “constructing and running the LNG export facilities and additional energy industry jobs as natural gas producers expand their output to meet the increase in demand,” Chairman Upton believes that H.R. 6 would help Ukraine and Eastern and Central European countries who are dependent on Russian natural gas. Russia would have less “leverage over these nations” and prices of LNG would come down. https://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/hr-6-domestic-prosperity-and-global-freedom-act

The Hoover Institution agreed that “the hydrocarbon boom in the United States has been driven by fracking.” Shale-gas production through fracking in North Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York accounts for 44 percent of total U.S. natural gas output. http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/170026

Predictions in the 1970s indicating that America would run out of natural gas were wrong. Even the production of oil fell (1990-2008), increasing our oil dependency on imports from unstable and hostile nations. The International Energy Agency reported that in 2013 U.S. production of crude oil increased by 991,000 barrels a day and oil imports declined by 16 percent.

Newsmax.com wrote that “America produced an average of about 12.1 million barrels of crude oil, natural gas liquids, and biofuels a day in 2013 – that’s 300,000 barrels a day more than Saudi Arabia and 1.6 million more than Russia, the two previous leaders.”

Gary D. Libecap, Economics professor at the University of California and research fellow at Hoover Institution, said that “fracking and natural gas production have been good for the economy, good for democracies worldwide, and good for the environment.” Environmentalists would probably disagree since complaints have been lodged with the EPA about the deleterious effects on soil and ground water from fracking and horizontal drilling.

Energy experts believe that the Obama administration slows or prevents drilling on federal lands by delaying and denying permits. Consequently, production on federal lands fell 23 percent since 2007. According to the Institute for Policy Innovation, the federal government owns 28 percent of U.S. land, 62 percent in Alaska and 47 percent in 11 western states. http://www.ipi.org/

The current administration chooses instead to concentrate on very expensive and insufficient wind and solar energy generation, particularly solar. In addition to the 34 failed green companies funded with taxpayer dollars, of which Solyndra was the poster child of a $535 million colossal failure, the Aqua Caliente Solar Project in Yuma, Arizona takes the top spot with $967 million in federal loans. Yuma has an unemployment rate of 26.1 percent. So far, the Yuma project created 10 permanent jobs. When completed at the end of this year, the solar facility will have 16 permanent employees. It will only cost taxpayers $60.4 million per job creation. http://lastresistance.com/5226/obama-spends-967-million-create-10-solar-energy-jobs/

Fracking on the other hand, creates real jobs and helps towns like Midland, Texas to increase per capita income three times the national average and to reduce unemployment to a low 2.9 percent, while extracting oil which is needed to produce energy and to run our large economy.

Because the current administration believes that carbon pollution drives climate change, the proposed budget for FY 2015 includes a $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund to fight man-made (anthropogenic) global warming. Our electricity generation from “dirty” coal will then be curtailed by EPA’s expensive job-killing and coal fire-plant closing regulations and we will be stuck with huge electric bills and potential shortages.  

Our way of life depends on electricity - lights, refrigerators, air conditioning, furnaces, computers, internet, radios, TVs, ATMs, banks, grocery stores, cell phones, chargers, medical devices, life support systems, operating rooms, gas pumps, electric cars, plants, farms, refineries, water purification, sewer systems – 68 percent is generated by fossil fuels, 20 percent by nuclear, and 7 percent by hydro power. http://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2014/03/22/us-electricity-system-in-regulatory-and-terrorist-crosshairs-n1812722/page/full

According to the Energy Information Agency (EIA), net energy generation from coal has dropped from 49 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2012. Right now, the shortage is partly offset by increases in natural gas.

EPA’s retrofitting regulations and the requirement to use non-existent carbon capture technology, has resulted in coal fire plant closures. This prompted Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, to propose an amendment to H.R. 3826 (http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3826)

that would make sure that EPA’s standards for all types of new power plants use existing technology.  Rep. Smith said, “By requiring carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that doesn’t even exist, the EPA’s new power plant proposal effectively bans new coal power. There is no coal power plant anywhere in the world that can meet the EPA’s radical proposal.” http://schweikert.house.gov/press-releases/rep-schweikert-cosponsors-amendment-to-curb-epa-overreach-on-power-plant-emissions-standards/

Robert Romano explained that “largely as a result of coal plant closures, overall electricity generation in the U.S. has dropped from 4.005 trillion kWh in 2007 to 3.89 trillion kWh in 2012, meanwhile end use has only decreased from 3.89 trillion kWh to just 3.832 trillion kWh. The difference between electricity generation and end use, or implied spare capacity, has dropped from 115 billion kWh to 58 billion kWh from 2007-2012.” This decrease of 50 percent is troublesome - steady demand would cause eventual brownouts. http://netrightdaily.com/2014/03/epa-lost-mind/#ixzz2vaOr9QUP

According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), approximately 11.5 million American homes use wood burning stoves for heat. EPA issued new rules on emissions of particles and gases released from residential wood stoves and other wood-fired heaters built after 2015 and the rules will be more stringent in five years.  EPA “estimates that 85,695 wood stoves will be manufactured and sold in 2015.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/epa-moves-to-regulate-new-wood-stoves/2014/01/03/b08cb232-7484-11e3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html

The airborne particulates allowed change from 15 micrograms per cubic meter to 12. Bob Adelman put it in proper perspective, “Secondhand tobacco smoke in a closed-car exposes a person to 3,000-4,000 micrograms of particulates per cubic meter.”  According to John Crouch of the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, particulate pollution from wood burning stoves often occurs because consumers use insufficiently dried wood.

I wrote about cook stoves in my book, “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy.” The drive to replace cook stoves with “clean cook stoves” with chimneys came from the United Nations and translated into grants of $100,000 to $750,000 awarded by the Department of Energy through the “Clean Biomass Cook stove Technologies” initiative.  The grants were intended to help 100 million households in third world countries by 2020. http://www.amazon.com/U-N-Agenda-21-Environmental-Piracy-ebook/dp/B009WC6JXO/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396282329&sr=1-1&keywords=UN+Agenda+21%3A+Environmental+Piracy

Two studies evaluated the “clean cook stoves” and found that they delivered the same amount of measured pollution as the previous stoves. RESPIRA (Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors) showed improved air quality but not overall health.  “Up in Smoke,” a much larger study from MIT showed same amount of measured pollution and no significant change in overall health. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is forging ahead with studies in Ghana, Nepal, and Kenya in spite of the two studies’ results.

Should our power grid fail because of a solar flare, EMP, cyber, or terrorist attack, we will experience a civilization setback and population demise that is hard to fathom. While our administration concentrates on environmental issues, on April 16, 2013, terrorists attacked a power substation near San Jose, California as reported by the Wall Street Journal on February 5, 2014.  The fact that this very important piece of information was not reported by the media until a year later is disturbing. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778

Terrorists cut fiber optic cables and destroyed 17 transformers by causing them to leak oil coolant, resulting in overheating and failure. The targeted attack which lasted one hour indicated that the terrorists were very knowledgeable. The repairs took 27 days. Those maintaining the grid were able to reroute power and avoid blackouts.

Electricity is delivered to us through “a complex, interconnected system of power lines, substations, and transformers called the power grid. The entire United States is divided into just three separate grid segments: East, West, and Texas.” (Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek)

Billions are spent on “climate change prevention,” and on expensive smart meters that endanger and harm our health and attack our privacy, while our complex grid is easy prey to sabotage and attacks, protected only by cameras and chain link fences. It is not just that electricity prices must “necessarily skyrocket,” as our President promised, our grid is a sitting duck to potential attacks, and our energy production is being reduced significantly by overly stringent EPA regulations.