Dino Trek

I’ve noticed that I have slid back into my grumpy old man mindset lately with the last few blogs, complaining about my Cold War childhood and having to shovel snow all winter. So it is time to talk about what this blog was originally intended for in the first place, to discuss my art and writing. I started drawing in the fourth grade and eventually became a modestly successful graphic artist and illustrator over the years, up until my forced retirement. For the last nine years I have reinvented myself as a children’s museum exhibit painter, science fiction novelist and an occasional cartoonist, building on works that I started more then 45 years ago. I never made much money from cartooning then and I certainly am not going to make any money now. But that doesn’t stop me from scratching that cartooning itch that affects me when I least expect it.

Back about 1990 when my son Rob was quite young, like a lot of youngsters, he became interested in Dinosaurs. We were able to indulge him with trips to museums, fossil digs and me doing a few paintings of Dinosaurs. I also began to develop a Dino cartoon strip. It was on the heels of a long-time science fiction cartoon strip by me, so I was familiar with the process. Back then, I roughed out some characters from different Dino species and threw them together for occasionally funny interactions, I drew some 50 individual strips and sent them out for a proposed book, but actually, nothing much happened. So I put them aside on my ancient computer and they languished in a half-forgotten file. During a much needed art studio update and clean-up three years ago, I came upon some old print-outs of my early work and wondered if it would be worthwhile to take a second look at the cartoons.

After reading some new books about Dinosaurs and Mammals, I decided to make my old, roughly drawn characters, anatomically accurate, and that has come with a number of challenges. Some dinosaurs are large, quite tall and extremely long, not exactly fitting smoothly into a square cartoon panel. Accurate Dino drawings also don’t look very humorous and I had to find small ways to modify their faces and other features without getting too far from reality. Now that they have been drawn, (with continuing modifications), I will plug them into the original cartoons that I did a long time ago and see where it goes. Who knows, maybe I will finally get them published, 30 years after I started them.

(Stay tuned for some of the strips, hopefully. I am going to start working again at the museum on some new exhibits so I am not sure how much extra time I will have for this in the next few months.)

Earth Day 2023

The 53rd Earth Day has arrived, (tomorrow), and everyone is touting their undying love for the world. Every product producing company and corporation is showing how green they have become and how their wares are completely safe for us and the environment. The government has passed new laws to make it easier for our planet to breathe without suffocating on CO2 and methane, and every 2024 political candidate is setting themselves up to show how they are the wonderful, caring Earth-friendly persons that they all imagine themselves to be. It makes me quite ill. Earth Day has joined the ranks of the rest of the crushingly over-commercialized holidays that Easter, Halloween and Christmas have long since become. Everyone can sound like an environmentalist without having to actually do anything now, and the rest of us will believe them. (It has produced a new word for our language, greenwashing).

Climate Change on our planet is being caused by Global Warming. As our planet heats up from the mind-blogging amounts of CO2 being produced by our technological civilization, and dumped into our atmosphere, the weather will get more extreme with hotter and colder, wetter and dryer swings, causing more and more disruptions of our daily lives. This last winter alone has produced massive, record-setting amounts of snow in California, Nevada and Utah and it could not have come at a better time. The Western U.S. has been suffering from a prolonged period of drought. All that snow will melt and flow into rivers, lakes and reservoirs. California especially has desperately needed the water for their nearly depleted reservoirs throughout the state. However, too much of a good thing will cause flooding in many parts of California which produce a considerable amount of the vegetable crops for the rest of the U.S. It will all be under water this spring and summer, most likely causing shortages and large price increases of many products. The Great Salt Lake and especially Lake Powell in southern Utah have also been reprieved from drying out for another year or so.

But, remember those climate swings that I mentioned, It may have been very cold and wet this last winter. but now, a strong and hot El-Nino has been predicted to begin this summer or fall. Record heat, never seen before, has been forecast for the end of 2023 and especially in 2024, which could become the hottest year on record. So, will that make things wetter or dryer? For each 1.8°F (1°C) of atmospheric warming, saturated air contains 7% more average water vapor. During an El Nino, warmer water in the Pacific Ocean is pushed east towards South and Central America and the California coast. It could create wetter then usual conditions in the southwestern U.S. and drier conditions in the North. It will be interesting to see if it actually stays wetter for California and here in Utah, but it will certainly get a lot warmer. Earth Day next year could be quite interesting, to say the least.

(The very long and cold winter that we just experienced here in Utah could change into a very hot summer and fall. We are planning on making some changes in our landscaping to make it more drought tolerant and to cut down on water use by converting some of our lawn to other plants.)

The New Cold War

When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s and up until 1991, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were nose to nose in a long, frightening conflict known as the Cold War. Of course we were technically at peace, but during that time there was a very aggressive nuclear and conventional arms race, a concerted and frenzied space race, many proxy wars, mostly in third world countries, and an overall ideological drive for world dominance from each side. It was a very scary time to be growing up, even with a young and incomplete awareness of what was going on in the greater world outside my home in Utah. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union into separate countries, the worst of the threat seemed to have lifted and I was happy to live a life relatively free of the possibility of global conflict.

Mark Twain once said that “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” And so it is, with weary observation, that modern history is beginning to resemble my childhood, though this time with another country set on becoming a major player on the world scene, China. In the run up to World War II, the US became alarmed at aggressive Japanese expansionism in Asia and closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping and cut imports of scrap iron, copper and oil. 71% of Japan’s scrap iron, 93% of their copper and 90% of their oil came from the U.S. and British and Dutch interests in the Pacific. Japan soon resorted to open warfare to get what they needed to continue their expansion. In modern times computer chips are running the world, and China is being actively blocked from getting what it needs. 90% of the worlds most advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, the machines that build cutting-edge chips are from a Dutch company and in California there are two companies that design the processing units vital for advanced A.I applications, necessary for running everything from cars and phones to modern weaponry.

Instead of an resource race, there is chip race. Last year the U.S. passed the CHIPS act, $52 billion dollars in grants and incentives to ramp up chip production. China has been responding with their own chip building programs and a huge military buildup, it has rapidly expanded its nuclear weapons capability and built the largest navy in the world. It has enlarged and created islands far from their coast to extend their territorial reach and threatened Taiwan endlessly. Last year China’s space program set up an Earth-orbiting space station and has mounted several lunar orbiting and moon sample missions. There are plans to build a remote lunar research station near the moon’s south pole and more plans for a manned lunar landing mission before the end of the decade. If this doesn’t sound like a repeat of the 60s, 70s and 80s manic completion with the Soviet Union, then I don’t know what does, or maybe perhaps, it just sort of rhymes with the original Cold War.

(I am just getting too old and weary to have to deal with another series of conflicts. It is a sad state of affairs that we must out compete China in a way that they do not feel they have to use the nuclear option. The odds right now, are that there is a 20% chance of a military clash in the next five years with China. And, we still have Russia in an active conflict that must also be defused without broader effects. Welcome to Cold War 2.0)

Project Plowshare

Growing up in the 50s and 60s, during the first frantic decades of the Cold War, I heard a lot of strange things to do with atomic weapons. One of the oddest was a program for the development of techniques using nuclear explosions for construction purposes. I suppose this was to help calm people’s fears of nuclear annihilation, sure these things were hellishly terrifying to all of us, but hey, we can also use them for good. Project Plowshare was started in June, 1957, as part of a worldwide ‘Atoms for Peace’ program. The idea was to use the ‘friendly atom’ in such things as medical research, massive earth removal projects and find ways to use them in nuclear power plants. We could use all those nuclear bombs for good things instead of just blowing up cities and nations.

Some of the proposals for Project Plowshare, (you know, the Isaiah Bible verse for beating our swords into plowshares), even if they were atomic swords. Anyway, how about widening the Panama Canal with nuclear explosions? Or perhaps blowing up a path for a new sea-level canal through Nicaragua, hey, and call it the Pan-Atomic Canal. One proposal which came close to being carried out was Project Chariot, using even bigger hydrogen bombs to create an artificial harbor in northern Alaska. It was only stopped because they actually became concerned for the native Eskimo population and the fact that there was really nothing much there to use it for. In 1956 the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal seizing it from British and French interests. They began charging their own tolls to pay for the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile river. To create an alternative to the Suez Canal there was a proposal to use 500 nuclear explosions to excavate a canal through the Negev Desert in Israel to bypass the Suez.

Other proposals to use nuclear excavation techniques included a project to use 22 explosions to excavate a huge road-cut through the Bristol Mountains in the Mojave Desert for a super highway and new rail line. Some included blasting caverns for water, natural gas and oil storage. They considered using blasts to connect underground aquifers in Arizona or cutting paths on the western slope of the Sacramento Valley for water transportation. Even deep atomic explosions were proposed for natural gas fracking purposes, but canceled after the recovered gas was found to be too radioactive to use safely. The program was finally shut down in 1977 as more was learned about radiation dangers and because of other public concerns. In all, there were 35 nuclear warheads used in 27 separate tests to study the feasibility of the peaceful use of these weapons. True to form, the Soviet Union ran it’s own program called ‘Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy.’ Even though some of their tests were more successful, they eventually stopped their projects as well.

(Many of the mostly underground Nevada tests occasional leaked radiation which drifted over into Utah. Fortunately my family didn’t move to Utah until 1960, so I probably missed the worst of the 1950s tests.)

Ice Age Utah

A week ago today, I woke up to another foot of snow. That was on top of older snow which had been on the ground since early December. The storm was part of a 4-day event that finally ended on Wednesday, by Saturday the temperature, which had hovered no higher then the mid-thirties all winter long, had jumped to 55 degrees F. Seemingly, our long winter has finally come to an end and the three feet of everlasting snow in the back yard is finally melting away. It can be forgiven if I complain a lot about it. This has simply been the worst winter I have gone through in my entire life. Most of the winters here have 4 to 6 days when the snow is so bad that I have to shovel or snow blow the driveway and sidewalks. This season there have been 26 times which it was necessary to do that. A years worth of precipitation has fallen locally in 6 months so far, and the mountains around us have broken all previous records for total snowfall.

I can draw some comparisons to the late, unlamented Ice Age, that covered a good part of North America with a mile of so of ice, (and to be fair, it was only the very northern states that were covered). Here in Utah at the end of the last Ice Age surge, only 12,000 years ago, we had our own unique impact from that much ice and water. Lake Bonneville, whose ancient shoreline lies under the foundation of my house, was filled with melt water from those glaciers. Currently a mere puddle remains of that body of water, the Great Salt Lake, and is struggling under a drought. It has seemingly been reprieved for the time being from a total dry-out by the bounty of this winters overflow. Its future is still somewhat in doubt if we see a return to dryer conditions.

The margins of that huge fresh-water Ice Age lake was home to many kinds of megafauna. There were big-horn sheep, horses and bison. Other animals included mammoths, mastodons, camels horses, muskoxen and giant ground sloths. They were preyed upon by saber-toothed cats and dire wolves. About this time, the giant lake broke its bounds and began to rapidly shrink, and most of these giant animals became extinct in this area. We know that because their bones have been found over much of the state. So was it a sudden change in the weather, much like it has been over the last week here? Did these cold-adapted creatures simply become unable to cope with the warmer weather that suddenly appeared? Utah’s famous Huntington mammoth remains were found in the mountains of central Utah at an elevation of 9,000 feet and was estimated to have died 10,500 years ago. Did this creature climb up there to find cooler weather? Was he the last of his kind here and did the warmer weather finally do him in?

(My photo of replicas of the Huntington mammoth and a saber-toothed cat in an exhibit of Ice Aged creatures. Snow blowing the driveway is difficult enough, having to watch out for these animals as well would have been quite harrowing.)

Let it Snow

The Utah water year runs from October 1 to September 30 in the following year. That is the period that measures how much precipitation falls on any given spot in our rather dry state. The amount of water that ends up here where I live in North Ogden, is a lackluster average of 20 inches per year. Last Friday, March 31, marked the mid-year term in our water year, so how have we done in the first 6 months considering that in all of the last year, we came up a bit short with 18.6 inches.

As it turns out, we have nothing to worry about this year. At the midpoint of our water year we stand at 21.4 inches of precipitation in North Ogden. This as you can see, is already well above the total for the entire season. So much for the drought that has been plaguing us for the last several years. Out of those 182 days so far, 75 of those had some precipitation in measurable form, 42 of those days were snow, the rest were rain. North Ogden typically has only 84 days per year of precipitation, so again, we are running well above normal. At our house we have had snow on the ground continuously since early December. We actually began to see patches of barren ground and grass in mid-March, but Mother Nature said, ‘No, not yet,’ and we are now back to about two feet of snow on the ground for the time being.

Were has this bounty come from? Our good neighbors on the coast have generously shared their copious rain and snowfall. Not willing to be contained there, it has spilled over into our state and beyond. The often quoted atmospheric river storms have pounded California with 12 massive systems among a total of 29 events in all, large and small. After a severe 3-year drought in California, they have been given a reprieve for this year and now have to contend with too much water. In Utah as well, there has been a reprieve from our own drought, but it remains to be seen how much water will help out with the low level of the Great Salt Lake and Lake Powell in southern Utah.

(There was such a miserable weather event on March 31, I decided to have some fun with the unending storm. This fanciful mix of real snow out my front door and a supposed means of getting around in it had me wondering if perhaps getting a couple of Tauntauns might help.)