Frequent WUWT contributor Tom Fuller has decided to step away from blogging. His final post is below. Tom provided some greatly appreciated help in keeping WUWT humming while I dealt with family health issues, and so I owe him a huge debt of graditude. Tom the door is always open at WUWT should the itch to write strike. – Anthony
Good-bye to all that
Tom Fuller
This will be my final article on Examiner.com. Thank you all for your support and your criticism. You can help with a title for this…
To Kim and Lucia who both knew best
How thoughts like these should be expressed
Prologue
When I was real and life was a child
Proved moments of calm after decision
When life is most real, it most needs revision.
Farewell, friend and farewell, foe
The urban indications meant to orient a person to his time and place
And shakes the digitalis clocks that stop and start the city’s heart
With flash of time and Celsius
Deliver us
And penetrates the whitewashed box,
Providing whitewashed baseball scores
To heaven for analysis
Paralysis
From Pratt & Whitney’s lastest, last
Combined with tarmac’s snaky coils
Of heated air that won’t constrain
All attempts at legerdemain
For fear, for fear, it’ll disappear)
Santanas reaching desert ends
For we have story plots to tend
Depending on unceasing trends
In afternoon light it flashes and shines
We shiver in blue and pause in our labors
Willing the world to be perfectly still
I light up with a phosphor match
Have faced the winter’s evening charms
By slamming dope into their arms
That economy and grace
Evocative of thought or dance
The beauty of the human race!
Drugged hatred sleeping behind their eyes
Walk to the fantail saying ‘F*** it’
With Thai stick waving in the breeze
Obscuring all the increments
Of ancient briny measurements
From ancient mercury implements
They write the numbers as they please
The light goes gray and heavy with shock
The temperature guesses are scrawled in grease pencil
We shiver in blue and sprawl on the cases
Chapter 2 – The Debate
Forensic taste of paradox
Gazing at Wilde’s stars from gutters
And commenting with geniuses and nutters
With doom our given fate
As punishment for crimes
Against our poor tectonic plate
The gods themselves protest in vain
To undergrounds for dusty years
Composed of Bowery Grenadiers
And Canadian Mining Engineers
A winning streak and well-earned fame
We brought you health and wealth besides
We tell you now of rising tides
Demands that we examine it
‘If data aged like well-kept wine
Why must you then hide the decline?’
Reluctantly break from the huddle
Enlisting voiced vituperation
From corners of all grateful nations
Denying angles of repose
And thus was born our Blogistan
From Fourier to ‘Yes We Can’
The waters warmed, the waters rose
But not as much as it was feared
Enlightenment had not appeared
The Arctic ice, the Greenland Cap
The glacial peaks, the this, the that
It comes and goes and how ’bout that?
Scraping the iceberg’s stony face
The science is what science is
And we are who we are, we are
Watching Mauna Loa’s upward trace
Caught in the climate conundrum
Will we pay? or Will we drown?
Are they priests or are they clowns?
It’s warmer in the center of the town
Epilogue
And I really must be going
Emotions mixed but eyes firm fixed
Upon an East-bound Boeing
In 30 years I’ll know
Reflecting back unearthly light
Like clouds below, oh albedo
Or soaking up all heat in sight
But which is it to be?
Light for you or heat for me?
In 30 years I’ll know
Seeks new equibilibrium
As if it were a New Jerusalem
In 30 years I’ll know
The Song of the Sirens from the blogs has pulled many writers off course, Tom, offering instant gratification of the desire to communicate, but proving an ephemeral resolution of that need; leaving a feeling of frustration that a concept or idea had not really been developed and presented in a format which would not simply vanish into the craw of an insatiable beast where, surprisingly quickly, it would simply disappear.
I hope this is your reason for withdrawing from the (ugly word) blogosphere, and that you will now wrestle with the much more difficult process of ploughing the fields of your dreams until the loam is friable and the seeds well grown, and to thence publish in a more substantial medium ─ electronic or paper-based ─ to let your talent be more widely spread, and more thoughtfully considered.
Go well, fellow author.
Tom,
I always enjoyed discussions with you. Even though we disagreed on many points, you were always respectful and pleasant to communicate with. I wish you the best in your new job.
Very T.S.Eliot, Tom!
“And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.”
All the best – we’ll miss you.
As one who is more of a lurker than a poster on the blogs on which I’ve read you, Tom Fuller, like many I haven’t always agreed with the substance of your posts; but (perhaps unlike Keith Kloor!), I’ve always appreciated your tone – and your observations on virtual group dynamics (the good, the bad, and the ugly) … which just happen to match my own!
Sorry to see your “swan song”, but I wish you all the best in your new “incarnation” as a non-self-employed person.
One word; logorrhea.
I remember commenting that Tom Fuller was rather pessemistic about human ingenuity when it came to finding alternative energy. And I stil think he is being rather alarmist about the situation. I could give examples of pessemism, which sound funny today, but alarmed people from the past. One example is of late 19th century projections for horse manure in London by the year 2000. :o)
I do appreciate reading posts from very differing veiw points as long as they don’t call me a denier. Thanks Tom for your input and all the best.
I always appreciated your subjects and input. Thanks!
Typo / drinko
that alarmed people from the past.
Best of luck Tom with your new career. I never came away from your musings unaffected.
Sometimes angrily, I’ll admit, but never without respect for your personal attributes. I know you’ll be back, once you’ve got on top of the new job. You can’t keep the lid on a volcano!
As Barry Woods suggested, keep an eye on BishopHill’s blog. I think that you would find it an ideal and relaxing place when you’re ready to get up to speed before getting involved in the hurly-burley of Climatolotics again.
As a PS. Barry, don’t lose heart and, please, don’t stop trying to change things. I have never disagreed, in principle, with anything that you have said and I have read. I, and I’m certain that many others, enjoy your posts.
KBO, please.
There was no reason really to disagree with any of Tom’s posts. We should be trying to become more energy-efficient. We should be thinking of the future. We don’t really know how much warming there is to come. We just shouldn’t change our way of life based on a theory when the evidence for that theory is more-and-more looking like a significant exaggeration. Thanks very much Tom.
Tom,
Perhaps a more judicious choice of employer might have afforded you even more time to indulge your penchant for lucubration. There are spacey agencies that appear to encourage blogging while at work.
Your posts made my blood boil but I read each and every one of them. I wish I could escape the climate debate sometimes, you lucky man!
Good luck in new endeavour.
PT
Tom, I didn’t agree with 90% of your posts but it was good to actually have a pro-AGW supporter engage with sceptics. That took more stones than the rest of the AGWers put together. I admire that. Hope to see you again.
My best wishes for your new job, Tom.
Your posts here led to excellent debates, and I for one have always appreciated your writings from the ‘other’ point of view because you never lowered your tone to hectoring, bullying, or generally denigrating your opponents.
And that is indeed a rarity!
Thanks!
All the best, Tom!
We’ve had some good conversations over the past years (e.g. http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/?s=fuller ), and while we often disagreed you were a courteous discussion partner (with me at least ;-), and one of your last posts (on the league of 2.5) was a very worthwhile attempt at building bridges between the different communities.
May I just take this opportunity to thank Mr Fuller and Mr Mosher for “Climategate, The Crutape Letters”, which is an excellent read. Best wishes, Dave.
Thank you for your contributions, Tom. I really appreciate your willingness to stand up to the plate with your ideas, even when you knew up front that you’d get vehement counterarguments. You handled the heat with grace.
Best wishes.
Hi Tom
Tried to post this over at the Examiner and it was deleted as Spam! Was it something I said?
“Hi Tom
Followed the link from WUWT to your real home here. Sorry to hear you are leaving. You are a fine writer. All the best with whatever you decide to do
PS My contribution to your post about sea levels has encouraged me to write it up as a three part series. There is no doubt we are still some 30cms lower than during the MWP and Roman Optimum.
best of luck.”
tonyb
I hope Tom is taking the time off to read these books,
The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (Peter Huber, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering, MIT, 2005)
Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence (Robert Bryce, 2008)
Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future (Robert Bryce, 2010)
The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won’t Run the World, Second Edition (Howard C. Hayden, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Physics, 2005)
The Wind Farm Scam (John Etherington, Ph.D. Emeritus Reader of Ecology, University of Wales, 2009)
😀
Tom,
Sad to see you go – I always enjoyed your writing and your views whether or not I fully shared them. Climategate was my wake-up call and you and Mosher’s book CruTape Letters really got me started in all this. So I blame you. (Just kidding!!!). I will be on the lookout for your comments on the blogosphere.