Category: Blog

This is a 1939 portrait of my grandfather, Paul Wright Gill, upon his graduating from the US Naval Academy.

On the morning of December 7, 1941 he was the torpedo officer, first lieutenant, aboard the USS Monaghan. They were ordered to get underway as the surprise Japanese attack began. They immediately sighted a Japanese sub at the mouth of the harbor and they rammed it and dropped depth charges on it.

Here is the after-action report: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/archives/digital-exhibits-highlights/action-reports/wwii-pearl-harbor-attack/ships-m-r/uss-monaghan-dd-354-action-report.html and a narrative if events: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/uss-monaghan-dd-354-pearl-harbor.

He would marry his hometown sweetheart while on leave in February 1942, and later have a family and distinguished career after the war.

Two thousand and three Americans lost their lives that day and our world was forever changed. History is not that far removed from the present.

I have written about fascism in the past. See here as an example.

If this election ten days from now is not decisive, I fear we are entering a new period of dominance and control in America that will transform us as a people into the villains. We are halfway there already.

God help us.

The planet and every species on it would be better off with fewer human beings.

Probably won’t happen. . . but when you look at the problems we have created, our policy solutions do not begin to solve them, and our politics remains stuck in the past. People are superstitious and selfish, and ill-suited to change.

Maybe I have had too much of the election season. . .

With the horrific flooding and destruction in Asheville, NC, I have been thinking about where we could live that would be safe from the changing climate on the planet. As if there is a safe sport that will be unaffected by climate change, and the ever increasing average global temperatures. . .

All of the supposedly most livable places have been hit with extreme weather events in the last two years. The Pacific Northwest, Inland New England, Western North Carolina, Coastal California. Extreme precipitation with flooding, and/or drought and wildfire.

Are these really the safest places to be long-term considering the changing climate and the most likely scenarios for 10, 20, or 50 years?

I think the answer is affirmative still, but one must be wary of potential flooding. I would still bank on Western Massachusetts up to Montpelier, Vermont. But, I would stay clear of historical flood plains by a margin of safety, and I would be mindful of any uphill water bodies.

Coastal California remains viable PROVIDED the Pacific Ocean remains a cooling factor. This seems unlikely to change soon, but perhaps I am naive to believe that???

The PNW is frightening to me. I believe they will see fire and rain, and I fear in future years the destruction could be biblical in its destruction.

Maybe the best situation would be to straddle two of those areas?

June 2024 Temperature Update

Still looks like a safe bet to live in a place where temperatures are moderated by the ocean – as land is heating up relatively faster than the oceans. This may be a predictable and obvious phenomena, but I am pleased that my prior hypothesis has been validated. My guess is that this trend will continue for the rest of my life (40 to 50 years). So, all the more reason to identify and reside in coastal micro-climates with on-shore flow for most of the year.

Losing a parent is hard. I am struggling to find the words to convey my feelings to my mother, when I see her for the last time. It is a gift to have the chance to say goodbye and incalculably difficult. I will miss her daily.

I love her. I am grateful to her for all of the sacrifices she made for me. And I will remember her voice, her name, her wisdom, her positivity, and her presence.

I am struggling to fathom a world without her in it.

And, of course, her dying puts my mortality into a focus I have not previously known.

The AMOC may be collapsing sooner than previously thought possible, which will radically shift sea level by 1 meter or more and make the US Northeast and Europe colder, and the Southern hemisphere MUCH warmer.Like so many of the knock-on effects of climate change, we are radically underestimating the instability of our environment.

More close to home,La Nina is now thought to likely follow this year’s El Nino. See https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-02-10/la-nina-on-the-horizon-californias-wild-weather-year-could-get-even-weirder.

This article in the Sunday Seattle Times goes through the analysis of what more rain and less snow does to the SPU watershed and Seattle’s water and power infrastructure. It states the obvious – more rain and less snow requires an increase in water storage to maintain the same water supply (because you lose the water stored in the snowpack).

All of the Western USA is facing similar problems, and yet the new reservoirs and groundwater storage are not being built fast enough. From Los Angeles to Seattle, there will be consequences for this failure. Namely, there will be years of water rationing. There will be cuts to water use in the agricultural areas, that may or may not successfully be enforced. And, there very well could be a failure, where a large municipality runs out of water.

Los Angeles in particular needs to wake-up and begin building reservoir capacity and increase the pace for developing recycling abilities! The snow pack in the Sierra will decrease over time, and the need to find ways to capture the rains and the earlier snowmelt that does occur will increase. . .

2023 is now officially the warmest year on record – 2.67 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial period. Nearly half the days were warmer than 2.7 degrees, which of course, was the limit set in the 2015 Paris climate Agreement.

More microplastics than previously known have been found in bottled water – 10 to 100 times greater than previously known. The particles are small enough to enter human cells and cross the blood-brain barrier.

Using sophisticated imaging technology, scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty laboratory examined water samples from three popular brands (they won’t say which ones) and found hundreds of thousands of bits of plastic per liter of water.

Ninety percent of those plastics were small enough to qualify as nanoplastics: microscopic flecks so small that they can be absorbed into human cells and tissue, as well as cross the blood-brain barrier.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-01-08/thousands-of-nanoplastics-found-in-bottled-drinking-water

And finally, it appears that adding massive amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere likely has long term implication and feedback loops. Scientists at Columbia found that the last time levels were this high was 14 million years ago.

“We have long known that adding CO2 to our atmosphere raises the temperature,” said Bärbel Hönisch, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who coordinated the consortium. “This study gives us a much more robust idea of how sensitive the climate is over long time scales.”

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/12/07/a-new-66-million-year-history-of-carbon-dioxide-offers-little-comfort-for-today/

I got a hunch. . .

Shiller PE Chart

10 to 2 year yield spread

S&P 500 Chart

notice what happens after the peak yield curve inversion – the highs in the stock market, and then bottoms about 1 year later. . . Concern right now is predicting the high within +/-2 months and modifying my positions accordingly.

Dotcom Bust

March 2000 – Peak Inversion

August 2000 – Last High of S&P 500 (5 months later)

July 2002 – Bottom of S&P 500 (23 months after High)

Great Recession

November 2006 – Peak Inversion

October 2007 – Last High of S&P 500 (11 months later)

March 2009 – Bottom of S&P 500 (17 months after High)

Current Situation

July 2023 – Peak Inversion

Estimate of 12/23 to 06/24 – Last High of S&P 500

Estimate of 08/25 to 02/26 – Bottom of S&P 500