Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 6

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.)

Desk Set

‘Desk Set’ is a 1957 movie staring Spencer Tracy who plays methods engineer Richard Summer, the inventor of an early computer, or ‘electronic brain’ known as EMERAC, (clearly a takeoff on the first commercially successful computer for businesses, UNIVAC). Katherine Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, who is in charge of a reference library and research department for a large network broadcasting company. Summers is brought in by the network CEO to see if the library can be automated with one of his large computers. Ms. Watson is initially suspicious of Summer, but begins to find him an intelligent and charming person. When the all female staff of the research department find out why he is actually there, they assume that they are going to be replaced by the machine, since the whole network payroll department was recently replaced by a similar Summers computer.

In the early 70’s I graduated with degrees in Illustration and Advertising Design. I learned completely traditional art practices, all done by hand. Computers that could do art were considered something of a fantasy for the distant future. However, the future came much sooner than I expected. In 1984 the Macintosh 128K came out and began to establish desktop publishing and art as an easy to do function in the office. In 1987 the Macintosh II was released and the newspaper where I worked bought one. I gave up my pen and ink work and started doing graphics on computer, and I have been working hard to keep up ever since. Fortunately, my art skills kept me gainfully employed until 2014, when the internet, with its offerings of free news, sports and advertising began to seriously impact newspaper revenues, and I, along with 20 other middle managers and older employees, were cut to trim expenses. So I am very much aware of how it feels to be replaced by technology.

After many comic misadventures, and a growing romantic attachment between Summer and Watson, the big computer finally arrives, taking up extra room and annoying the staff with its need for clean air and proper temperature for it to function. After spending all their time programing and entering data for the machine, the day comes when everyone receives their layoff notices, confirming their worst suspicions. Staging a staff work slowdown, the overwhelmed computer operator storms out leaving Summer and Watson to take up the slack. They all find out that the payroll computer has malfunctioned and accidentally fired everyone in the building. Summers explains how his machine was only there to help out and with a big business merger, there would be even more staff and work to deal with. Watson and Summer collaborate together to solve the immediate problems and learn to love the machine.

‘Desk Set’ was one of the first movies to talk about how technology was starting to replace workers even though this was not the focus of the romantic comedy, which featured the eighth movie paring of Tracy and Hepburn, both in their 50’s. The movie was not a commercial success and only grew in popularity many years later. Still, ‘Desk Set’ is a favorite of ours and a reminder that people were concerned with technology replacing them from early on. The most interesting part of this is, that films would reach a tech movie climax a decade later with Hal 9000, the ship’s computer in ‘2001, A Space Odyssey.’ Hal would kill off the crew of the Discovery in order to properly complete the mission. Not exactly the best way to talk about how computers were possibly going to replace people in the near future.

(Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in ‘Desk Set,’ with EMERAC in the background. And yes, real early computers were huge machines taking up entire air-conditioned rooms, similar to massive server farms these days.)

Will it Ever be Normal Again?

Here in Utah, last year, during the beginning of September, I complained bitterly about the unending heat wave that we suffered through. In Salt Lake City, the September 2022 temperatures were blasted by seven 100 degree days to start the month, including an all-time record high of 107 degrees. Previously, there had been only 3 September days with over 100 degree heat since 1874. A half-dozen other heat records were set in Utah during 2022 including the hottest month on record, (July), the hottest summer on record, the most 100 degree days in a year, (34), the second-longest streak of 100 degree days, (9 days), and the second-longest streak of 90 degree days. (42 days).

So, is it any wonder that a cooler then normal fall was very welcome. Then, it began to rain and snow. October precipitation was lower then normal, November was above average, and December was also well above average. A six day snow storm beginning December 11 left almost two feet of snow on the ground, where it has stayed. The snow has varied from 1 to 3 feet on the ground since. January and February water precipitation totals were over 10 inches, which is half of the yearly total of 20 inches here where I live. The temperatures have barely gone above the high 30s in an unending cold winter. Overall in the state, the water equivalent of the mountain snow pack stand at an amazing 195% of normal. The only years here in Utah that have seen more snow to date were 1984, 1997 and 2005. Has this helped the drought that Utah has been experiencing over the last few years? The current drought monitor shows that just over 31% of the state is in extreme drought down from 70% last year. So we are looking much better.

In the southern part of the state where Lake Powell stands behind the Glen Canyon Dam, (the second largest reservoir in the U.S.), it is only projected to rise 6%. The reservoir reached a record low elevation last year. It is estimated that it will take 15 years of above average snow to refill Lake Powell, even though the area snow pack is 40% above average this year. For the rest of the year, Utah is forecast to have above average temperatures this summer and normal precipitation, which is to say, not much during those summer months. But, with winter still being cold and wet right now, I might like a little warming up, but then I will most likely complain until the weather turns cold again. Some people are just never happy with anything to do with the weather.

(A couple of photos recently from along the side of our house and the back deck, it really has been a very snowy and depressing winter.)

Water Water Everywhere

The downpours began on Christmas Eve and continued almost nonstop for 43 days, (somewhat biblical that). The rivers running down from the mountains turned into raging torrents that overwhelmed mining towns and whole communities. The deluge filled the large Central Valley and turned it into a inland sea, some 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died along with almost 200,000 cattle drowned. Downtown Sacramento was under 10 feet of water and the state legislature in the city was not able to meet, so it moved to San Francisco until Sacramento dried out a half year later, but, by then, the state was pretty much bankrupt. This was California in late 1861 to 1862.

I came across this while looking for information on atmospheric rivers, they are not a new thing due to climate change, but an old and recurring problem for many parts of the world. Imagine a stream of moisture a mile up in the atmosphere the equal of 10 Mississippi Rivers that can be 250 miles wide and thousands of miles long. The most frightening thing was that these massive amounts of precipitation have occurred every 200 years or so on California and the Western coast and have happened for at least, the last two millennia. Another aspect of these atmospheric rivers is that smaller ones between 1950 and 2010 have supplied California with 30% to 50% of their annual rain and snowfall, all within about 10 days each year. River sediments in San Francisco bay have indicated massive floods in the years AD 212, 440, 603, 1029, 1418 and in 1605. The 1605 flood was so massive that San Francisco bay became, temporarily, a fresh water bay.

This year California has been pummeled by those atmospheric rivers, resulting in heavy rainfall, and in the mountains, record snowfall measuring up to 15 feet in many areas, trapping residents and blocking mountain passes. I am reminded of the infamous Donner Party emigrants that were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1847 by 15 to 20 feet of snow. Reportedly, several members were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. This years rain and snowfall will refill most reservoirs in the state, temporarily bringing a pause to a 3-year drought. Depleted aquifers in the state will take many more years of record precipitation to replenish, and it is likely that the weather may tip back into drought conditions with the anticipated arrival of a new El Nino in the Pacific. But those atmospheric rivers will always lurk in the background of California weather with an uncomfortable realization that current climate change can always make them worse.

(Below, Sacramento in early 1862 with residents resorting to boats to get around. Here in Utah, we have been coping with the weather overflow from California causing record snowfall of our own this year. So far this has been the worse since large amounts of snow melting in 1983 caused massive flooding throughout the state.)

The Elusive and Necessary Peace

I was born to parents, that as teenagers, lived through the Great Depression and then World War II. My father was in the Navy and my mother worked as a secretary in Washington D.C. for the Naval Department. The war ended, happily, in September of 1945. I was born a few years after the beginning of what was known as the Cold War, which most historians place its beginnings in 1947, only two short years after the end of WWII. The Cold War was a long, ongoing political rivalry between democratic countries led by the United States and the communist Soviet Union and its allies. The main features of the Cold War were the threat of nuclear war, competition for influence in newly independent nations after WWII and military and economic support of countries around the world working against each sides ideology.

It was this ongoing and frightening nuclear tension that heavily flavored my childhood and young adulthood, I even looked at joining the military at one time but ultimately decided against it. I grew up through hot and cold conflicts in the many proxy wars in other countries fought against the communists around the world. I was very excited when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 breaking into 15 separate republics, including Ukraine. It looked then like we might be able to have the world peace that was promised at the end of WWII. Unfortunately, the terrorist conflicts that began in 2001 and the resulting invasion of Iraq by the U.S. in 2003 put an end to any idea of world peace again.

Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian Federation began to violently reacquire some of its former territories in places like Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, claiming that it was their right to integrate them back into their sphere of economic and political influence. In 2014 the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine were annexed and Belarus was transformed into a Russian puppet state in 2020. The final step would be the complete annexation of Ukraine in February of 2022. But, the reunification of Ukraine ran into a small snag. The Ukrainians didn’t want to become part of Russia again and violently resisted and are still successfully resisting the Russians militarily, one year after the invasion.

The war in Ukraine is the final nail in the coffin of the post WWII idea of peaceful existence between countries. There will never be anything resembling peace in the world until Russia with its idea of a new empire is defeated militarily. After putting an end to Fascism in 1945 and Russian Communism in 1991, we should have been able to take a breath and work together as one world. The need for that is growing daily as we seen how climate change and environmental destruction is beginning to seriously affect our lives on this planet. We must try to work together more and more despite ongoing conflicts to help save ourselves and everything around us.

(Below, me and my Cold War siblings, Christmas, 1971. We were worried about being able to grow up in a world threatened by nuclear war. Now we are worrying about surviving climate change.)