Musings From the Corner of the Round Barn
Or, Man Oh Manatee!
by bear bait
More than 60 years ago there were a lot of barns in Western Oregon. A series of events since then have reduced the number of old barns to remaining few. We had some hellacious snow falls, such as Winter 1948-49, and those broke barn backs. Some notable wind storms, contributed, including the Columbus Day blow in 1962. And then the Christmas Flood of 1964. Big snow with rain on it, the last one was in 1969 if memory serves me, with 3 feet on the flat from YewGene to Po’tland, and deeper in the Coast Range.
At least twenty cow dairies lost their barns in those weather events, and the 1969 snowstorm was the final the impetus for the consolidation of all the cheese plants along the coast into the Tillamook and Bandon cheese brands. A lot of loggers no longer had to get up real early to milk some cows alongside their children and wives.
Among those barns were a few round ones, an idea of long ago efficiency and ease of moving livestock. They all had a scaffolded ramp up which the hired man or the oldest kid after school pushed a wheelbarrow of cow flop and bedding to its conical resting place away from the barn, the pile from which the tractor with the bucket on it would fill the “turd hearse” [manure spreader] with the composted remains of such pile early every summer. That was after someone drove the team or a tractor across the pastures “turd tipping” so grass could grow in more places. A tractor or a team would drag the turd hearse around the pasture, and the ground driven mechanism would hurl bits and pieces of cow manure, the specific gravity of which would eventually determine the place to which the material would fall to ground, or else down the tractor driver’s neck. Even the flies would have flies on them by early summer. I digress. On to the round barns.
My old Dane grandpa, never missing a chance to kick a Swede in the nether regions, metaphorically, pointed out a round barn to me on one of our trips to the beach to fish for flounder. He told me that a Swede hired man had run himself to death in that round barn right there. I asked how. Grandpa said he was trying to find a corner to pee in. It took me a minute, but I caught the joke and we had a belly laugh about a breathless Swede run to death because he couldn’t find a corner to pee in.
I picked up the paper this week and there it was: the semi annual lament about the poor manatees of Florida dying of exposure in the cold waters of Florida winter. I don’t quite understand the cold winter waters of Florida. That is not the stuff promoted by Chambers of Commerce or tourist divisions of state economic development. Too cold for manatees in winter? The same manatees being killed by go-fast boaters’ propellers most of the year?
So I Googled the issue of cold manatees and I found annual stories going back to 2005. The latest ones of this last week tell us that 60% of manatees have a fidelity to a particular fossil (or nuclear) power plant warm water outflow, of which Florida has a dozen. Fifteen percent of Florida manatees favor natural warm water springs, of which there are fewer today because development, aided by power production, which have removed enough ground water to stop many former warm water springs from flowing.
Carol Browner of EPA (and both the Obama and Clinton Administrations) is hell bent (diabolically dedicated to) closing those “polluting” fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, She claims (falsely) that nuclear plants present the death dealing possibility that some terrorist clandestine organization will someday target one to produce a “dirty bomb” and kill all of the infidels in the USA, of which there are more than 275 million. That is a lot, by the way.
So here we have cold manatees, saving their fat asses by hanging at their favorite power plant warm water outflows, which are of course too warm and thus water pollution as declared by the Clean Water Act.
The power plants are fouling the air with life-giving CO2 and warm water, which are alleged causing global climate “disruption”, a hypothesis predicated on man-caused pollution making the world too hot and melting the polar ice caps, and of course, extirpating the poor manatees which prefer the warm water outflows from said power plants. Wow!! I can’t grasp all the terrible results of hot water. Especially when the manatees are dying of exposure to cold water. Hep! Hep me! I be confused.
Shut down the power plants, save the Earth! And all the manatees croak due to exposure and cold. But then again, they may too cold to swim (or paddle) out into the speed boat channels to be made into sushi by power boats. Ecology is complicated.
Meanwhile, the EPA and Obamanation are making and passing administrative rules to punish any and all who by God choke the air with CO2 (which is the one molecule that plants absolutely need to grow and create life from via the sun’s energy, plus water molecules laced with some trace minerals of course) thus promoting global warming, which is the doom of us all (with the exception of manatees?).
That canary (albeit a fat one once linked to mermaids tales) of the watery mine that is semi-tropical Florida, the beloved manatee, is being killed by cold water every year. And has been for more than five years.
At this allegedly precarious time of global climate confusion and the politically imagined prospect of a hellish hot Earth, in southern Florida (one of the warmest, on a daily basis, places in the USA), freeze has once again ruined crops, raised the price of fresh greens and citrus fruit, and is killing the “iconic” marine mammal we dub manatees and/or mermaids.
Naturally all the cold is attributed to global warming. You don’t say… I am not taking that under advisement. I am calling BS. I am not buying into what I can see in front of my face, my icy breath, as the manifestation of global “warming”. If you think the world is too warm, go ask the manatee (if you can understand a word they say through their shivering manatee lips).
I run a little blueberry farm where we grow a late ripening variety to fill the berry availability space between the last of North American fruit in fall and the earliest of the South American fruit that comes into the US and world fresh market in late October and early November (springtime in the Andes). This year they had late winter (our fall) snow in the growing areas of Argentina and Chile. In Argentina where the blueberries are grown, it is very dry and the irrigation water comes from the snowmelt on the east side of the Andes. It snowed in Argentina in 1905, and not again until 2008. In June and July of 2010 it snowed twice. The second snow broke the backs of many, many barns and livestock facilities. It also messed up transportation, which led to a shortage of fuel to run frost protection machinery. Tens of thousands of head of livestock were killed. And the early blooming blueberries were whacked a good one.
The beneficiary was the crop I oversee in Oregon. No competition and a much reduced late season supply from S.A. turned into a windfall for Oregon growers of late variety blueberries. Damn that global warming, er cooling, er disruption.
In New Zealand 500,000 or more spring lambs perished in one July blizzard in 2010. Wyoming deer range was overrun with bleating sheep this fall. Supply and demand.
Global warming is a trying time for Southern Hemisphere living. Don’t forget the bundled up soccer fans and the erratic balls of the World Cup in South Africa this last spring, i.e. fall in the southern hemisphere. Cold down there. A lot colder than they are used to. Just some more of that evil CO2 reacting with the hole in the ozone layer, creating cold waves emanating from Antarctica, the ice of which is expanding, no doubt due to global warming, I guess.
Blueberry farmers are thankful for all that sub-freezing global warming there and here. In Oregon we lost three weeks of growing season because the sun was cloud blocked for a lot of late spring and early summer. Our blueberry bushes experienced a lot of woody growth and ripening retardation due to the effects of a long, cold spring and an even grayer and colder early summer. So our fruit ripened later than usual, and our picking window lasted longer than usual, and without competing fruit from South America our price started out high, got higher, and it was just a bountiful year. All due to global warming/cooling/whatever. Give me more!!!
I know I am just talking about weather and not climate. But six years of cold water deaths for manatees is more than an anomaly. It is a trend. And right now, development taketh away and development giveth. Which came first, the taking of the warm groundwater springs? Or the warm water outflows from power plants? And which will be given up first, potable water or the electricity to warm a cool morning, to light a dark night, to drive the machinery to make the goods that allow people to enjoy seeing wildlife like manatees that benefit from the man-warmed water?
I heard today that Obamanation and Browner’s EPA are going to usurp the right to use coal for energy. By administrative fiat coal is going to be punished, taxed, and regulated out of existence. On the streets, that is called “suicide by cop bullet”. Kill yourself by having the cops do it for you.
There is a proposal to export the coal that the Boardman OR power plant et al. will not be using in the near future. (PGE, aka Punt, Go, and Escape with your money, are in the record books as having shut down the shortest-lived nuclear power plant in history and now the shortest-lived coal fired plant, which was the replacement for the aborted Trojan nuclear plant).
The new coal proposal is for a rail fed exporting facility at or near Kalama, WA, on the Columbia River. Lots of “green” opposition. [Note: An article from the December 28 Olympian indicates that the Washington Department of Ecology has just intervened in the appeal of the coal-export port upgrade for Longview. The DOE said that Cowlitz County’s environmental review should have analyzed greenhouse gas emissions more broadly and not just in the immediate boundaries of the Longview project. - ed]. All the big NGOs are getting involved. I wonder if Peabody Coal funds a trust or foundation that will be against the facility. After all, the coal will go to China which will burn it to make electricity, and of course, foul the atmosphere with CO2 and melt the snow and boil the rivers and oceans, all of which may or may not benefit the manatees.
Obamnation, with the help of Warren Buffett, is going to alter our selfish behavior by eliminating the export trade and jacking up our utility bills at the same time [here, here]. High electric and gas bills, high auto and truck fuel bills, high home heating costs, high manufacturing energy costs, and a crippled economy to boot. It’s back to the caves and the chucking of spears at feral beeves.
The so uplifting Obamanation plan for alternative energy is first accomplished by taking all the private capital extant and spending it to build hugely inefficient and costly “renewable” energy sources. Ironically, if you can call it that, the non-renewable fuels that go to making the machinery of renewable energy is more than more energy than can be produced by the windmills, solar arrays, etc. in their lifetimes. We are being sold, if you can call it that, a perpetual motion machine that is supposed to violate the Laws of Physics.
Do any of the “progressive” social engineers ever have to take an electrical or mechanical engineering course? Do the environmental engineers?
All I know is what I read. My mind is about connecting dots. No abstract thinker, I. Warm water loving manatees dying for more than five years, in the daily average warmest place in the continental USA. That’s global warming? Pshaw!!
How many people along the eastern seaboard would agree today that their climate is too warm? Did you see how large the pool of cold air, the “arctic high pressure bubble”, is right now? No warming this year. Take a peek at the green grocer prices. Those don’t represent a warming earth.
My advice is to not buy Smart Pills from a Democrat who has a pitcher of Kool Aid on his or her desk. Anyone heard from Al Gore lately? Maybe the roar of snowplows overpowered his voice. When you look at the fat he put on, you have to know he was preparing for a cold winter like a manatee. And he got one!
Meanwhile Lame Duck Gov. Toolongstupidski must have a bone to pick with Retread Duck Gov. Taxhorror. The outgoing Duck has put the interim head of the Oregon Energy Dept. on Admin Leave while AG’s office investigates how incoming Duck Taxhorror’s current girl friend got a Stimulus funded contract with a bid higher than the low bid number.
There is disarray in that agency. Giggle. Snort. Meanwhile, a guy with the oversized Stanley full of Kool Aid — former Sec of State, gubernatorial candidate, and Shakey’s waiter Billy “Algore Jr.” Bradbury — was appointed by Toolongstupidski to join the Northwest Energy and Conservation Council. I would have thought Bradbury would have been a natural at overseeing the Massage and Masseuse Board what with all the one-on-one training he received as a Gore acolyte. Bradbury will never work a day in the private sector as long as he lives. That is the Democrat Way. Maximum PERS as a reward for being dysfunctional public employees. Bradbury’s job will be to make sure nobody can built a house without a windmill and solar panels and black water tubing to heat the shower. He is a social engineer. Married to a connected Democrat lawyer who litigates and advises on environmental lawsuits. They bleed blue.
Oh, lucky Oregon!!!! Just a part of the ongoing Portland mass insanity to push the lemmings of the Left (and everyone on the Right, too) kicking and screaming off the cliff. For the sake of the Earth, of course. Decisions made from a faux ivory tower by faux leaders. Actually, the Oregon leadership has the goal of taking us back to the caves. That is the logical and inevitable end to their policies. We hope to become the first state to return to the Stone Age, using no human-manufactured energy except wood-fueled fires (just the wildfire kind; woodstoves have been banned).
Oh yeah… Have a Happy New Year.
bear bait
