The Bounty

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

We had a most marvelous time this past Thanksgiving. Our daughter, three grandchildren and their spouses, and five great grandchildren, three under a year old, visited, some for two nights. We had a Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, followed by another on Saturday, because we hadn’t agreed on a schedule, and another shorter farewell inning on Sunday.

The center of the meal was, naturally, a turkey, but what a turkey. Adam and Paula had raised it. When they asked what size we wanted, we said the largest they had. We were thinking of maybe 12 pounds or so, not the more than 28 pounder we received!

Good Calories, Bad Calories

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. ~ Plato

This is a review of a book that Michael Pollen has described as “A vitally important book, destined to change the way we think about food.” Alternative medicine guru Andrew Weil, M.D., called it “A very important book.” Yet, it is an investigated report of intimidating depth, 609 pages including the index, that sadly I doubt most of you will ever read. I only try below to give you a softer tour of a few of the high points to tempt you. The book is Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, Anchor Books, 2007. Taubes not only describes the expected results of various diets, but at least as importantly I believe, recounts a pertinent allegory of our times, of how easily we can be manipulated to our and the Earth’s detriment.

Nearly thirty years ago, I was experiencing a variety of seemingly unrelated symptoms that became more worrisome over time. So began a wandering from physician to physician, specialist to specialist, seeking relief. One night, after ten years or so and a dozen physicians, I was in terrible distress and Marlene somehow or another got me to an emergency facility.

Greetings from the Farm

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Well, in truth, far from being a farm. Maybe a third to half acre depending upon what we’re counting. Our home is under a grove of maybe two hundred year old valley oaks between a stream, which is dry two thirds of the year, and a red oaked ridge to the west that finally stretches wildly up a couple of thousand feet. It’s very quiet, except for the bird “clamor,” and nights are starry. Our water originates from a spring that is shared by others; in spite of the drought, it so far continues to flow – with wonderful water.

Wow, it rained, thanks apparently to El Niño and a warming ocean. The plants look so thrilled. The winter garden is being planted: beets and carrots, peas, lettuce and broccoli, cabbage, spinach, chard, and kale, Asian greens, and onions, garlic, and leeks. We’ve planted a thousand onion and garlic bulbs, or so it seemed. We learned from Peaceful Valley’s fall catalog that we can also plant potatoes. Wow, and no watering. Of  course we can’t grow tomatoes, corn, beans, and squash, but winter is otherwise a wonderful time to garden in our climate. But, lest we forget, the cooler summer and rain are vagaries of ever-changeable weather and solar sunspot cycles and not indicative of climate trends – greenhouse gases continue to accumulate.

I was born and raised on a Great Depression/WWII Iowa farm and would likely be there still, if I could have found a way to afford to stay. When I graduated from high school, the industrialization of agriculture was well on the way, beginning with heavy mechanized equipment expenses. I always wanted to return, as Wendell Berry did, but could never find the means. I sometimes tell Marlene of my continued wishes for a real farm, to which she laughs and asks me how I would have the energy to operate it. OK, I’m almost 74 years old and, since I insist in “farming” without power tools, I have about enough to keep me busy. This is especially true since time is wasted reading and writing and walking and just poking around.

Both the problem and the fascination with this place is that it is like no other in which I’ve gardened: Iowa, the Northwest, the old cooler, wetter Bay Area, or Kauai. Wendell Berry’s old farmers insist that one can’t learn farming from books;

Chemical Jigsaw Puzzles

From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

I’ve followed the chemical pollution conundrum for, what, fifty years and thought I understood all the risks to which we are exposed. The day before I began composing this, I stumbled upon an explanation of one alarming aspect of which I was somehow unaware: monoclonal antibodies as described by Stuart Kaufmann in his “Investigations”. This appears to be one of those critical patterns that connect of which most of us haven’t noticed, but which seem to me vital for us to understand. Can I not tell you? First, a bit of cellular biochemistry that has been cooked, I hope, to tender digestibility:

Every living cell has a cell wall consisting of fatty molecules that separate its interior chemistry from the world. The cell, however, must get nutrients from outside and otherwise sense what is going on out there in order to find that food and otherwise adapt to its living and non-living environment. In order to do this, certain molecular protuberances known as receptors poke from the inside through the cell wall to the outside. When a wandering molecule on the outside, referred to as a ligand, binds to a receptor, many things can happen depending upon the nature of the receptor.

A receptor may recognize a ligand as food and initiate a chemical process to move it through the cell wall. Alternately, when a binding occurs, the part of the receptor exposed within the cell may initiate a chemical reaction therein. For instance, if the ligand is the hormone cortisol, depending upon the nature of the receptor, a binding can result permitting fat storage, adjusting blood sodium levels, or cooling down an inflammation among others. That is, cortisol receptors may share an external molecular appearance while activating quite different functions inside. This is likely true for nearly all types of receptors.

Finally, there are those curious receptors known as antibodies that float around outside cells. When one end binds to a ligand, say a virus, the other becomes an active ligand for other receptors presented by immune system cells. This second binding results, hopefully, in the inactivation or death of the infecting agent.

Cells of all types, human, other animal, plant, and bacteria, have receptor/ligand pairs of multitudes of different types, many more of which are being regularly discovered. Thus, for us humans, there are those related to nerves (serotonin, dopamine, …), hormones (thyroid, female and male, cortisol, …), immune system (many, many), alertness (endorphins, …), wound and bone healing (interferon, …), food utilization (insulin, …), and so on.

Community Building in a World of Shrinking Energy Resources

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better … and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed – the ecological, social, demographic, or general breakdown of civilization – will be unavoidable.
–Václav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia, in a speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, February, 1990

The American political establishment and press were ecstatic that playwright Havel, the president of a recently communist country, should come the U.S. and praise freedom. But, they entirely overlooked what he was saying.

Earlier in the century, phenomenologist philosopher Edmund Husserl was contending that theoretical knowledge had lost contact with living human experience. In 1936, Husserl wrote a powerful treatise on the subject, “The Crisis of European Sciences” (in German), in which he asserted that the morally ordered world of our prereflective lived experience is inseparable from Nature, what he described as the common life-world. Lebenswelt. Havel wrote that Husserl’s understanding of “the natural world” and “the world of lived experience” are reliable vectors through which to approach “the spiritual framework of modern civilization and the source of the present crisis.” He identified children, working people, and peasants as “far more rooted in what some philosophers call the natural world… than most modern adults.” “They have not grown alienated from the world of their actual personal experience,” he wrote, “the world which has its morning and its evening, its down (the earth) and its up (the heavens), where the sun rises daily in the east, traverses the sky and sets in the west …”

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 3)

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Parts |1|2|3|

August 28, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

In the East, Gandhi was assassinated, as was his dream for India. Vandana Shiva has described so poignantly what is happening there at this moment, but not just there. I don’t believe that we have any hope in reversing this in our own present governmental context. Is it not evident that we need a revolution. But, how so? As Thoreau finished his essay, “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. … All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. … But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.” I urge you to read “slaves” as “illegal immigrants, many working for slave wages”. Who but Thoreau can say it better? Thoreau scared people – and still does.

Those in power in this country and increasingly in the world have no respect for hard physical labor; accordingly, following our leaders, neither do Americans at large. So, we depend upon the mostly illegal Latinos to do the physical work to feed us. A distant acquaintance from this group, who has lived here many years, has a fine family, and has a responsible job running field machinery for a farmer that is a far distant giant global corporation, had to return south because of this mother’s illness.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 2)

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Parts |1|2|3|

August 18, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Soon after it was published in the early seventies, I grabbed Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals off the shelf. Every few years since, I’ve reread it and continue to find jewels. Alinsky was firm that if we are to succeed in community organizing, we must be cognizant of history, have a sense that our actions fit into a larger context, that we aren’t alone. As you have seen in Part 1, we are not the first who have confronted these problems, though ours have become more threatening in very broad Earth-wide terms. Allow me to take you back further.

Not long ago the great majority of Americans lived on farms or in small villages supporting those farmers. Almost all of them had personal gardens and fruit trees and raised chickens. Even within the villages, not a few owned a few goats and the yearly pig. I recall it well when the first “supermarket” came to my home town in the fifties. My farmer parents never raised another garden except for a couple of tomatoes. Instead, they concentrated on modernizing their farming methods beginning with buying expensive equipment, which required Mom to work in town, as Dad did as well in the winter repairing tractors. My ancestors’ sustainable family farms became shrouded in tales recounted at increasingly rare family gatherings. Because of soaring farming costs, children scattered and the old mutually supportive extended families withered.

So, I’m a romantic. In my first decade, I lived on the place that my great, great grandparents (one set) had settled. My great, great grandfather was an expert carpenter, likely apprenticed as a fishing boat builder on the Isle of Jersey and the Gaspè Peninsula. He had also learned blacksmithing from his father. Though the farm was wasting away in my time,

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 1)

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Peter Kropotkin

From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Parts |1|2|3|

August 12, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.

— seventeenth century anonymous

The Grand Inquisitor, in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”, challenges Christ: humanity is “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious … in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘make us your slaves, but feed us.’” Christ remains silent.

As Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Gary Paul Nabhan, Gary Taubes, and others have chronicled in great detail, we Americans and increasingly those living elsewhere are enslaved by a food production system that is notorious for the waste of natural resources, destruction of environment, social decay, and damaging to health. This is only one symptom, although a major one, pinpointing that our society is sick both emotionally and physically. We are sliding toward a chasm edge beyond which these food sources and all the other goodies of our modern society will slip from our grasp. I won’t beat this drum any further and assume it is a given. If you can’t agree or at least imagine so, if you aren’t mad as hell and unwilling to stand it any longer, if you don’t care, don’t bother to read further.

Our overriding questions: how did we get in the fix and how do we escape? Southwestern writer Edward Abbey captured the answers in a nutshell:

“Money means power, not merely wealth. Money gives us power over others – to command their labor, their minds, even their souls. Even their behavior, conduct, attitudes.

Reading between the lines (with video)

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County
(video at end of article)

July 30, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

My, my, so many angry and insistent letters to editors, angry and insistent blogs. I say I don’t read or listen to the commercial media stuff anymore because it is all fluff. But, sometimes I can’t seem to stop myself. We stopped for some coffee on the way to an appointment the other day and there was a New York Times, July 22, laying waiting to fill my time. I flip through it; nothing; nothing. Then, I reach the editorial, which glares at me “Climate Loopholes.” I also subscribe to email news notifications from Mother Jones. Shortly after reading the article, that magazine pointed me to Rachel Morris’s “It’s 3 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Climate Bill Is?”.

The increasingly infamous Waxman-Markey climate change bill was approved by the House and is on its way to the much tougher Senate. Half of the electricity used in this country is generated by extremely dirty coal-fired generators. Thanks to coal-state representatives, the bill imposes no standards on existing generators and, more amazingly, removes these plants from EPA Clean Air Act oversight.

A second problem with this bill involves carbon dioxide cap and trade. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, as you may have noticed, have recently been reporting immense profits. These profits didn’t come from loans, but by selling insurance in the form of hedge funds,

Why Are We Wasting Time?

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

July 24, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

I’ve nearly given up reading news and commentary of any kind. I hardly ever visit the usual widely read Internet commentary blogs or magazines of any stripe. There are only three notable exceptions: Ukiah Blog, the Ukiah Daily Journal letters to the editor, and the Anderson Valley Advertiser for Bruce Anderson’s commentaries and to get a laugh about the latest Supervisor foibles.

Surely, then, I’m not informed? I very much disagree. If you could see the stack of books surrounding us everywhere, you would see what nonsense that is.

Two of the latest books that have come my way are “Self Organization in Biological Systems,” edited by Camazine et al and published by Princeton, and “Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change,” edited by Berkes et al and published by Cambridge. Each includes reports of detailed studies and assume sophisticated understanding of ecology and other areas. They have much to say regarding our situation, but I’d bet no one in a policy making context will ever read them.

I don’t write these things to put you down in any way. My purpose is to buttress my feelings that almost everything that is dumped onto us by the media, Internet blogs, corporation marketing, and especially governments of all levels is superficial tripe. If we have a feeling for history, such as Howard Zinn documented so well

The coming great cook-out? Part 4 of 4

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

July 2, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

George Was Right!

On June 22, Sonja Sharp reported on Mother Jones that the far northern Siberian town Oymyakon was undergoing an unprecedented heat wave. The previous day temperatures were recorded at just under 32 C, or nearly 90 degrees F (32.6 C is the highest ever recorded temperature), with weekend temperatures in the high 80s. This past winter, temperatures twice dropped to -60.2 C, or nearly -86 F, marking one of the coldest winters the village of once-nomadic reindeer herders has suffered in nearly a century.

At the moment, we appear to be experiencing a duel between a cool sun and a warming atmosphere. The sun has been warming, with short respites, for millions of years, as astrophysicists assure us it will continue to do. So, I know how I’m betting.

I often wonder why I’m bothering to write these, especially given the doubts I have that we humans can get our heads out of pails filled with meaningless distractions. Oh, my, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died, as headlines informed us. I’m sure this caused distress for some. How many others died as they did? Do you know of any who haven’t or won’t? How many will die if we cook the Earth? How many will die if we exhaust the Earth’s productive soils and fresh water, as we are doing, and food production collapses.

Let’s not talk about such depressing things, it is too distressing. Let’s leave it to the experts to save us, those engineers who created all those wonderful electronic devices that we must have. Let’s go shopping, which is always fun.

Funny thing, I’m unafraid to look these concerns and the pending failure of the capitalist economy in the face, and I’m still the happiest I’ve ever been as I live in the moment. It is a astoundingly beautiful world, perpetually wondrous, perpetually changing. I don’t mean here the world of the big box stores, fast food outlets, and filling stations, indistinguishable wherever found in the country and increasingly the world. I’m speaking of, for example, a tree in my backyard.

Every leaf on that tree is unique as even a simple examination will discover; it never existed previously and shall never again. No two trees, no two blades of grass, no two sparrows are identical, even to themselves moment to moment. Everywhere in the natural world, I see such uniqueness, such amazing beauty and complexity, trillions of cells working cooperatively. Who could be bored, if they are aware? I am in such awe and so thankful of having had the opportunity to have such experiences.

My overwhelming concern is that we may destroy these gifts. In fact, all over the Earth we are doing so – in order to construct, duplicate, more cars, more televisions, more computers, more fashionable clothing, and more “educated” children who can plug into the corporate workplace. All of these soon become old and new better products are ever coming that we must have. I find this so sad, as I hope you do.

The coming great cook-out? Part 3 of 4

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

June 11, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

A Green Bubble?

But how can I explain, how can I explain to you?
You will understand less after I have explained it.
All that I can hope to make you understand
Is only events; not what has happened.
And people to whom nothing has ever happened
Cannot understand the unimportance of events.
~T.S. Eliot, “The Family Reunion”

Search for certainty as much as we can, and we’ll invariably fail. That’s the story told by the so-called new science of emergence that is infiltrating all the old sciences and taunting classical beliefs that humans and their sciences and technologies can overcome. Below is a five act tragedy or comedy – it’s difficult to say which, though I’m reminded of Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges – centered on our dilemma.

Global warming news
Record cold has been experienced in the past few weeks across the Southern Hemisphere, in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Our own spring has become cool. The sun is acting strangely and may be throwing a kink in the immediate prospects of rapid global warming. George W. Will and friends have been arguing for years that the climate is not warming, it is cooling. They are surely savoring the news, recognizing confirmation, and preparing to twist it. Here is my, more likely I believe, contrary twist.

The sun goes through roughly an 11-year cycle of activity, from stormy to quiet and back again. Solar activity often occurs near sunspots, dark regions on the sun caused by concentrated magnetic fields. It is much warmer during solar maximum, when sunspot cycle and solar activity is high, versus solar minimum, when the sun is quiet and there are usually no sunspots.

The coming great cook-out? Part 2 of 4

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

May 29, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

A View From Afar

Here I sit in outer space, occasionally intercepting so-called information broadcast by dying print media and internet blogs of unknown origins. Some are reporting that the recession will be over in a couple of months, but jobs and house prices will continue shrinking until sometime next year. Anyhow, though individual debt is at al all time high, consumer confidence is increasing – but, wait, their purchasing isn’t. A lot of this just doesn’t compute, but there is more.

The really big news that isn’t headlined by the popular media is that the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill is on the House floor. As with all such legislation, as far as I can tell from discussions, it is likely so convoluted that no one truly understands it. “Plenty of folks are horrified—for entirely opposite reasons.” Keith Johnson wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Even with all the compromises, conservatives are still aghast at the costs of what they call a giant ‘energy tax.’

Thanks to all the compromises, some environmentalists are aghast at what they see as a toothless bill. You could drive yourself insane plowing through the nearly 1,000 pages and try to work out how all the overlapping policies, regulators, giveaways, exemptions, and mandates actually affect U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions over the next four decades.”

Not to worry. The White House assures us, in a statement released May 22, 2009, “Coupled with the announcement about setting a new national policy to both increase fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gas pollution, the legislation that passed out of House Energy and Commerce Committee is a historic leap towards providing clean energy incentives that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create millions of new jobs all across America. The President has been clear that if there are disparate impacts on consumers and business during the transition period, they should be compensated. Make no mistake – this bill sets aggressive emissions reductions targets and provides for a program that invests in the technologies needed to bring about a clean energy future.”

The coming great cook-out? Part 1 of 4

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From Don Sanderson

3/19/09 Ukiah, North California

That global warming is occurring has become obvious here in Northern California. As I am writing this paragraph, it is now the second week in December, we still have tomatoes and peppers ripening in our garden. Last year, some made it until Thanksgiving, a November first here in the experience of a 90 year old friend and native.

We are now entering a citrus climate, so what’s not to love? Avocados next? Mangos? Beginning last winter and continuing though this fall, except for a brief rainy spell, we have had a high pressure system above more typical of summer. When we have had frosts, the cold hasn’t come from the north, but from loss of ground heat to the empty sky typical of a desert. We now have had rainfall amounts characteristic of areas several hundred miles south and water shortages are becoming critical. The creek in front of our home, which typically still has had pools into July, emptied in May last year and early April this – fifteen years ago it was nearly perennial and hosted successfully spawning steelhead. Fires that burned all over the area early in the summer are forcing winemakers to filter the smoke chemicals out of their wine.

Funny, though I point out to others that these are likely effects of global warming and may be expected to get worse, it doesn’t appear to be changing anyone’s behavior. From discussions, many seem to feel that ‘they’ will fix it, whoever ‘they’ are. Besides, some of my friends are reading that some ‘authorities’ are saying that this will only increase land for agriculture in the north – if climate change is indeed happening, which these persons doubt.

A mid-January, 2009, addendum: we finally had a frost in mid-December followed by a couple inches of rain; the creek remains dry and warm sunny days are predicted for a week or more into the future. In late January, 2009, still no more rain, local lakes are at record lows, and we are reading the news of terrible droughts in Argentina and Australia. Perth is in danger of becoming uninhabitable.

Early March, 2009, addendum: we’ve had maybe 7 or 8 inches of light rain since the middle of February and the creek is running, though I can now step across at some places without getting wet; will that get us through the summer? It was just reported that Lake Mendocino’s water level is now at 55 percent, whereas it was at 96 percent at this time last year, so let’s not hold our breaths. I learned a week ago or so that the Colorado Plateau drought, which is now more than 11 years old, is threatening the water supplies of Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, San Diego, and so on. It appears we should be expecting this situation of confront us soon. Meanwhile, the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and the forecast is more of the same – well, maybe a sprinkle.

Sanderson update…

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From Don Sanderson

2/23/09 Ukiah, California I was incorrect about the value of bonds to be sold this week, but ….
From Bloomberg a few minutes ago:

The Treasury Department plans to auction $40 billion of two-year notes Tuesday, a record $32 billion of five-year securities Feb. 25 and a record $22 billion of seven-year debt Feb. 26.

“With all the supply coming, people are taking it as an opportunity to short the Treasury market,” said Charles Comiskey, head of U.S. Treasury trading in New York at HSBC Securities USA Inc., one of the 16 primary dealers that are required to bid in Treasury auctions. To short is to bet the price of a security will fall.

The U.S. will probably borrow $2.5 trillion during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to primary dealer Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The figure is almost triple the $892 billion in notes and bonds the Treasury sold in the previous 12 months.

“We’re dealing with a huge boatload of supply,” said Kevin Flanagan, a Purchase, New York-based fixed-income strategist for Morgan Stanley’s individual-investor clients. “We feel it will continue to hover over the market for the entire year.”

U.S. yields indicate bets on inflation have been rising over the past three months.

Fed policy makers have debated whether to purchase longer-term U.S. debt to help lower consumer borrowing costs, an option raised by Bernanke late last year.

“Buying Treasuries is not on the Fed’s front burner,” said Thomas Roth, head of U.S. government bond trading in New York at Dresdner Kleinwort, another primary dealer. “It’s something that would be a last resort type of thing. People are still hoping.”

Elsewhere, Bloomberg reports that dividends have fallen far below bond yields, ao the stock market has become uninteresting to investors. Look for a big stock market drop and 401Ks and other pension funds to disappear.

And, away we go …

What shall we eat?

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From Don Sanderson

2/20/09 Ukiah, California At the beginning of the week of Feb. 14, George Wills loosed a column entitled “Dark Doom Sayers” informing us that global warming is a myth, disdaining Energy Secretary Stephan Chu’s comments on the effects resulting desertification would have on our food supplies, and mocking Science Advisor John Holdren who has similar concerns. Wills asserted he had scientific foundations for his conclusions, so who can dispute with him? We want to believe. Indeed, it doesn’t require much effort to find Wills is preaching nonsense.

Wills began by referring to a report from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center (ACRC), global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979 and that Arctic sea ice had been rapidly increasing. The ACRC staff quickly replied on their web site: “We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.” Arctic sea ice expanded at near-record rates of October and November, which Wills’ claimed supported his points. In fact, the rate than slowed and present coverage is somewhat less than last year at this time, roughly 13 million sq. km.

He then quoted the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to the effect that global temperatures had not increased in the last twenty years. In fact, the WMO reported “The global mean surface temperature for 2007 was estimated at 0.41°C/0.74°F above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.20°F.” “In January and April 2007 it is likely that global land surface temperatures ranked warmest since records began in 1880, 1.89°C warmer than average for January and 1.37°C warmer than average for April.”

Next week could be really big – 2/21/09

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From Don Sanderson

2/21/09 Ukiah, Northern California Next week, some economically/financially important events are unfolding that well may portend a rapid economic dive off the cliff for the United States, much more quickly than anyone is predicting that I’ve seen reported in the usual media. But, the tracks are there. It concerns the U.S. Treasury bond market where Obama must go to get his stimulus funds and, increasingly, much of the rest of the money he needs to operate the government and fight his wars. Some background:

A good way to track the economy, given the amounts of money the U.S. government is spreading around, is to follow the yields of U.S. Treasury bonds. Whenever the U.S. spends money it hasn’t collected from taxes and fees, it must first get from the sales of bonds.

Some background: When one invests a certain amount of money in a bond, say $1,000, at an annual return of 15 percent, it is said that the bond has yielded 15 percent or $150. If the bond is then sold for, say, $800, the buyer still gets an annual return of $150, but that is a rate of return of 18.75 percent, the bond now yields 18.75 percent. So, if you read that U.S. Treasury bond yield has increased, this should tell you that the market for bonds has fallen, much as the stock market falls. Bond yields have been steadily growing.

The U.S. Treasury sells both short term, say 5 year, and long term, say 20 year, bonds. Those who invest in short term bonds may be uncertain with the future and don’t want to bet long term. So, the relative yields of the two types of bonds should give one an idea of how much faith investors have in America’s financial future. In fact, short term bond yields are low in historical terms relative to long term ones, indicating bond holders feel insecure.