Planting Flowers

Why Science Teachers Should Not Be Given Playground Duty

Warmest Summer Since at Least 1940

Copernicus:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/06/world/hottest-summer-record-climate-intl

UAH: Second-warmest Month in Their Records

UAH/Roy Spencer just published their temperature anomaly for the lower troposphere.

It's the warmest August since their records start in 1979 (by 0.30°C!) and the 2nd-hottest month since 1979 (just 0.01°C below the record of February 2016). 

This decade-to-date, 34 months into the new decade, is 0.27°C warmer than the last decade-to-date. (It's a short time interval, though, so not very meaningful.)

Every new decade UAH adjusts their anomalies to the latest 30 years (perhaps to keep the numbers smaller?). August's anomaly, with respect to 1980-2009, is 0.83°C, larger than I would have guessed. 

When is 1.00°C going to appear?

Very likely even higher anomalies to come in the next few months as the El Nino gets rolling....

China's WAP Decline

China's working-age population has peaked. Not good news if you want continued national economic growth.

   

Via The World Bank, via Paul Krugman in the NY Times. He writes:

"At a fundamental level, China is suffering from the paradox of thrift, which says that an economy can suffer if consumers try to save too much. If businesses aren’t willing to borrow and then invest all the money consumers are trying to save, the result is an economic downturn. Such a downturn may well reduce the amount businesses are willing to invest, so an attempt to save more can actually reduce investment.

"And China has an incredibly high national savings rate. Why? I’m not sure there’s a consensus about the causes, but an I.M.F. study argued that the biggest drivers are a low birthrate — so people don’t feel they can rely on their children to support them in retirement — and an inadequate social safety net, so they don’t feel that they can rely on public support either."

This kind of thing is why macroeconomics is so interesting. And why you can't run government as a business, something some people don't seem able to understand.

Roy Spencer's Temperature

Roy Spencer usually publishes their temperature anomaly for the lower troposphere for the month just ended on the first of the month.

But it's not published today. (As of Sept 1, 4:54 pm Central Time.)

I've noticed from the past that he often doesn't publish it on the first of the month when the anomaly is high. 

But never when the anomaly is low.

Of course, maybe he's on vacation. It is Labor Day here on Monday, and maybe he's getting in a four-day leave. I hope that's the reason. Wouldn't want to think there's a bias going on. Wouldn't want to think there's a bit of a file drawer problem.

(Seriously though, there is a real issue, in me and everyone else, to stop analysis when we get the result we think we want, and to keep looking for problems when we don't. I guess the only solution to that is for others to look at the science too and see what they get. Science does that and usually gets it right, but usually it takes some time. The RSS group hasn't published their August LT anomaly yet, but then they usually don't on the first of the month, but usually a few days later, sometimes several days later. Seems like a better delivery system.)

Oldie But Goodie

By Joel Pett, 2009:

From Wikipedia:

The cartoon, which first appeared in USA Today in December 2009,[3] around the time of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference,[4] depicts a conference presenter listing the many advantages of curbing climate change including "energy independence, preserving rainforests, sustainability, green jobs, livable cities, renewables, clean water/air, healthy children, etc., etc.," only to have a climate change denier interject that if it were all a hoax, we'd create a "better world for nothing".[5] Shortly after the conference was over, Pett got a request for a signed copy from then-EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson, who framed the comic and put it on her wall. Pett has repeatedly gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups, in the United States, Canada and Europe to use the cartoon in campaigns. The Australian Greens used it in a campaign which some have claimed was influential in the Australian parliament adopting a carbon pricing scheme under the Clean Energy Act 2011, said to be the most rigorous scheme in the world for the time it was active.[6]

"I've drawn 7,000 cartoons in my life, but really only one," Pett said. "It's an example of one of these ideas I had in my head for 10 years before I realized I hadn't cartooned it...I was thinking, you know, 'It doesn't matter if global warming were a hoax, if the scientists made it up, we still have to do all that shit.'"[7] Pett said in a 2012 editorial that in the 27 months since its first publication, not a week had gone by where he didn't have a request to use the image.[5]

The Dominator

Hockey season is coming up, so please pardon the occasional post on this greatest (IMHO) of sports. 

It's still two months until the NHL hockey season starts--three and a half weeks before the first preseason game--and most of the trades and acquisitions have been done by now. Most notably, my Pittsburgh Penguins hired Kyle Dubas, whose contract wasn't extended by the Toronto Maple Leafs after they failed to advance past the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. (Meanwhile, they just rewarded this guy, who didn't really do enough in the playoffs {5G 6A in 11 GP}, an astonishing $13.25 million a year for four years.) In Pittsburgh Dubas made a lot of strong moves very quickly, and there's some talk the Penguins might be real contenders again. Their three Hall of Fame players--Crosby, Malkin and Letang, all at least 36 years of age, and who already have three Stanley Cups, are getting old and want one more Cup, in a league that's getting faster every year.

Anyway, I found this clip of highlights of Dominik Hasic ("The Dominator"), who played in the NHL from 1990-91 to 2007-08. Wild, acrobatic, beautiful saves. At the end of his NHL career his save percentage an amazing .922, and average goals against 2.02, winning two Stanley Cups with the Detroit Red Wings. Some consider him the best goalie ever.

Biden's Carbon Capture Programs

They're expensive. From CNN:

The Biden administration on Friday announced its first major investment to kickstart the US carbon removal industry – something energy experts say is key to getting the country’s planet-warming emissions under control.

Direct air capture removal projects are akin to huge vacuum cleaners sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, using chemicals to remove the greenhouse gas. Once removed, CO2 gets stored underground, or is used in industrial materials like cement. On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced it is spending $1.2 billion to fund two new demonstration projects in Texas and Louisiana – the South Texas Direct Air Capture hub and Project Cypress in Louisiana

“These two projects are going to build these regional direct air capture hubs,” US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters. “That means they’re going to link everything from capture to processing to deep underground storage, all in one seamless process.”

Granholm said the projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually once they are up and running – the equivalent of removing nearly 500,000 gas cars off the road.

So let's have a look at the numbers.

$535 per metric ton. Seems high.

I don't know the latest cost numbers for carbon capture, but I'll post this and come back with more information.

Sources:

CNN

individual car emissions (EPA)

US emissions (Energy Institute (formerly BP))

US GDP (FRED)

Checking On Antarctic Sea Ice

It's still pretty bad. Without doing the calculations, I'd say it looks more anomalously low than it was in July.

Via University of Maine's Climate Reanalyer.

Heatwave Projections

Interesting gif from Nature. 35°C=95°F.

 

The worse areas are well north of the equator.

I'd like to see that top chart but for 45°C (113°F).

Raven Teases Wolf

Here's the video, it's on Facebook. (Don't know how to embed it.) This sure looks like it was done just for fun.

Apparently ravens and wolves have a close relationship that has mutual benefits.

Here We Go Again

The normal high/low for this Monday is 84° | 55°.

I've been keeping track of daily Salem Oregon weather since I moved here on 9/1/2011. The temperature deviances are actually a pretty good Gaussian distribution. So I can estimate occurrences of high temperatures.

A high of 108°F (24°F above normal) is 3.99 standard deviations over the mean, which should occur 84 years.

Our high of 117°F on 6/28/21, the monster Pacific Northwest Heat Wave of 2021, was 39°F above normal, which should happen every 165 million years. (!)

I only have 10.9 years of data, so these numbers probably aren't very good. Just for fun.

Here's the distribution in Salem for the last 11 years, for the daily temperature, which is the average of the high and low.

The peak is a little wonky. Don't ask me why. Horizontal axis is degrees Fahrenheit above or below the daily average; vertical axis is the rate of occurrence.

I calculated the mean anomaly and standard deviation of the daily highs to be 1.29°F and 5.69°F respectively. 

Since I Was Born

Since I was born:

• The US Consumer Price Index has increased by a factor of 10.3 (=inflation)
• US population has increased by a factor of 1.87
• Households by a factor of 2.55
• Civilian employment has increased by 2.46 (women in the workplace.)
• Manufacturing employment is down 18%.
• US federal government spending by a factor of 62 
• US GDP by a factor of 49.6
• Real GDP by a factor of 6.2
• Hence real US GDP per capita has increased by a factor of 3.3 
• Average hourly earnings by a factor of about 12
• World Population by 2.64 times
• World per capita real GDP by 3.2 times.
• China's population by a factor of 2.12
• China's nominal GDP by a factor of 303 (not inflation-adjusted).

Seen in Portland, Oregon

World Oil Production per Capita Has Little Change

There is remarkably little change in world oil production per capita per year:

Note the vertical axis scale is fairly refined, so the annual fluctuations are only about ±5% at most. I would have guessed there'd be a fairly large positive trend. 

Sources:

Oil production  

World Population

I should look at consumption (oil, not tuberculosis).

PS: In US oil-speak, "Mb" means thousands of barrels and MMb means millions of barrels. (Boo.) Took me awhile to figure that out. 

Life's Pleasures

Finally getting to wash your hands when they're sticky¹ is one of life's small pleasures.

--

¹ I don't mean dirty, I mean sticky, although they can be both sticky and dirty. But primarily sticky.

Global Boiling and Other Stuff

Things I've encountered:

I am not at all in favor of this term "global boiling" that the UN is trying to introduce

The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” António Guterres declared in a news briefing, as scientists confirmed that July is set to become Earth’s hottest month on record.

“Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” he said at a briefing at U.N. headquarters in New York on Thursday, as he described “children swept away by monsoon rains, families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat.”

Sure, global warming is getting to be serious, and will get more serious. But calling it "boiling" is such a naked attempt to induce fright. And then, presumably, action. It's almost laughable, at least silly, and an easy target for deniers to mock. Besides, nothing is really boiling, and won't. Not even close. Seems like maybe it was dreamed up by PR types who are deep in a UN bubble.

I don't know what's going to get the world to take this problem seriously, but such extreme nomenclature isn't the answer, I believe. What do you think?

⁂

I don't see the world addressing global warming en mass via mitigation. I think we're well on the path to geoengineering via stratospheric aerosols. Then someday in decades carbon removal from the atmosphere. But it's going to get very hot before then, at least 2°C, and probably 2.5°C. I wouldn't bet against 3°C. IMO.

⁂

When water expands as it freezes, it exerts a pressure of 200 atmospheres. Watch it blow this steel container apart.

⁂

Sea level rise in Mayport, Florida is 1/3 inches a year over the last 20 years. It's located in the northeastern-most part of Florida, just outside Jacksonville--there's a big US naval station there, Naval Station Newport.

⁂

⁂ is my new favorite symbol. It's called an "asterism." A word from planetary astronomy.

⁂

Neat to see my comparison of record ocean temperatures to climate model projections in today's @nytimes. Its definitely approaching the upper end of what we'd expect to see based on climate models: https://t.co/mPb6IqsesZ pic.twitter.com/bW1IUcFy9a

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) August 4, 2023

⁂

Deforestation in the Amazon

A Russian Soldier in Ukraine

via the New York Times.

Fetterman on Depression

From an NY Times interview with John Fetterman, Senator from Pennsylvania:

US vs China Cumulative Emissions - Parity?

The US has emitted more CO2 cumulatively than has China. The current ratio, for CO2e starting in 1850, is 1.69. When will it equal one?

Our World in Data gives this chart

but their table of data is not very accommodating, having everything, by country, by year, shoved into a single column.

So instead I'm going to use the much more reasonable data presentation from PIK (Potsdam Institute of Climate Research), which begins in 1850.

Then, the ratio of US CO2e to China CO2e emissions is, since 1850

This is all emissions, in CO2-equivalent units, for the Kyoto gases, which are 

Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and the so-called F-gases(hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6). Each gas is weighted by its global warming potential and aggregated to give total greenhouse gas emissions in CO2 equivalents.

Up until about 1880, China actually led the US, presumably from methane emissions from growing rice.

Since just after the peak, say starting in 1970, this ratio is very linear and looks like

This linear trend reaches 1 in the year 2028.8--just 5.2 years from this August 1st.

Of course, China now has a population 4.2 times that of the US, so per-capita this ratio isn't even in the ballpark of one. 

And per-capita, not per-country, is really how carbon emissions should be accounted for. Americans are still a much bigger energy hog and carbon polluter than the Chinese, and this may never reach parity. Even more so when you consider that we've outsourced some of our manufacturing (=carbon emissions) to China. Perhaps that's the only reason why US annual emissions have been decreasing in recent years. I'm pretty sure someone somewhere has been keeping the data on this.

After Twitter

Norman Page Again With the Cooling

Norman Page is back at it with more predictions of global cooling.

If you recall, our friend Norman Page PhD keeps making predictions of global cooling that keep being wildly wrong. Yet he never learns.

In 2012 he wrote that his cooling prediction of 2003 was going great:

"My 2012 forecast of a cooling trend from 2003 on is looking good." 

despite it looking like no such thing. That year he also wrote a on WUWT, titled "Global cooling in the near future," saying (in bold)

"the earth is entering a cooling phase which is likely to last about 30 years and possibly longer."

Both these predictions have been absolutely wrong. Embarrassingly so, you'd think.

Worse, he tried to claim he was right all along.

And he's been at it still. First in 2017:

"The coming cooling: Usefully accurate climate forecasting for policy makers," Energy & Environment, v28 i3 (Feb 10, 2017).

in the journal that is the last recourse of deniers, Energy & Environment. In 2019 he wrote about this paper:

"The 2017 paper proposed a simple heuristic approach to climate science which plausibly proposes that a Millennial Turning Point (MTP)  and peak in solar activity was reached in 1991,that this turning point correlates with a temperature turning point in 2003/4, and that a general cooling trend will now follow until approximately 2650."

still claiming that it started cooling in 2003/4, when of course it has done anything but:

In fact, the 20-year trend of GISS monthly global surface temperature is 0.45°C/20yrs.  

Here Norman is, doubling down again on Judith Curry's blog just the other day, saying scientists have a "CO2 derangement syndrome."

Some people just refuse to learn. I wonder if Norman's salary depends on ignoring the evidence. 

India Population Surpasses China

China's population fell for the first time last year, by 185,000 (-0.01%) compared to 2021. And India now has more people than China, by 5.0 million in 2022. 

Amazing and Beautiful

This is amazing and beautiful, but the video isn't embeddable so you have to watch it on YouTube.

Here's a #short.

Added 12/8/23: Here's the full Youtube video. Can you blame Cetaceans for having returned to the sea from land?

The music, which is perfect for the video, is Continent (The Journey) by Adrian Berenguer.

Kudos to the cameraperson.

Speaking of impressive dolphins....

Hottest June Ever

Copernicus [the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)] released their temperature anomalies for June, and found that the global average temperature for June set a record, among Junes. Their data starts in 1979. {no fair! that's the beginning of the satellite era! ...So be it. The results from UAH and RSS also start in 1979.} They choose a baseline of 1991-2020. They write

Globally, June 2023 was:

• 0.53°C warmer than the 1991-2020 average for June
• the warmest June in this data record
• substantially warmer than the 0.37°C anomaly in June 2019, the second warmest June on record

That's quite a jump for a new record.

and here's my chart for the 10-year moving averages. There might even be an acceleration in these data....

Here's their wild looking chart for June SSTs. 

which is the region of the ocean west of London/Pyrenees/western Africa and from the equator to Iceland. (Latitude lines on this map are 36° apart.)

Hottest Day Ever

El Niño Is Here

Salvation

One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”

-- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Is CO2 Plant Food?

Andrew Dessler asks agricultural & food scientist David Lobell of Stanford if "CO2 is plant food."

Aurora Over Mount Chocorua

(Hey, that rhymes, get it?)

From my friend Jim D, a retired chemistry professor from Linfield College in Oregon who moved back east with his wife right across Lake Winnipesaukee from where I used to live!

I once saw the aurora from Gilford, but it was like a white glimmering sheet and nothing like this at all. 

What a gorgeous high-res picture.

--

PS: I once hiked to the top of Mt Chocoura.

PPS: I tried again another time, this time on a second date with a woman, but we left too late in the afternoon and terminated the hike just before the really rocky, steep part to the top. She was a slow hiker, and we tried to take a shortcut trail to get back to the car. We ended up deep in some woods trying to grope our way back to the car. As the sun fell on that November night, I kept telling her, with more and more urgency, that we needed to hurry up. But she just couldn't. I was able to somehow follow the trail by starlight (we didn't have a flashlight) and got us out of the woods and on to a road that led back to my car. In my memory it is actually a special moment -- I was feeling that I somehow knew how the dark, not visible trail before us would go, as it twisted and turned around trees and humps and creeks and rocks. I almost felt like I had done enough hiking and backpacking by then -- 1900 miles on the Appalachian Trail, plus dozens of other trails -- that I could intuit where the trail would go based just on the terrain. And I did. It was kind of unnatural and, if I believed in it, a bit supernatural. I don't believe in the supernatural -- I just feel like my instincts kicked in when I really needed them, when I had started to think we were really going to be lost out there in the New Hampshire woods in November as it was getting quite cold.

But we made it out. I kissed her in joy, kind of awkwardly, we drove out the long dirt road to a place and ate pizza, and I never tried to see her again. Too slow. I have to admit that evening scared me more than almost any hike I'd ever been on. Although there was another one in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona in January....

Good times! Seems like all I have left anymore are memories. 

As with most things, Kevin McCarthy is confused:

I heard the President gave a big speech about economics. Do you know what would be good economics for America?

Energy independence! pic.twitter.com/H636CddAA8

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 30, 2023

Under Biden, the US is now a net exporter of oil:

Data: 

US Weekly Product Supplied

Red State - Blue State Murder Gap

In the US, the murder rate in states that voted for Trump is 40% about higher than states that voted for Biden, and the gap is increasing:

from

“The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem,” Third Way, Jan 27 2023.

via David Firestone in the New York Times, who writes:

The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.

But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.

Why is this relevant? Because increasingly I've been seeing conservatives writing that some cities are going downhill -- crime, police issues, drugs, homelessness, decay -- because they have mayors who are Democrats. (And, the subtle allusion is, because many of these mayors are black.)

I'm not implying these mayors are perfect. Just that they're far from singularly responsible for the problems in big cities. In most cases it's state legislatures and governors who determine gun laws (which are increasingly lax, especially in the south, which may be partly or mostly responsible for the murder gap), or money for the homeless or medical care or rehabilitation programs, etc. 

Then there are the policies of neighboring states. Chicago, for example, has some of the strictest gun laws, but most of the guns used in homicides there come from out of state: 

In 2017, a report commissioned by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel analyzed four years of gun tracing data and found 60% of illegally used or possessed firearms recovered in Chicago come from out of state. Indiana was the primary source for approximately one in five such guns. In 95% of cases, the person with the gun was not the initial purchaser.

As always, the situations with respect to crime are far more complicated than the juvenile bullet points that get throw out as soon as the discussion begins.

"people in a country side feeling the effects of global warming"

"people wilting on a hot day in a city"

I asked Bing Image Creator to create a picture using the text in the title of this post. These were the best two:

Took about a minute, once I figured out how to use Bing Image Creator, which itself took about five minutes.  

It wouldn't let me use "suffering" or "heat stroke," so I had to go with "wilting."

Landlines Lost

Here's an interesting graphic from the Washington Post about the evolution of how people make and receive phone calls.

I went wireless-only when I moved to Oregon in early 2006. I thought I was behind the curve, but I guess not. 

Solar Eclipse on Mars

Taken by NASA's rover Perseverance as the moon Phobos passes in front of the Sun, on April 2, 2022. The eclipse lasted 40 seconds. 

Phobos orbits Mars at a distance of 6,000 km above the Martian surface.

Note that it doesn't cover the entire Sun, unlike solar eclipses on Earth. That's because the exact coverage of our Moon over the Sun is an extremely rare thing for a planet to have -- a moon that's just the right size and distance to the angle made by the diameter and its distance almost exactly matches the same angle to its sun. It's quite uncanny, and won't last forever as the Moon is moving away from the Earth by 3.8 cm/year. The last total solar eclipse on Earth will be in about 600 million years.

So in fact, we live in a very special time and place, when and where we have total solar eclipses. Might be enough of a reason for aliens to consider us a tourist attraction.

--

Here's a video, via Mashable:

 

Global Heat Wave May Be Ending

Link: https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1672085759694893058

Oregon County Sues Oil Companies for 2021 Heat Dome

Multnomah County in Oregon is suing several fossil fuel companies for causing the monster heat wave in Oregon in June 2021.

Multnomah County is the county that includes Portland, Oregon.

That's not all:

The county also seeks an estimated $50 billion for an abatement fund to study, plan and upgrade public health services and infrastructure to help “weatherproof” the county during future extreme heat events. 

The video accompanying the story says more than two dozen cities, counties and states have filed similar lawsuits. 

Given that the oil companies, like Exxon, did know of the warming potential of their fuels, I think lawsuits like this are justified, just as were the lawsuits against tobacco companies. With enough of them the fossil fuel companies may well settle by some kind of similar multiple hundred-billion dollar type of payment. And they'll be getting off easy.

Record Sea Surface Temperatures

This tweet made me want to look at the latest sea surface temperatures at the U of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, and they're something else:

Extra atmospheric water vapor in the stratosphere from volcano Tongo?

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. 

The study says it could be there for awhile:

It may take several years for the H2O plume to dissipate. This eruption could impact climate not through surface cooling due to sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming due to the radiative forcing from the excess stratospheric H2O.

For the North Atlantic Brian McNoldy wrote the other day that the latest SST for the North Atlantic was a record high anomaly, 3.87 standard deviations above the mean (a 1-in-18,650 occurrence)

Climate Pacts Have Done Essentially Nothing

From William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University. There is just too much money to be made in fossil fuels (~ $100T?).

This doesn't prove climate pacts and accords and conferences have done nothing -- we'd need to see the same curve but without them. But it's not encouraging in the least. 

Cormac McCarthy Has Died

The writer Cormac McCarthy has died. But not before this bit of pessimism, from a 1992 interview with the New York Times:

McCarthy wrote All the Pretty Horses, which is a fabulous novel if you can adjust to his clipped, acerbic writing style that wonderfully sets the tone for the story and its location. 

He also wrote Blood Meridian, which is now near the top of my reading list. I hear it's extremely violent, so much so that some people have stopped reading it out of revulsion and disgust. Today the NY Times called it "a bad dream of a Western." And he wrote the books on which two popular movies were based: The Road and No Country For Old Men, neither full of lollipops and rose petals. The former is set in an apocalyptic western Pennsylvania, not far from where I grew up, which some people consider the northernmost edge of Appalachia, one of McCarthy's two favorite locales (the other being the American southwest). He himself grew up in eastern Tennessee, of which he said, "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks."

He started college studying physics and engineering. After the Air Force he got serious about writing:

After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack. While Lee cared for the baby and tended to the chores of the house, Cormac asked her to get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.

Here's an interesting picture of him when he was young, about 40:

Classic '70s look. 

People Without Shame

People without any semblance of shame will be the downfall of this country. --

--

David Appell, freelance science writer

e: david.appell@gmail.com
w: http://www.davidappell.com

p: +1 503-975-5614

m: Keizer, Oregon, USA

Canadian Wildfires & Climate Change?

Not much of a trend:

Source: Canadian Broadcasting 5/25/2023. Corporation, https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/canada-wildfire-data-change-1.6854186