Our Earth Climate—Going with the Flow or Shifting the Goalposts

YEAR 2015 BEAT HISTORICAL RECORDS

2015 hottest & most active on record. Can we take it? Or will we break it?

Last December’s climate conference in Paris set a goal—agreed on by the Earth’s most powerful mid-East, West and Southern nations—to hold our combined increase in the global average temperature to two degrees Centigrade (2ºC) /Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—above pre-industrial levels.

Now February 2016 has already reached world temperature limit, see below.

Climate-speak—no time for fairytale flowery language: do or die

If we continue at the rate we’ve been going, NASA’s climatology computer model shows dramatic swings happening in world temperature, volcanic activity, and rainfall—not in twenty years, but in two.

As the predicted temperatures rise, the same group of scientists admit that ‘model uncertainty’ grows: that means it becomes increasingly more likely that we will experience “unforeseen, often disastrous” events. Hurricane Katrina? Just a fond memory.

It’s doubtful we’ll hold the line at two degrees Centigrade, but we need to give it our best shot. With anything that exceeds that target, we’re talking about enormous changes in global precipitation and temperature patterns, huge impacts on water and food security, and significant sea level rise
NASA Goddard Climatologist P.Sellers

2015 hottest, wettest, & most active on record. Can we take it? Or will we break it? The Earth, that is.

Climate Summit—The Science View: We Submit—or Else

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions—”by 2050″ or a similar approximation is no longer acceptable. We are being asked to step up and be counted—to right some of the wrong we are/have been doing—and mend our ways.

Bite the Bullet or Die

We outgrew killing whales. Maybe now we can stop killing ancient redwood groves

‘I believe future generations will look back on 2015 as an important but not decisive year in the struggle to align politics and policy, with science. This is an incredibly hard thing to do. On the science side, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence over 15 years, that climate change is real’
Piers Sellers, NASA physicist/climatologist 1/17/16

Upper limit 2ºC or 3.6ºF

Piers is convinced that if we continue unabated on this trajectory—i.e. make promises and do nothing—we could lead ourselves into a very uncomfortable, even dangerous, place.

Climate Ceiling Reached
The hottest on record is no joke in NASA and NOAA kingdoms. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Goddard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration take their newest computer science statistics seriously.

Tropospheric-stratospheric effects, exaggerated in El Niño years, produce increasing warm/wet summers

In perfect (space) timing, January 17th was launch date for Jason-3, the Space people’s answer to their weather-prediction prayers.

For this beauty*, NASA and NOAA cooperated with the French space agency to get their baby strategically placed in orbit—understandably—to monitor North American shores—impacting both Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Their data will also serve wider world systems on other shores.

Jason-3 adds to a twenty-three-year satellite monitoring of global sea surface maximum height levels—a measurement with scientific, commercial and practical applications related to climate change.
It is essentially a record of world currents and weather. Jason-3 data will be used for monitoring global sea level rise, researching human impacts on oceans, aiding prediction of hurricane intensity, and has marine navigation capability.

Its initial 2016 mission—is planned to last a minimum of three years.

*Sadly the Falcon-9 rocket, planned after re-entry to be recycled in the best Space Shuttle tradition, failed to land on its target—an unmanned platform in the Pacific—exploded and destroyed the platform. Oh well, another $1million down the tubes. Back to the drawing board for Vandenberg air base buffs.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…

After Trinity National Forest fires devastated half a county, natural regrowth has been encouraged

What can we back on Earth do?

Instead of multiple repetitive wars among ourselves, it’s been suggested we combine our intelligence for a war on emissions.

Early 2016 has been a hard year for Earth-First proponents, particularly in the Pacific NorthWest where the lungs of the planet—the Giant Redwoods, Bristlecone Pine and Douglas Fir—reside. This ‘carbon storage unit’ of age-old trees has been functioning well until quite recently. Then some of the lumber companies—instead of respecting the tradition of replant, restore, regenerate—succumbed to the old dollar bribe:
success in any industry, it seems, is measured by the bottom line of the balance sheet.

Local so-called environmentally-friendly forestry interests—some calling themselves ‘Resource’ companies—have, over a generation, acquired tens of thousands of acres of ancient trees illegally from original California settlers, and are systematically felling them in the name of ‘harvest’.

CLEAR-FELLING OUR WAY TO OBLIVION

Pictish Calgacus leads 30,000 Caledonians into battle with Romans at Mons Graupius, modern Aberdeenshire, AD83, where 10,000 Caledonians died

The Caledonian Forest in Scotland is a prime example of successive raiders, decimating or razing to the ground every living thing—in the name of war—or progress. Sadly, while we may have learned how, we seem unable to implement our new knowledge: that wildlife—especially tree forms—maintain a balance which we humans have difficulty grasping: that our life on Earth would be a devastation—a vast wilderness—if we were to continue, to run amok, clear-felling our way to oblivion.

It happened to the precursor of the Sahara Desert. Now Namibia. And it’s occurring all over Brazil. More shocking, it’s happening in our own backyard—in the midst of the most-politically-correct university community in North America. And we seem blind to the signs, the gradual erosion of what was once a flourishing planetary breathing system—healthy ancient trees.

Our attitude to forests—their vibrancy, and consequently our own continuing existence—seems faulty.

In Europe during both world wars, all participating countries felled trees to build with, and to burn—as part of the ‘war effort’.

France decimated the Alsace region and felled throughout the Loire valley, regardless of ‘aspect’—the term used in gardens of great houses, when meshing planting with a pleasant view. In Germany—while many southern forests were left untouched—e.g. Schwarzwald, Poland, Eastern bloc, northern trees suffered in an endless drive for more war fuel.

Hill of Barra, Aberdeenshire, showing rear route taken by Bruce’s troops to quell local Comyn opposition, 1308

Scotland suffered heavily. Deterred from obliterating millennium-old giant yews in their own home counties, the English pounced on (what was left of) the Caledonian Forest in Aberdeenshire, Kincardine and Forfar, and finished off what raiders had begun centuries before.

Most ‘recently’, Robert the Bruce, self-crowned king of Scots, began his march a.k.a. tree-burning at the Battle of Barra, 1308, in central Aberdeenshire and burned his army’s route thirty miles to the North Coast. The Caledonian forest—pine in particular—never recovered.

The Caledonian Forest had only just revived after Roman burning!

North Britain Conquest and Retreat

Regenerating the Caledonian Forest—author with Tacitus’ Mons Graupius in background

In November of AD83, as winter began its icy grip, Roman general Agricola pushed for one more battle in North Britain, before retiring to the comfort of Rome. It is said he took the Caledonians by surprise, but it is more likely Roman foot soldiers had more leverage on steep mountain terrain than the antiquated wooden chariots of the Picts. Rallied by the piercing cry of their battle-horn, the fearsome gold boar-headed carnyx, thirty thousand Caledonians gathered on the slopes of Bennachie. Ten thousand bodies were left dead after the battle.

In plain below Bennachie-Mons Graupius, 5thC Pictish Picardy Stone shows Caledonian lineage

Solitudinem faciunt Pacem appellant
They create a Wilderness and call it Peace—Calgacus exhorting his Caledonian tribes to battle at Mons Graupius

Tacitus could not possibly have known what Calgacus said to his troops before the battle of Mons Graupius—GRAMPIAN mountain range in Aberdeenshire—even the Chieftain’s name fails to appear in any Kinglist. Yet this one particular phrase from his speech has a genuine feel about it, as if Tacitus had heard it himself from the lips of captured Pictish warriors, and was moved to write it down. Publius Cornelius Tacitus’s job on the march was that of recording the exploits of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola (AD40-93), on the British campaign. They returned to Rome long before the snows took hold, leaving devastation behind.

Heartland of the Caledonian Forest—Aberdeenshire—was historically hit hardest. Unlike Westcoast Scotland, soil and climate here are receptive, rich and varied. The balmy Gulf Stream circles the Orkneys and Ultima Thule and then streams towards these ‘lowland’ hills, bringing balanced seasons to an already rich environment.

Climate, soil and people are more fertile/kindly than in rocky west coast ravines. Caledonian Scots pine, pinus sylvestris thrives. So does farming.

19thC tree-felling was kinder on California Redwoods, leaving more natural gaps for regeneration

When the Romans burned their way north, they were looking for gold. They found rebellious tribes and left them for dead, along with their forests. Robert the Bruce, in the summers of 1308-1310, burned the hunting (pine) forests of his rival for the throne, Comyn Earl of Buchan, and left nothing behind.

Two world wars finished off what was left of minimal remaining Caledonian pine stands.

Now, centuries on, Scotland’s Forestry Commission helps smallholders and landowners to replant oases of indigenous forest—pine, birch, oak and hazel—with maintenance grants to keep them sheep-and-deer-free—not an easy task in what are now (2000 years later) rich agricultural rolling meadows.
Other private agencies—like Trees for Life Scotland—have initiated their own planting programs, restoring pine, birch and aspen in deer-free ‘exclosures’, to encourage regeneration of natural understorey. Pine marten, snowy owl, crossbill, goldfinch and crested tit have all returned to such reclaimed woodland.

Biomass—Use or Abuse of Alternative Fuel

Trinidad Pier in whaler days, now a Northern Humboldt fishing village and resort

Controversially, Humboldt State University—seen by many academic institutions as a forerunner of enlightened attitude to use of technology within the natural environment—has mistakenly taken up the cudgel of biomass—as a back-door entry into the thorny climate problem. Unfortunately, their research has not been completely transparent and investigation reveals ‘substantial’ funding from forestry interests which are not impartial to the outcome of the University’s plan.

Biomass, seen as waste from a single campfire, may be relatively harmless to our atmosphere. Big business biomass, however—the University declares it will run its whole energy program on biomass fuel, instead of conventional statewide power sources—comprises woodland waste: milling detritus, forest-floor leftovers, mixed in a suitably nice cocktail of machine oil, sawdust sweepings, with an occasional drop of diesel—to go.

Local Earth-First activist group Climate Crisis Humboldt spoke in forum last week with HSU Senate, suggesting they reconsider their plan, and deliberation is underway within the hallowed halls.

The Humboldt climate group’s cry has not gone unheard. They are supported by European and international interests, embodied in Friends of the Earth, who are pushing for cancellation from the (higher—U.S.) Senate!

There is hope—if the state’s most northern university changes, the rest of California’s campuses will follow their lead. There is already considerable antipathy in the county towards the underhanded way in which funding from a local forestry giant has been offered as bait.
After it was pointed out to them that more carbon is stored by older/larger trees, than by acres of smaller young saplings, the company’s tree-felling operations have been temporarily halted by popular demand.

Global Temperatures Already Rising

Now statistics for February 2016 already show a marked upward trend, with unprecedented temperatures in both hemispheres.

February 2016 global temperatures already reached top limit

As March brings spring growth, the climate question will come up again and again. Earth Day—April 20th—celebrating John Muir‘s birthday and his “wilderness America”—is targeted by tree sitters, EarthFirsters and volunteer forest guardians in Pacific NorthWest, in their march for the trees.

Earth Mother is indeed listening to our cries this spring. And if we choose to mend our ways, she might even forgive us and bring back her beauty—or her Beast.

It’s our choice. Our future.
©2016 Siderealview

Tree Consciousness: Last Nail in the Human Coffin or Resurrection for our Species?

One century on—John Muir’s Redwood darlings—stripped for cash, hemmed in by hiking trails

“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and luggage and chatter.” –John Muir, letter to his wife Louie from Yosemite, July 1888

Arbor Day weekend—sadly for the trees—falls on Easter this year: exactly one century after their truest lover, arboreal-sequoia-spirit, John Muir, born April 21, 1838 Dunbar, Scotland, died (December 24, 1914) of a broken heart in a Los Angeles hospital—a terminal scenario he most feared.

Earth Week for Arborists

NoCal 2014: free, enticing, available, but very managed & very non-Redwood-friendly

Arborophiles will gather this week for an unusual tree-planting ceremony. One of many initiatives in the U.S. capital during Earth Week to give credence to the memory of Sierra Club Founder John Muir, the tree-planting ceremony April 25th by Archangel Ancient Trees’ David Milarch at the National Institute for Health, Bethesda, MD will embed in the earth two clones of the ‘Hippocrates sycamore’, a gift from Greece to the U.S. in 1960. At that time, a cutting was taken from the original plane tree on Cos, as an intercultural exchange from the Father of Western Medicine who taught his acolytes there, 330B.C., to D.C.’s Institute of Health—whose whole-medical ethos is based on the Hippocratic Oath. Milarch’s work to clone the rootstock has succeeded. The Institute celebrates Earth Week with an annual tree planting in the capital.

Teetering off the continental tectonic plate: coastline driving along Humboldt’s Scenic Drive is a constant surprise

Two hundred forty miles north of Dunbar, Trees for Life, a charitable group on a mission to restore Caledonian pine forest in sheep-torn northern Scotland, celebrates its twenty-fifth year of planting this summer. The Scots Government (RCAHMS & Forestry Commission) have been supporting individuals to plant small landholdings of remnant forest-cum-ancient monuments with indigenous trees, since 1988. They also celebrate twenty-five this year.

Blue Findhorn caravan where Dorothy Maclean, Eileen and Peter Caddy meditated, lived and grew cabbages

Dorothy Maclean, 94—surviving co-founder of the Findhorn Garden of miracle growth in Moray, Scotland—continues to speak daily to her Muses, her sweet pea Deva, and the Great Spirit. “If we hadn’t tuned into the Nature Devas and listened to their coaxing, we would just have been another meditation group,” she says of the fifty-two-year old Foundation, Center for Intentional Living and Eco-Village, which grew out of the caravan park where she planted her sweet peas. Her quiet stillness continues to inspire her friends and neighbors. The Findhorn Garden thrives.

Findhorn was fertile ground for many Earth-spiritual ideas. David Spangler, Co-Director 1970-1973, founded the Lorian Association, Issaquah, WA where he is Director of Education-Research. His Center for Incarnational Spirituality
focuses on exploring, understanding, and teaching Lorian’s understanding of the emerging spiritual impulse.

Long-time Findhorn trustee and believer in the angelic realms, author William Bloom regularly speaks on self-realization, and encourages living within nature and within one’s own spirit.

Fup, Jim Dodge’s exceptional mallard, has wisdom of the still life

Our radiant energy pervades and gives rise to all life. While it may speak to us through plants, Nature spirits or the human beings with whom we share life on this planet, all are reflections of the deeper reality behind and within them. Myth has become reality in the Findhorn Garden, not to present us with a new form of spiritualism, but to offer us a new vision of life, a vision of unity.
Essentially, the Devas and Nature Spirits are aspects of our own selves, guiding us toward our true identity, the Divine Reality within.
The Findhorn Garden: Pioneering a New vision of Man and nature in Cooperation, by the Findhorn Community; introduction by Sir George Trevelyan, Bt. Turnstone/Wildwood, ©1975

Jim Dodge has been director of creative writing in the English department at Humboldt State University Arcata since 1995. Author of Fup, above, and Stone Junction, he believes like Maclean, Spangler and Bloom, that by surrounding oneself in nature, making it our friend, Nature has ways of teaching us to flow more intuitively, more naturally, as the waves of energy themselves. It is what is taught in all Native American wisdom.

Earth First or Earth Whenever

Naturalist John Muir took US President Teddy Roosevelt camping overnight in Yosemite, 1906

He thought on it, mulling it with that slow, voluptuous thoroughness that comes with the still life. He paused. ‘Have you not found that hunger becomes most intense near the moment of satisfaction?’
Johnny Seven Moons to Granddaddy Jake in Jim Dodge’s Fup

John Muir would have been happy to see his trees—albeit several foreign imports—receive all this attention. But his first love—wilderness—and our 21st-Century attitude to it, would have him totally confused.

Because this weekend also heralds Spring Break—Brit, Easter Hols—and a sudden switch of fortune for spaceweather-worry-warts from Arctic deepfreeze to Caribbean breathless balmy (courtesy current incoming M-class solar flare, below sidebar right); American teenage tin-soldiers are on the march.

Spring Break: mass exodus of youth, determined to tame Nature in the Wild

Parents in tow, willingly or otherwise, the great Easter adventure is to pit one’s child against Nature, and hope the family comes back in one piece, if not in one tent. Media classes in kayaking and backpacking abound, boyscout-girl-guide firemaking is ‘awesome possum’; endless catalogs touting latest designer all-weather gear, space-age freeze-dried GMO-mush in non-recyclable plastic bombs serve to make vacation roughing it more smooth… or maybe it’s to give Mom relief and a catalog to read, when wet wood spits out the camp fire.

Highway-299, No.Humboldt County’s E-W artery, daily connects Redding, Central Valley via Redwoods to the Coast

School vacations occur, regardless of solar maxima, X-class and M-class flares incoming, internet interruptions, and Chaos Theory.

What currently cool school kids may fail to grasp, in their quest for astral Tesla solar panels, ear-to-ear-sound, and instant palm-top X-box hacking, is that there is no internet on a mountain top; arborophiles and tree sitters hug trees, not cut them down. What their parents may fail to notice is increasing wear and tear on the planet brought on by human indifference.

Homeguard, Humboldt style

According to Forbes Magazine, ‘Gallup poll reports more than sixty percent Americans believe effect of global warming is happening during their lifetimes, yet only 25% worry about it.’

Local tolerance during full moon madness, combined with Easter, the new growing season and runup to Beltane and Cinco de Mayo, is just too much for some local redwoods residents. They close their gates, get out the shotgun, ask stray campers, their single-parent wildchild wannabes—and their litter—to leave.

Big Tree, like her sister Corkscrew Tree, both 350-ft+ sequoia sempervirens, hold Prairie Creek State Park microsystem in balance

Meanwhile, Milarch and his research team have been scouring Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park along infamous Tsunami Alley in Northern Humboldt, in search for the last undiscovered sequoia sempervirens.

It will not have helped matters in the ‘real world’ that Wilderness has not been cared for at Muir’s level for several decades, much less in the one hundred twenty years since he and President Roosevelt founded the Sierra Club in 1892—to take care of Mother N where John M left off. Teddy Roosevelt, at Muir’s insistence, brought 430 million acres of land under federal protection during his presidency.

At the end of his life, Muir and Sierra Club fought a bitter battle on construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam over Hetch Hetchy Valley in his beloved Yosemite National Park.

1890s Chute harvested redwood logs, wooden trains, flumes called Miracles of the Age hauled lumber to sawmill yards

Muir used his solitary voice in the wilderness; Sierra Club used lawyers.

Seen as the first major battle of the environmental movement, it pales by comparison with present treesit, earth-aware group initiatives, and corporate legal wrangling. But for Muir, who had seen his work put an end to ruthless tree-felling, an exploitative timber trade, this betrayal bruised his spirit. On Christmas Eve, 1914—just over a year after Congress authorized the dam’s construction against his wishes—Muir died of pneumonia in southern California.

Redwood moorings from Trinidad, CA whaling days were replaced 2012 by smart steel dock

His work was seminal. He inspired generations of naturalists, and brought pioneer spirit, raw enthusiasm and innocence to an American system which has only calcified since his time.

National Parks hit by recent budget cuts made wilderness vacations less fun than fatiguing, more stressful than stretching. So, some public opinion has made inroads, in California, Colorado and Washington at least.

David Milarch admits his search for the ultimate sequoia is a hunt for a trigger to activate his own DNA. He believes the trees have more to teach us than we presently have capacity to learn, but thinks, like Dodge’s immortal Granddaddy, that time is on our side.

There is No Planet B
US Congress antics and current Mercurial media circus make chameleons of all politicians, and so 21stC legislation cannot be depended on for preservation of our Pale Blue Dot, as Carl Sagan affectionately calls home.

Full Lunar Eclipse chalice chart 4/15/14 inside a Cardinal Grand Cross: cornucopia of Earth Week abundance: we can lose it all

In 1982, a shy genius marine bacteriological USC professor Milo Appleman, Ph.D., published his Epitaph for Planet Earth: How to Survive the approaching End of the Human Species, (Frederick Fell, New York). His predictions of the North Pacific Garbage Gyre and (projected) effect of human pollution on world oceans fell on deaf ears. Now, trillions of dollars worldwide are spent annually on so-called cleanup operations.

Media moguls, bored with political stalemate, seem to have brightened viewers’ choices by reaching for the heavens: coverage of April 15th’s first blood moon total lunar eclipse of 2014, along with juxtaposition of Mars, Jupiter and Mercury in the northern night sky, broke Nielsen ratings for a decade. This means more people may be—unconsciously—influenced by the stars!

Cardinal Grand Cross:
Uranus Jupiter Pluto Mars at 13º square
change~change~change

When beggars die,
There are no comets seen,
The heavens themselves
Blaze forth the death of princes
Calphurnia to Julius Caesar
Act II Scene 2 William Shakespeare

What they didn’t say—management order not to frighten viewers—is that, energetically, planet earth is still laboring under the aegis of Saturn and Uranus, planets of change, lined up in a Cardinal Grand Cross, which began March 2010 and will not leave us alone until June 2016. This means massive change for society, but also inner change for the individual. Spaceweather and glory of the stars? this is only the beginning.

So-called primitive Man has always looked to the heavens for guidance. He derived comfort in infinite Divine balance of number. Gematria, Judaic name-number of God, reflects supreme balance in Fibonacci Phi spiral that permeates the Universe. In known civilizations of antiquity—China, Babylon, Egypt—arithmetic-number was sacred, as source of all knowledge, a guide to rightful conduct in art, music, affairs of state.

Minimum ‘safe’ height: 146feet;
most of Tsunami Alley: sea-level 😦

Ancient Science was based like today on number, but whereas it is now used quantitatively in a secular sense, the Ancients saw numbers as symbols of the Universe. They inhabited a living creature of divine fabrication, designed in accordance with reason, and thus, to some extent, comprehensible by the human mind.
John Michell, Dimensions of Paradise, 1988

Comet ISON whet public appetite, current planetary alignments, plus total lunar and annular solar (visible only in Antarctica 4/29) eclipses and Lyrid meteor shower all in one week are a heady mix. Within the vise of a six-year Grand Cross, daily change is beginning to look scary. The streetwise kid knows at gut level what the Ancients knew by precise calculation: Fireworks in the sky means group change—maybe even all change.

Petrolia Shear Zone, Humboldt County, where 3 volcanic faults meet, courtesy HSU Geology

When solar storms and volcanic activity start to make EarthMama shake, even the masses look to the skies. There are three more total lunar eclipses to complete a tetrad over the next year—encouraging ingénue stargazing—10/8/14; 4/4/15, 9/28/15. Even New Age television seems to be getting stardust in its teeth.

Humans—through Nature—have always thrilled to the presence of the Divine—Muse—in dance, music, water, sound and light. Losing our way in the 21st Century, like those tree people of the past, may not be an option. So, please, would all ’Sixties’ Back-to-the-Land BabyBoomer survivors—or any who sold out to the system and regret—please stand. Along with treesitters in the mold of Julia Butterly Hill, and activists of the ’Noughties, now our flower-power really counts.

This time, it will take all the love we can generate together,
to heal and help each other through.

There is no Planet B.
Now is the time to love our little comfort zone.
WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get.
@2014 Siderealview