I turned forty-six yesterday. Not a terribly momentous birthday, normally. None of mine are. I haven’t thought much about celebrating a birthday since I turned twenty-one.
On this occasion, I was in Whitefish, Montana, a byproduct of the CrossFit Risk Retention Group’s annual meeting. Because the RRG is a Montana entity, our auditors and regulators are there, as is the RRG’s President (by design). Thus, this year someone came up with the idea of holding the meeting on Whitefish Lake.
Not a bad choice of venue
I had a commitment in Boston just a few days after the RRG meeting ended and it was actually cheaper to stay three extra days in Montana and then fly to Beantown for the Ass’n of Corporate Counsel annual meeting than it was to fly back to San Diego for two days, then get on a flight to Boston. It was also a little easier on my body. I’m normally pretty good, but hopping across time zones repeatedly occasionally screws with me and I’m speaking on Monday and would rather not look like I just left drug rehab – or should enter it – in front of a roomful of 5000 attorneys.
Suffice it to say, I had all the excuses I needed to stay over in Whitefish, Montana, for my birthday.
As I was pondering the flip of the calendar, it occurred to me that this birthday might well mark the beginning of the second half of my life. The “back nine” in golf parlance. This assumes I make 90 years old, of course. While this might seem ambitious – and in defiance of the actuaries – I’ve got the genetics on both sides to back up this kind of optimism. My saintly grandfather – dad’s dad – will turn 96 next week. My mother’s mother is 91, I believe. I’ve known great-grandparents quite well on my dad’s side. “Chubby Meme” Messier, my paternal grandmother’s mother, was 93 when she passed and I was well-familiar with her Quebec patois and Franglish. When she wanted to swear, she switched to Canadian French and the kids would all just stare in curiosity. Whatever she’s saying, she’s pissed and it can’t be good. In any case, it doesn’t seem too overly optimistic to think I could make 90. (My goal, truth be told, is to crack one-hundred. I really want to have lived for a century when I get called to finally sit on the eternal bench). As I was pondering the math of middle age, I was pretty stoked. Truth is that for the first fifteen years if my life (or so) I was largely clueless and useless, so really, I only got 2/3 of the first half of really full-on living.
What a great way, then, to spend that first anniversary of the back half in Glacier National Park. It is humbling in a way that only epic and ancient natural phenomenon can provide. I didn’t quite have the same sense of profundity when I visited the Grand Canyon. I don’t know why that is, but it didn’t really move me. Yes, I get it. The Colorado River cut through all of that for an incomprehensibly long time. Meh. I’m not anti-Grand Canyon, it just didn’t stir me the way Glacier National Park did. I guess I’m a mountain more than a ditch guy.
Looking north toward Going-to-the-Sky road
My fascination started with a hike up a stream – any old stream. No real reason, either – just pulled off to look around. And immediately noticed these holes in the rock.
Bigfoot and Littlefoot?
“What are those?” my companion asked. “What do you think caused them?” I just stared for a while and looked around. “Water.” “Hmmmm…” she said and continued upstream. She didn’t say it in the “oh, you’re so full of shit” kind of way, but just filed it for later and moved on. “Wonder how all the rocks got in there…”
Eventually, we stumbled onto other mysteries (below), but we got an answer to the question as we moved further ahead. A simple hundred yard journey upstream was like walking slowly back in time. As we approached more water, we found this:
If you look in the center, you can see the water trickling down into a tiny catch basin that has formed in the rock. Next to it is one that is full, but the water course has changed and as a result, it is now simply an isolated hole, filled with water… and rocks in the bottom that washed over this tiny waterfall. I have no idea how long these things take to form, but it was fascinating to be able to have the question and then see it answered by just walking and looking.
There were other even stranger natural formations, like this picture, that no amount of staring and hypothesizing could answer, but fortunately, the google-machinez was able to assist.
Turns out H2O is always a good answer to geology trivia
These pockmarks are also the result of water – that is, they’re what results when two currents cross over these rocks at ninety-degree angles to one another.
Of course, the travelogue is nice, but what fascinates me in the face of geologic formations that are millions of years old is Man’s presence in the face of this.
“Make you feel insignificant?” she asks.
“Not at all. Profound. Important. We give this meaning…” I might have smoked a little herb while we were walking up the river, too.
“This was around long before we were,” she points out. “Species come and species go, you said so yourself…”
“Of course. But this is where I get specie-ist: I don’t care about the others as much as my own. Look, I love the bears, and marmots, and every little critter on the planet, but I wouldn’t destroy the life of a single human being to preserve a spotted owl or any other species.”
“But we won’t always be here…”
“Awww, man, don’t bum me out. I get profoundly bummed out when I consider the extinction of mankind.” She laughs, heartily.
“How can you see all of this around you that preceded man and not consider a world without man?”
“Because so far as I’m aware, we’re the only species that has the intelligence and…what – spirit? Appreciation for beauty? Aesthetic? – whatever else you want to call it – to appreciate these rocks. Without us, these are just rocks that goats and insects crawl upon until the sun winks out or that caldera in Yellowstone finally blows it all to hell and there’s another extinction event. Mankind gives meaning to these rocks, the way the trees change color, the austere beauty of all of this -” pointing around us.
She laughs hysterically.
“Did you smoke while we were hiking up here?”
“Maybe. But I stand by it, regardless.”
Back in the car driving up the Going-to-the-Sky Road, I am overcome by the scenery. At The Loop, we pick up a hitchhiker headed UP the road, which seems odd, and is precisely why I stop to pick him up. Years of training compel me to help him with his bag into the trunk and use the time to surreptitiously pat him down – a hand on the back, a stumble into him – he’s not carrying and if he does anything stupid I will throw him off the cliff that I am very carefully driving along.
He explains he’s hiking the entire country over the course of a couple of months and he’s about halfway into his trip. He hiked down from Logan Pass and left his car up there, but he’s spent several nights up in the passes that we’re driving toward, all well above a mile high. Turns out he’s an ill-informed hippy, but he’s a good dude nonetheless, younger than I am by at least a couple of decades. When he talks about how the glaciers he’s seen on the east side of the park are sadly melting because of human beings, he seems to not have read the park brochure that explains these are “young” glaciers, whose size and melting have absolutely nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming (AGW), now renamed “climate change” – which can now safely add itself to the list of stupidest naming attempts ever, along with the “War on Terror,” the “War on Drugs,” the “War on Poverty,” and every other singular-plural sports team name.*
*You do not declare war on a tactic; that is idiocy. It’s like declaring a War on the Reverse Slope Defense or a War on the L-Ambush. Complete and utter nonsense. Ditto for a “war” on a chemical compound or a “war” on a human condition. Unless we propose to give everyone an income at the time they are born (Democrats are trying, I know), declaring a war on something that will be the fate of a good many people by dint of living in a desert, or having a parent who gambled, drank, or simply lost everything, is more rank stupidity. In reality, all of these are simply ruses that a gullible and well-meaning public have fallen for.
AGW- er, “Climate Change” is no different. Now before you get your hippy hair all in a lather, let me introduce you to someone: say hello to my little friends… stromatolites!
Stromatolites are ancient life-forms, among the oldest of which we are currently aware. Stromatolites date to about 3.5 billion years ago and they peaked about 1.25 billion years ago. There do appear to be inorganic forms of stromatolites, as well, and it’s currently an area of study in geology. Glacier National Park has some amazing organic stromatolite beds, part of the unique fossil record that is GNP.
Stromatolites are a cyanobacteria – and wouldn’t you know – they are capable of photosynthesis. This blog provides a nice primer to stromatolites and how they come to be part of the fossil record – and also populate several ecosystems currently. What is important for our purposes is photosynthesis. At least one member of the American Geophysical Union (in a wonderfully animated and passionate blog here) describes the importance of stromatolites thusly:
They [stromatolites] were one of the first abundant photosynthetic organisms. They essentially remove CO2 from ocean; use the carbon for themselves while causing precipitation of calcium carbonate, and release the oxygen. They cover their cells with protective slime. When the slime gets too covered in sediment, they just grow a new layer, which results in dome-shaped layered “cabbage heads.” Stromatolites used to be so abundant that the sheer volume of oxygen they produced significantly changed the composition of our atmosphere. Stromatolites made our planet suitable for organisms like us!
Let me try to put this in perspective for the Warmistas. This entire planet was once covered in ice. Nothing worth writing about could live…except possibly stromatolites or their like. It was the ability of stromatolites to uptake CO2 that led to a sufficient accretion of oxygen – over millions of years – to provide an atmosphere that would eventually sustain human life.
Now, when I hear knuckleheads railing about “climate change” – and I’ve finished correcting them to at least use the proper terminology, anthropogenic global warming – I’m always curious to know if they’d like the Earth to get colder. Or, in the alternative, to just stay completely static. Every temperature the same as it is now. I always get a blank stare at that question. “Ummmm….”
Right. You have no idea, in other words. What exactly is the “correct” temperature for all of the various locales on Earth? I mean, if you’re up in arms about AGW, then you presumably have some idea of what you think the proper temperature ought to be, from which man is evidently causing the Earth to deviate.
(Another of my favorites: you ever watch the ice melt in your drink? Did it ever overflow as a result of the ice melting? The answer is “no” because of the unique properties of water. It’s the only liquid I know of that actually expands when cooled as it becomes a solid. The converse is that as it melts, it takes up less volume. I was never quite clear on how the oceans were going to massively rise as a result of ice melting. I know it’s more complicated than that, but it’s a great way to make people actually start thinking about the science behind the bullshit they hold dear.)
It only takes one or two questions to expose this chicanery and fraud for what it is: a complete scam and at the heart of it are politicians getting rich. Shocked. Shocked, I say.
I admire the audacity of it, at some level. Imagine it for a moment: convincing people that they have to pay a tax on the very breath they exhale, carbon dioxide. That’s what it is. The whole AGW scam, which has yet to be vindicated by even ONE of its own models, is telling people that their exhaust gases are impermissible and should be taxed. Oh, Dale, that’s not true! they scream. It’s only the, um, other icky CO2 from like burning coal and industry that should be regulated.
Of course that’s where it starts, but CO2 is also the gas that cows expend and I have read ostensibly credible, mainstream articles regarding the need to have human beings wean off of meat because of the methane gas produced by livestock. Think I’m exaggerating? Read the EPAs website. It’s the one that has the words “climate change” right in the web address – in case you were wondering how dumb they are.
Now, someone reading this will start screaming in their head about how I’m not “environmentally friendly” or “environmentally conscious” or whatever the new PC words are to demonize anyone who might disagree with the current zeitgeist. This is the part of the AGW crowd that is most troubling: it’s not that they’re completely and totally full of shit (they are); it’s not that they are completely ignorant of the most basic concepts of science, including what it is (they are – science has nothing to do with consensus). Either a hypothesis is right or it is wrong – it isn’t made less or more right because you can get people to agree to it. Neither Einstein nor Newton were right as a result of their ability to generate a “consensus.” They were right because they were right; they’d still be right if the entire world had disagreed. Science is about models with predictive power and in that regard the AGW has failed – and continues to fail – miserably. If I were wrong as often as the AGW crowd has been, if I had faked data to support my belief, or if I had decided that the data needed to be “smoothed” and “reworked” to make my theories look better, people would be hectoring me in the street as a complete charlatan – but if you do so in the service of Mother Gaia and make the right noises about loving the Earth, then anyone who disagrees with you is now a “denier.” And THIS – this is the part about the AGW crowd that I truly despise: they have all of the tolerance of Torquemada and the same kind of smug certitude, such that anyone who dares to question the orthodoxy is likely to be on the wrong of the equivalent environmental Al Hambra decree.
That’s not science. Science is not orthodoxy; it’s a process of inquiry. It is an attitude of genuine inquiry about cause and effect, not a weapon to be used in public policy disputes. And it certainly doesn’t berate and denigrate opposing views, especially given the complexity of the systems involved and the fact that the models being touted as “The Truth” continue to fail. Repeatedly.
For what it’s worth, I’ve spent a ton of time outdoors in my life and I’m nowhere near the kind of outdoorsman as a lot of people I know. But this last week I started to think that maybe we would be better off as a society if we made kids spend the last few years of high school in the outdoors for several weeks at a time – maybe even months. Let them learn how to care for themselves in nature. It is the ultimate place to teach self-reliance and a myriad of skills that would likely lead to less dependence and more independence by young people. When you know how to hunt and fend for yourself out in nature, what are the odds that you are ever going to need to be reliant on government for your food and shelter? I acknowledge that we couldn’t have this without making the decision as a society to preserve our National Park system. It’s one of the few things I think government got right (although they tend to do what they do to everything else and suck all of the fun out of it).
East Glacier
On the last day in the park, while hiking along Highline Trail (which, if you are genuinely afraid of heights like I am, I would not recommend), the itch to climb overcame what would normally be considered common sense. So, upon finding a bend in the trail that had a dry waterfall because of the lateness of the season, we left the trail and started to see if we could ascend the knifelike ridgeline and see the other side. I think I saw a sign way back that said something about not hiking off-trail…
Highline trail…it ain’t much
I wasn’t willing to do anything stupid, but the ascent was fairly difficult, consisting of a lot of scrambling up near vertical slopes, and even some no kidding “climbing” rock faces, but overall, doable by anyone who has the will and some moderate physical capacity. The view was great, but not spectacular. And we never made it to the top. I reached a point where discretion seemed the better part of valor, but the climb – the attempt – the leaving the well-worn path…that was the best part of all of it.
