The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

In print for fifteen years and more pertinent than ever. 

This author has something imperative to say that MUST NOT be dismissed!

Excerpts:
Some idea of the power greenhouse gases have to influence temperature can be gained by examining other planets. The atmosphere of Venus is 98 percent CO2, and its surface temperature is 891°F. Should CO2 ever reach even 1 percent of Earth’s atmosphere, it would “all other things being equal” bring the surface temperature of the planet to boiling point.
Were it not for plants and algae, we would soon run out of oxygen and suffocate in CO2. Through photosynthesis (the process whereby plants create sugars using sunlight and water), plants take our waste CO2 and use it to make their own energy, in the process creating a waste stream of oxygen. It’s a neat and self-sustaining cycle that forms the basis of life on Earth. The volume of carbon circulating around our planet is enormous. Around a trillion tons of carbon are tied up in living things, while the amount buried underground is far, far greater. And for every molecule of CO2 in the atmosphere, there are fifty in the oceans.
Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal producer) led a campaign, informed apparently by his personal beliefs, that the earth’s atmosphere “is deficient in carbon dioxide” and that producing more would herald an age of eternal summer. In a move rather like the CEO of an arms manufacturer arguing that a nuclear war would be good for the planet, Western Fuels wanted to lead the charge in creating a world with atmospheric CO2 of around 1,000 parts per million.
A ten-year, peer-reviewed study by the IPCC commissioned by Bush senior and studies by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA. September 2002 the White House released the Environment Protection Agency’s annual report with the entire section dealing with climate change deleted.
Bush administration “desperately wanted to burn more coal... . Coal is our friend,” and that to do so they would scuttle Clean Air and Clean Water Act requirements. In this the administration has been as good as its word, for, as Shea quipped, it may be some time before the industry has another president like “Bush or Attila the Hun.”
The greatest damage was done by the Global Climate Coalition, an industry lobby group founded in 1989 by fifty oil, gas, coal, auto, and chemical corporations. During the eleven years of its existence the organization gave $60 million in political donations and spent millions more on propaganda. The stated purpose of the Global Climate Coalition was to “cast doubt on the theory of global warming.”
Some industries that oppose action on climate change use tactics reminiscent of those of asbestos and tobacco companies, who by constantly challenging and clouding the outcomes of research into the link between their products and cancer, succeeded in buying themselves a few more decades of fat profits.
Asbestos and cigarettes can kill individuals, but CO2 emissions threaten our planet.

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS


The Industrial Revolution beginning around 1800 began with steam power fueled by coal.1900 began the second century of the Industrial Revolution, electricity powering by coal, hydro, petroleum, and ultimately wind and solar.


American corporate power was quick to step into this war of the “Electric Currents.” Thomas Edison and his technology of DC (direct current) would stop at nothing to dominate the industry where Westinghouse and Tesla’s new and experimental AC (alternating current) was the only feasible solution.


American business giants battled to dominate and control a world wide technology of the Empires of Light and power distribution.

This is a real history making story, well done, fascinating and fast moving.



Excerpts:
1888, Thomas Edison was no longer content to vent his rancor with secret attacks. Using the vehicle of the Edison Electric Light Company, he lashed out publicly, issuing what surely stands as Americ’s longest and most splenetic howl of corporate outrage. The eighty-four-page Edison diatribe, jacketed in angry scarlet and emblazoned with the title WARNING!, served as the official public salvo in one of the most unusual and caustic battles in American corporate history. Edison, with his DC system, was making his first open attack against Westinghouse and AC in the War of the Electric Currents.
Assumed that the electrical future was securely his, with all its glory and potential for riches, suddenly saw the famously tough, reckless, and industrially wealthy Westinghouse boldly swooping in from Pittsburgh to steal away his hard-earned prize. Edison would not sit back quietly and let what he saw as a dangerous system imperil not just his company, but the whole marvelous field of electricity.
Englishman H. G. Wells, science fiction writer turned social observer: These dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel pit into which one descends has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engineer irresistible forces in their sleep”. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket”. All these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and stronger than that”. I fell into a daydream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be used by them.”



Tesla and his helpers turned out all the necessary components for three complete AC systems, single-phase alternating current, two-phase, and three-phase. He designed and built copper and iron models for each system, a dynamo (without the commutator!)
Decades ahead of his time

63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Jesse Ventura stood up and blew the whistle on gross governmental disregard for any ethical behavior in the land of the victim be damned where they have the very best politicians that money can buy.

The book is a classic eye opener, not to be taken lightly
.
Excerpts:
2010, the Obama Justice Department cited the so-called “state secrets doctrine” in successfully getting a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit on “extraordinary rendition” (a phrase that really means we send suspected terrorists to other countries to get held and tortured


WikiLeaks is exposing our government officials for the frauds that they are. They also show us how governments work together to lie to their citizens when they are waging war.


“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.”


Call something “terrorism,” the Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be made null and void? All they’ve got to do is say the word and they can put you under surveillance without a warrant. To me, this smacks of an attack on the foundations of democracy that plays right into the hands of terrorists. It also sets a precedent for the kinds of tactics we went on to see at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.

Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century by John Higgs

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Profound beyond the limit and ingeniously eye opening.

This book is a scholarly trip through an electrically charged revolutionary century of innovative developments, political turmoil, war mongering psychopathy, corporate power supremacy, out of control climate calamity, and the greatest economic disparity since the three hundred years of the Russian Czar.


Excerpts:
A journey through the twentieth century can seem like an epic quest. The gallant adventurers who embark on it first wrestle with three giants, known by the single names of Einstein, Freud and Joyce. They must pass through the forest of quantum indeterminacy and the castle of conceptual art. They avoid the gorgons of Jean-Paul Sartre and Ayn Rand whose glance can turn them to stone, emotionally if not physically, and they must solve the riddles of the Sphinxes of Carl Jung and Timothy Leary. Then things get difficult. The final challenge is to somehow make it through the swamp of postmodernism. It is not, if we are honest, an appealing journey.


The twenty-first century is not going to make any sense at all seen through nineteenth-century eyes.


A century is an arbitrary time period. Historians talk about the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) or the short twentieth century (1914-91), because these periods contain clear beginnings and endings. But for our purposes “the twentieth century” will do fine, because we’re taking a journey from when things stopped making sense to where we are now.


Ideology beat science
Even Margaret Thatcher had to amend her views after it became clear how much they offended her political allies. While her 1980 talks displayed clear scientific understanding of the situation, her 2003 book, Statecraft, fell back on the political talking points that cause climate scientists to bang their heads on their desks in despair. Curbing climate change was a front for a political viewpoint that she disagreed with, and for that reason no efforts to curb climate change should be made. Ideology beat science. Individualism beat environmentalism. So carbon continued to be emitted, topsoil continued to decrease and the ice sheets on the poles continued to melt. The debt which funded the consumer activity that caused all this continued to grow. As a result, the window when runaway climate change could have been prevented now appears to have closed.



W. C. Fields was the putative author of “I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”

The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen's Guidebook to the American Bill of Rights by Les Adams, Akhil Amar

BOOK REVIEW
The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen's Guidebook to the American Bill of Rights by Les Adams, Akhil Amar

FIVE STARS - A historical document clearly explained with it’s impact clarified. 

This fascinating book will take you back to the ore-industrialization years and the nearly impossible War of Independence, the Civil War, women's rights, prohibition, and the political powers that continually attack to bend it.
Excerpts:
One of the ironies of history that this thoroughly reprehensible monster played an instrumental role in the foundation of English constitutional government from which a number of the American concepts of freedom embodied in our Bill of Rights were to be drawn. You see, King John happened to be the most notable participant in an event that many historians regard as being one of the most important in the entire history of the western world.
The signing of Magna Carta by King John
(the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and its accompanying Bill of Rights) as one of the most important writings in the history of the American republic.
This is a book written not for lawyers and judges but for ordinary citizens who care about their Constitution and their rights.



As great as men like Madison and Jefferson were, they lived and died as slaveholders, and their Bill of Rights was tainted by its quiet complicity with the original sin of slavery.



Thomas Paine, (1737-1809). Anglo-American political philosopher who enjoyed active and influential political careers in England, France, and the United States. After the publication of his Rights of Man (1791-2), a powerful condemnation of Edward Burke’s Reflections Upon the French Revolution, Paine was indicted by the British government for treason. In the United States, he was an associate of major figures in the American Revolution, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. His best known writings were: The American Crisis (1776-83), a series of pamphlets; and Common Sense (1776), in which Paine argued that common sense surely led to the conclusion that the American Colonies should become independent of Great Britain. This little pamphlet, which sold over 500,000 copies (an extraordinary figure for that time), was one of the most influential political documents in American history.

Greta Thunberg, Closing the Loop

Greta Thunberg, a sixteen year old Swedish climate activist, is presently on the final approach to New York City aboard a trans-Atlantic sailing vessel with an estimated time of arrival of late afternoon August 27, 2019.

This extraordinary and courageous young lady happens to be a classmate of my cousin’s granddaughter and is a real caring and credible young lady.

The rest of the story; a thousand years ago Leif Erikson, a Viking explorer established settlements in America. First in Nova Scotia, unearthed in 1960, and up the Hudson River in present day New York, unearthed recently.

Greta Thunberg will be closing the loop of her Viking seafaring heritage.

Related link: https://bingsbuzz.blogspot.com/2019/02/more-pieces-to-grimsrud-family-puzzle.html

Photo of Greta by European Parliament from EU - Greta Thunberg at the Parliament, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78369696

Climate Change: A Brief Look

Climate Change: A Brief Look

As scientists had predicted global warming would melt polar ice caps and glaciers that would diminish the relativity of snow letting solar heating to be further and faster absorbed by open oceans and soil.

Water is a huge absorber and conveyor of solar heating. Ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream are powered by thermal heat differentials. Examples: The Caribbean Sea is a tropical zone where its temperature exceeds 83 F or 28C. This water floats above cooler water. Arctic Polar ice cap melt is denser than surrounding water and settles to the bottom. There you have relatively the ingredients of thermal heat differential. Hot Caribbean surface water flows north to displace cold polar ice cap melt that settles to the bottom and flows south along the bottom to fill the gap of the hotter water heading north. A solar powered heat pump is formed and is know as the Gulf Stream...a product of nature.

The warmer Gulf Stream water reaches Northern Europe elevating temperature there. To give a perspective, latitudes of Northern Europe are equal to those of Hudson's Bay in northern Canada, home of polar bears and permafrost. As you can see that warm Gulf Stream water has a significant effect on Northern Europe. At present that Caribbean Sea temperature has risen from 83F to 85F. However, the Gulf Stream flow has reduced by more than 30 percent. This is just the beginning. The result is heat build up in the Caribbean Sea and Northern Europe having cooler summers but milder winters.

The impact of all of this will have a multitude of changes. Resulting in polluted Caribbean waters that enhance seaweed growth and killing fish, turtles, coral reefs, and more.

Northern Europe is witnessing invasive insects moving north from warmer climate zones. An example is the oak processionary moth caterpillar, a long name for a small insect but a big problem causing skin irritations, rashes, eye conjunctivitis, and asthma reactions.

There are weather extremes world wide such as droughts, floods, and storms of greater intensity.

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 by William R. Trotter

BOOK REVIEW
Five Stars

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 by William R. Trotter

A History not to be forgotten; Little Finland, four million strong, stood up to the mighty Soviet Joe Stalin. Soundly beating back an over-whelming and unrelenting adversary only to then be invaded by Hitler’s war crazed Nazis.
Finland bordering Russia, Sweden, and Norway is a very good neighbor, and one of few over run countries of World War II that promptly repaid all of its war time debts.
Excerpt:
That an army so inferior in numbers and equipment, should have inflicted such serious defeats on an overwhelmingly powerful enemy, and, while retreating, have over and over again repelled his attacks, is a thing for which it is hard to find a parallel in the history of war. But it is equally admirable that the Finnish people, face to face with an apparently hopeless situation, were able to resist giving in to despair, and instead to grow in devotion and greatness. Such a nation has earned the right to live.

To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman by Alix Kates Shulman

BOOK REVIEW
To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman by Alix  Kates Shulman
FIVE STARS

Born an activist, Emma Goldman led a life truthful to her beliefs in liberty for all.
Her inspiring story of her heroic and unabashedly sticking up for human rights causes was not the easy path.
Read about her detractors and their self-serving egotistic axes they felt compelled to grind.
Thought provoking and enlightening, this book will definitely rattle your brain.
Excerpts:
Then how would an anarchist society work without government? In an anarchist society every single person would be at liberty to do as he or she pleased. Being free, anarchists believe, people would choose to cooperate with each other voluntarily for the good of everyone. A word often used to describe this main feature of anarchism is libertarian. An anarchist society is based on individual liberty, not government authority or force.
Anarchists are not against order, as many people believe. They are only against imposing order by force or threat of force. They oppose the force used by governments against their own citizens through police, and against the citizens of other nations through armies. They believe that order would certainly prevail in a world where people were free to do as they pleased, because people would choose to make and follow certain rules for their own mutual benefit. That is a very different matter from being forced to follow rules imposed from outside for someone else’s benefit.

Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain by Gerard Colby

BOOK REVIEW

Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Forbidden Bookshelf 6) by Gerard Colby

FIVE STARS

Two hundred years of history; the DuPont family moved to America in 1800 and rode the Industrial Revolution wave to the top. This intriguingly provocative and extensive tome narrates the tale how dedicated and focused determination capitalized into a winner take all.

Two hundred plus years of America’s scramble to it’s world wide top position are step by step documented, the good, bad and ugly. This excellent book is an eye opening prospective I recommend to those who desire to look beyond news hype.

Excerpts:

Strange coincidence: of all the records of congressional hearings stacked in the library, one was notably missing when I visited there in 1970, the 1934 Dickstein, McCormick hearings on the aborted plot for an armed coup against Roosevelt.

The CIA’s covert operation was in direct violation of United States law. Congress had refused to authorize any monies for the CIA to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and some Congressmen were furious that the Reagan administration had gone ahead anyway and ordered the CIA into action, backed by thousands of U.S. troops in Honduras.

America copies the Spanish conquistador inquisition crazed imperialist model.

Economic Supremacy, later paraphrased by Professor Woodrow Wilson, insisted that expansion was the key to wealth and called for America to accept its historical destiny as the new center of empire and make the Pacific and Asia its colonies. Alfred Thayer Mahan agreed, calling on the federal government to accept “The White Man’s Burden” by building a large navy that would forcibly bring the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant God and civilization to the heathen world.

Nixon quote...”I an Not a crook!”

1966, Smathers also voted against legislation aimed at the Du Pont estate’s control over the Florida National banks. Since then, he has left the Senate floor for its darker wings, where he lobbies for southern wealth and large corporations. Indeed, Smathers has been acquiring a whole new set of very interesting friends in Florida. Smathers was the guest of honor at the ground-breaking ceremony of the Key Biscayne Bank, in which Richard Nixon held savings account No. 1. This bank was largely controlled by Charles G. (Bebe) Rebozo, a close friend of Nixon and of right-wing Cuban counterrevolutionaries in Miami. Another director was Robert Abplanalp, another millionaire friend of Nixon, owner of a Bahamas island frequently used by President Nixon as a retreat, and landlord of one of the rented houses in Nixon’s official Florida White House compound at Key Biscayne.