Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Our search for firewood in Floyd County

Even the best laid plans can go awry and this year gives us a painful example of that. We had laid in a larger supply of firewood this year than ever before but the continuing cold weather has caused us to burn it all with more freezing weather ahead of us.

It is still a long time to spring and our wood stove will be running 24/7 for several more months unless we get a reprieve.

I put a backup plan (Plan B) into action several weeks ago in which a number of dead trees were cut down so I could attack them with a chainsaw and split them up into firewood. Unfortunately this backup plan was stymied by the fact that 16 inches of snow fell and we cannot get to the trees to work on them.

So, we went to plan C in which we called our neighbor who had offered to deliver logs which we can cut up into firewood. He would have been be happy to deliver, but he couldn't get to the logs because his tractor could not handle the deep snow.

Now we were down to one day's worth of firewood and things were looking grim. I start calling around and found that nearby firewood dealers cannot get to their woodlots because of the deep snow. The phone book was not much help as firewood is a seasonal thing and is often a sideline activity so it is not widely advertised.

We persisted and I got a partial load from Pete Hall, who lives just down the road from us. He had a little left over from another delivery and the wood he delivered would hold us for a week if all went well.

It' was time for Plan D and I was looking for firewood everywhere. I was driving home and I saw a large load of oak firewood being driven down the road ahead of me. I followed the truck for quite a while until the driver saw me and pulled off the road so we could talk. I arranged for him to deliver a truckload of firewood as soon as possible

As soon as I got home, I secured a load of pallets from my neighbor to dump the firewood on so that it will stay dry until we can store it away. That is what you see in the image at the top of this post.

The truckload of firewood arrived two days later and looked like this before we covered it all up with a tarpaulin.

I think it will hold us until Spring, but I am going to keep an eye on our consumption and will reorder if necessary.

If you live in Floyd County, VA, here are a few people who can supply you with firewood:

Bob Backlund, Sawbrier Farm 3182 Webbs Mill Rd 540-391-8999

Frank Griffith, Mountain Top Logging, 386 Silverleaf Lane 276-692-5806

Pete Hall, Franklin Pike, 540-745-7228

Preparing for a colder decade - Part 1

My friends who follow the "official" line on climate change look with pity at me as I persist in looking at websites that insist on refuting EPA and IPCC forecasts. As a result I am preparing for one or more decades of increasing cold while they are doing their best to stave off global warming.

We will see how things work out in the coming years.

In the meantime, I am considering a series of actions that may make life easier while Nature makes up its mind whether we will have a warmer future or a colder future.

 The first problem that I see is that many of my handy tools and equipment are designed for temperate weather and we are seeing extreme weather that stops outside work completely. I plan to modify what I can to extend the working range of this equipment.

This is the first step: A Wheelbarrow - Sled Conversion Project

I have a fine two-wheeled wheelbarrow which is light and strong and works like a charm until the snow gets more then 4 inches deep. Since the snow is about 15 inches to 24 inches deep and I still need to haul firewood from the woodpile to the front porch, I decided to convert the wheelbarrow to a sled.

I removed 6 carriage bolts and lifted the barrow body off the undercarriage.

I drilled two holes in the lip of the barrow and attached a rope to use as a tow line.

Once the tow rope was secured, I could easily draw the barrow across the snow. The entire conversion took only twenty minutes.

We used the improvised sled to move hundreds of pounds of firewood from behind the house up a slope to the storage area on the front porch. My neighbor Raef King did the heavy lifting while I did the heavy thinking. I was very appreciative for his assistance.

He did a little testing on the sled and concluded that more work is needed before it can be used for coasting down snowy slopes. It doesn't steer worth a damn.

Other than that limitation, we have a workable solution for hauling heavy material around in deep snow.

Future projects that might make country winters less oppressive:

I have ideas for other projects, but they are much more difficult to implement. I would like to find a conversion for my garden tractor that involved tracks or really wide wheels for the rear wheels and wide skis for the front wheels. Think of a slow speed snow tractor.

I would like to find a low cost greenhouse with automatic ventilation that can be erected on a raised deck. It should be able to withstand severe weather and should be relatively easy to dismantle and store away during the summer. If I can extend the growing season for my deck gardens, it will be very useful as the climate gets colder.

Covered storage for our vehicles is no longer something that might be nice to have. We spend a lot of time cleaning ice and snow off our car and van. In some cases, it takes as much time to make the car drivable as it does to drive it into town. If winters continue to be colder, it will make sense to make our vehicle use as efficient as possible.

I sure miss Baghdad Bob

Introducing the Gateway Pundit "Cold Reality" picture contest.

Is this a preview of the climate change to come?

Our family has been so preoccupied with the insanity of the global warmists that we have not taken a good look at the oncoming threat of 20 years of global cooling until very recently.

The latest series of snow storms have dumped several feet of snow on our property in Floyd VA and we have been fortunate to have our neighbor Rodger Bower to dig us out each time we became snowbound.

Because we have been getting mixed snow and rain, the snow becomes so heavy that it is very difficult to shovel. If we did not have access to someone like Rodger and his tractor, we would have been confined to the house for weeks at a time. The snow was deep enough that the usually reliable all wheel drive Subaru could not get us out to the plowed road.

We have been very fortunate this year, but I am beginning to wonder what will happen when the winters are significantly longer and colder. Are we going to be able to handle months and months of deep snow drifts and 10 degree weather?

We have been able, with the help of friends and family, to amass a store of firewood that was many times larger than what we gathered in previous years, but we have burned our supply faster than in any previous year.

We will need to cut and split another few cords of wood to make it through to warmer weather. Fortunately, we have a supply of standing dead trees that can be easily dropped and rendered into usable firewood. I can see several years supply, but I wonder what will happen when the several years of colder weather turn into a decade or two?

Our backup heating is electrical baseboards which work like a charm but are quite expensive and are used as a last resort. I shudder to think what out heating bills would look like if we had propane or electrical heat.

Global cooling will seriously impact our growing seasons. Our micro garden (foot square gardening) was barely satisfactory because of the short growing season. Local farmers were also affected and did not have the crop yields they had last year. If we are in for a long siege of shorter growing seasons, I am sure that we will soon be constructing greenhouses to make the most of the cooler summers to come.

People are resourceful when pressed to the wall and I think we will see many changes in how we heat our homes, how we grow food, and how we live during the colder years to come.

 Our clothing styles may even change as time goes on. In May, we will change from our winter mukluks to lightweight summer mukluks. You read it here first...

A Cold Spell has been cast upon us

Now that the global warming scam is history, many of us are scrambling to keep the home fires burning hot enough to ward off the cold.

Here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, temperatures seem to be much lower than in the nearby cities like Roanoke and Christiansburg, Maybe these are example of Urban Heat Islands which are significantly warmer than their surroundings. The town of Floyd is definitely not warmer than its surroundings.

We are burning firewood at double the usual rate in order to keep the house temperature in the 70's. I can't imagine what the people burning other fuels like propane must be going through.

Another sign that we are experiencing severely cold weather. We are sprinkling birdseed out the door and we usually have a carpet of birds all day long. Yesterday I saw crows feeding about 5 feet from the front door. When they start banging on the door to let us know that the seed is running low, we will know that the end times are near.

Climategate unfolds - scientific fraud is exposed for all to see

The temptation to attain fame and grant money through fraud was too great to resist for a number of "climate scientists" who are now exposed to public scrutiny through examination of their emails. These so-called scientists have discredited climate science as a legitimate profession. Instead they have created a modern day example of cargo cult science that stands as a historical landmark for political corruption.

From Wikipedia: Cargo cult science is a term used by Richard Feynman during a commencement address in 1974 to describe work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty".

The supporters of "global warming" are already marshaling arguments to defend their cause against scrutiny. They claim that these emails are being taken out of context. Perhaps they should take the time to read some of these emails. I have been browsing through the emails and they are quite illuminating.

Here are a few links that will let you decide for yourselves:

Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate

Email exchange between Graham F Haughton and Phil Jones

Climategate: Violating the Social Contract of Science

ICECAP compilation of recent articles

Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?

Climategate Computer Codes Are the Real Story

I expect to see an outpouring of support for these beleaguered "climate scammers" from NPR and other organizations who are in on the take or who have drunk the global warming Kool-Aid. The support will not contain real data or links to verifiable sources.

Global temperatures have been falling for eight years and yet we are spending tax money and crippling industrial development  to stop "global warming" during an economic depression.

Your conclusions may differ but I think the cat is finally out of the bag.

Climate Data-Fudging Exposed - ClimateGate is here

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has been exposed as the greatest hoax since the Piltdown Man.

In a caper reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers, a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.

These emails, now available for all to read on the Internet, expose conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

Google ClimateGate and AGW hoax for more data than you can read in one sitting.

Perhaps the Global Warmists will quietly fold their tents and leave the true environmentalists to saving wetlands and safeguarding water supplies.

I do not see a great future for Al Gore's carbon credit trading schemes.

Have you noticed the all-black wooly bears this year?

We may be in for a very severe winter if you believe the Farmer's Almanac.

Here in Floyd, VA, we are seeing an all-black version of the common wooly bear caterpillar without the traditional wooly bear stripes. It is completely black from end to end and has a soft fuzzy coat like a normal wooly bear.

At left is the winter severity legend in pictorial form. Image from the Wooly Bear Festival in Vermillion, OH

According to legend, the severity of the upcoming winter can be judged by examining the pattern of brown and black stripes on woolly bear caterpillars--the larvae of Isabella tiger moths.

If the brown stripe between the two black stripes is thick, the winter will be a mild one. A narrow brown stripe portends a long, cold winter. So, what will happen when there is no brown stripe at all?

This is what a normal Isabella tiger moth wooly bear looks like:

Our black wooly bear was identical to this, but was all black. It did not resemble the caterpillar version of the leopard moth that is pictured below:

The leopard moth larva has a spiky coat, while the common wooly worm has a softer and even coat. We were so startled to see the all-black wooly bear that we did not get a photo. As soon as I see another, I will post the photo here for a comparison.

If you don't believe in wooly bears, then you might consider what is happening to our weather recently.  Trees are already turning color and some are dropping their leaves. Nights are cold enough to justify turning on the heat again. Temperatures warm up to the eighties by noon, but drop to the fifties and below at night.

I am not taking any chances. I have been hard at work splitting and stacking firewood in preparation for a long hard winter.

I am already concerned about next year which should be even colder than this one as I have little confidence in the computer simulations that predict a global warming trend.

Cargo Cult Science produces "Global Crises" on demand

Certain politicians and tin pot dictators have long employed the tried and true method of using crises to keep constituents from "looking behind the curtain".

The most effective method of diverting attention away from how badly things are being run is to find a target menace and make it so terrifying that good sense flies out the window. Uninformed citizens (elites &  masses alike) who get their news from TV instead of real sources blindly follow the government piper over the hill.

A competing nation can be made into a boogeyman to frighten the rubes and get their tax money, but for real control of the citizens, you need a global crisis. This is where the cargo cult scientists like James Hansen come in. They will whip up computer models that will prove whatever a politician needs.

You want a global disaster of apocalyptic proportions? Hansen and his cohorts have a hockey stick generator that will make your hair stand up. Temps are rising! Seas are rising! We're all gonna die in five years!

Unfortunately he will not reveal his source data so other scientists can duplicate his findings. Real science requires that experiments are repeatable.

The UN knows a good thing when they see it so they sponsor the IPCC, their Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to push an agenda that will increase UN influence. After all, the Oil for Food scam is dead, so they need a new reason to exist.

Many scientists in the IPCC disagreed with the slanted reports put out by the UN and they set up the International Conference on Climate Change which counters the junk science coming out of the IPCC. This series of conferences is sponsored by a number of organizations. If you have any curiosity about what is actually happening in terms of climate change, you might start by reading the most recent proceedings.

Richard Feynman's 1974 Commencement address at CalTech provides the definitive definition of Cargo Cult Science. In it he points out the dishonesty of falsely promoting one's research to secure funding.

Only a few years ago, James Hansen was promoting Global Cooling. Now he has switched to a more remunerative prediction. Computer models can "prove" almost anything.

I wonder what the next "global crisis" is in the works?

Maybe they will try to prove water vapor and CO2 are pollutants... Oh, right.

Global Warming and Jackalopes

I am totally willing to believe that Global Warming is harmful to Jackalopes, but I believe this will not alter history in the slightest degree.

Jackalopes are amusing and imaginary creations.

Global Warming is also imaginary, but it is not amusing.

By next year, the AGW people will be claiming that the drop in global temperatures is due to their efforts.

They will have conveniently forgotten that temperatures have been falling for 8 years.