Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
That was what the sign on the highway outside of Reno said, at any rate. I kept waiting for the corresponding sign saying
Ice May Be Foggy
But I haven’t seen it yet. We escaped from the Nugget Hotel, which was a good thing. They have a “Gilleys” bar there, complete with a Bikini Bullriding Competition. I tried to talk the gorgeous ex-fiancee into entering … she said I didn’t look all that good in a bikini even with a following wind, and I couldn’t argue on that score, so we rolled out to visit our friends in Imlay, Nevada.
The first curious sight was a house a few miles outside Reno. It was a white house, with a lovely green front lawn. It had a small tree in the yard, and a 
car in the garage, and a white picket fence around the whole thing.
And on all sides of that … nothing but high desert. Sagebrush and scrub and sand. It looked like the tornado from the Wizard of Oz had picked the house up from Illinois with every homey appurtenance, lawn, picket fence and all, and set it down in raw desert in Nevada …
(We’re in Idaho Falls now, staying by the Snake River. I just heard the train whistle and I can feel the rumble … I do love that sound.)
Mostly what we did in Imlay was play music. One of my friends is a drummer, and one plays the guitar/fiddle/harmonica, so with Ellie we had an entire band. The music and the stories rolled on and on. They live up in the hills above the valley floor, the land there looks like this …
I’d describe it as “medium bleak”. Then this morning we rolled out, stopping on the way at the strangest Indian memorial I’ve ever seen.
There was a curious man, half American Indian and half Dutch, who was known as “Chief Thunder”. He decided to use “white man’s junk” to make a memorial … and what a memorial he made. He called it “excrescence art”, and the building looks like this …
Here’s a closeup of one small section:
The main construction materials appear to be glass bottles, wood, sweat, cement, mud, plaster, chewing gum, and I’m reluctant to ask what else. It is so bizarre I can’t begin to describe it, other than to say that the amount of work and the passion it represents are astounding. People never cease to amaze me.
From there, we went across an endless hot desert landscape. Temperatures were over 100°F (38°C). The most amazing thing was the repeated appearance of the forgotten stepchild of the emergent phenomena that regulate our planet’s surface temperature … the lowly dust devil. We saw big ones, and small ones. We saw ones that lasted only seconds, and a few that lasted many minutes.
Dust devils are one of the many emergent phenomena that appear when the surface is hot compared to the atmosphere. They move an unknown amount of energy from the surface up into the troposphere. As far as I know, there are very few studies of them. We don’t know how many there are, or how much energy they move.
But if you are looking across the desert landscape and you want to know where it is the hottest … that would be where the dust devils are busily at work, cooling the desert surface.
We passed by the valley of the Death Star, and went by a string of no less than 41 giant wind turbines on towers … surprisingly, nine of them were actually turning …
After spending about six weeks going through the desert this afternoon, we finally made it to the Snake River Valley around Twin Falls. The Snake is one of my favorite rivers, in part because some of the time it runs down at the bottom of an outrageous canyon.
Tonight we’re back in wetter country, in a log cabin in Idaho Falls …
It’s a lovely little cabin, built the old-school way, not a kit. Another train is going by. The gorgeous ex-fiancee and I sat out on the picnic table and played guitar as the sun was going down. Life is good.
Tomorrow it’s off to Yellowstone, and then roll we north. The beat goes on … my thanks for the emails and suggestions, I fear I can’t answer them all, but do know that they are much appreciated. I’m tired, it’s 11PM, I’m off to shower and then to sleep.
All the best to all of you,
w.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
My “favorite” laugher from way back, PA DOT road signs they used to place along miles of single lane restriction for road construction especially on the interstates: “Temporary Inconvenience – Permanent Improvement”. As for ice, the signs used to be “Bridge freezes before road surface” which must have too confusing for people so now they say “Bridges may be icy.”
Another laugher in Massachusetts. Somebody landed a huge contract to put up two signs, (each way), for every damn bridge and overpass in the entire commonwealth that reads: “Plows use caution” to which I mutter to myself… no they don’t!
Why don’t we all put funds in to place billboards with basic climate change facts around America? I would donate $200.00.
Such as- Twelve Urban Myths of Climate Change
from material provided by Christopher Monckton:
1.”Global warming is happening.”
No: According to the RSS satellite record, there has been none for 17 years 10 months.
2.”Warming is faster than we thought.”
No: In 1990 the climate models predicted that global warming would happen twice as fast as it has.
3.”There’s a 97 percent consensus.”
No: Only 0.5 percent of the authors of 11,944 scientific papers on climate and related topics over the past 21 years said they agreed that most of the warming since 1950 was man-made.
4.”Droughts are getting worse.”
No: A recent paper in the learned journals shows the fraction of the world’s land under drought has fallen for 30 years.
5.”Floods are getting worse.”
No: The U.N.’s panel has said in two recent reports that there has been no particular change in the frequency or severity of floods worldwide.
6.”Sea ice is melting.”
No: It has grown to a new record high in the Antarctic, though the Arctic icecap has been shrinking a little in summer.
7.”Sea level is rising dangerously.”
No: Some satellites show it as rising a little, while others show it as falling.
8.”Hurricanes are getting worse.”
No: Their combined frequency, severity and duration has been at or near the lowest in the 35-year satellite record.
9.”Global warming caused recent extreme weather.”
No: There has been no warming recently, so it cannot have caused any extreme weather in recent years.
10.”Global warming will reduce the number of redheads.”
No: This is one of many scare stories about imaginary effects of warmer weather.
11.”The ocean is acidifying.”
No: The ocean remains decidedly alkaline, and there cannot be much change in its acid-base balance because it is buffered by the basalt rocks in which it lies.
12.”It’s cheaper to act now, just in case.”
No: It is 10-100 times costlier to try to prevent global warming today than to let it happen and pay the cost of adapting to it the day after tomorrow.
Just about everything the mainstream news media say about global warming and its supposed dangers is the opposite of the truth.
From the Heartland Conference, presentation by Lord Monckton. Note this is an excerpt I have edited into 12 points for presentation on this blog and also so that I can print it off for a presentation and poster I am making for a local community organization. Why not do the same? Read the original here. Read more here.
[Reply: Read more where? ~ mod.]
Rather than listing the 12 facts just list a catchy website on the board. I have a suggestion if you want to email me direct.