NORMALIZATION

I can't make up my mind about climate change. Will we adjust our behavior in time, or does the human species lack the intelligence to survive? I hope the answer is yes and no, I worry the answer is no and yes. It seems to come down to how you define “intelligence”, by the smartest of us or the most obstinate? There are over 7 billion human brains working at this moment, and too many it seems are convinced meteorologists can't accurately predict if it will rain tomorrow, so of course scientists can't predict the average temperature a hundred years from now. But the first is almost impossible to predict, while the second is just extremely difficult.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says “The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time”, while the Climate Impacts Group offers a more pragmatic definition; "You pick your vacation destination based on the climate but you pack your suitcase based on the weather." And it all started with a Swedish triple threat – he was an arrogant, racist atheist. But he was a very smart chemist. In fact Svante Arrhenius was so far ahead of his instructors that they gave his PhD dissertation a “C”, and in 1903 that same work won him the Noble Prize in Chemistry.

Growing up with those long cold Swedish winter nights made the racist Svante (above) curious as to why we weren't still having ice ages.  Being a chemist he naturally thought chemistry might provide the answer.  His knew that the sun heated the ground during the day, and reflected most of that energy back into the air as infrared radiation, otherwise known as heat.  He suspected that the more carbon dioxide and water vapor there was in the air, the less of that reflected infrared radiation could escape into space. What he came up with in 1896 was his greenhouse law; “If the quantity of (carbon dioxide) increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.”   He ran the numbers, and found, as he wrote a decade later, “...any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth's surface by 4 degrees Celsius; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8 degrees C.”   Svante had predicted global warming and climate change, four years before the 20th century had begun.

Poor old Svante. He had to do his calculations the old fashioned way – using unpaid graduate students who labored for hours with pencils and papers and slide rules.  And he made a couple of bad assumptions. He figured clouds were pretty much a wash, since they both reflected sunlight from their tops, and trapped heat under their shadows.  He was right about that, but he missed how sensitive the climate was to carbon dioxide by half.   In other words he saw that burning coal and oil and wood released carbon into the air, but he didn't realize how really bad that was.  In fact, being Swedish, he was looking forward to more beach weather.

It was the geologists who provided what I think is the most convincing piece of the puzzle, they just did not know it for a long time. You see, they were looking for gold and diamonds and copper and coal and oil and even water, which they did by first drilling a lot of holes all over the place. Now, each hole was an experiment, and these rock farmers recorded everything about the holes as they drilled them, including the temperature at various depths. Most of those numbers were kept secret by the companies that collected them. But eventually the more social geologists were able to collect a record of what they called the geothermal gradient world wide. They found that as a general rule at anything less than 200 feet the temperature was about 11 degrees Celsius – or 55 degrees Fahrenheit.  Below that you have to figure in ground water, rock type, how close you are to a volcano - but as a general rule the temperature goes up about 1 degree Celsius for every additional 1,000 feet down the hole you go.  And it wasn't until much later that other graduate students noticed that as a general rule, up close the general rules did not add up.

Plotting out the temperatures in great detail and very exactly, and allowing for volcanoes and such, still produced a steady rising temperature curve as you went down.  But on the other end, at the top of the holes, things were a little odd.  The line there seemed to be steeper than it ought to - not enough that it kept the rock hounds up at night, but it did nag at them.  And then somebody compared the carbon 14 dating of the rocks through which these holes had been bored, at the top.  And suddenly the ages and the temperatures of the upper rocks of the holes started to make sense. The closer you got to the surface, and the younger the rocks got, the higher the temperatures were above that general rule, beginning about 500 years ago, about the start of the industrial revolution, when a growing number of smoke stacks started spewing out all that carbon that Svante had measured .And in 1998, a century after the chemist Svante started this,  three geologists , Henry Pollock, Shapeeng Huang and Po-Yu Shen provided geological confirmation of global warming. “The subsurface temperatures ...indicate that Earth's mean surface temperature has increased by about 1.0° (C) over the past five centuries.”

So two independent fields of science, chemistry and geology, had each independently produced a picture of a warming planet for the previous 500 years, and predicted it would continue to warm. Together they produced a coherent, unified story with an explanation. Glaciologist, the only scientists whose field of study melts if they don't work fast enough, had independently stumbled on a third proof. Snow falling on glaciers today has more carbon in it than water melted out glacier ice formed five hundred years ago, and far more than the snow that fell a thousand years ago. And the amount of carbon in the snow is increasing. And it wasn't until very recently that meteorologists got into this discussion, which was to be expected, since, their field of study is what every other scientist calls “background noise”.

Let me give you an example of that noise; from December 1^st , 1801 to January 31^st , 1802, only about an inch of snow fell in Albany, New York, a spot which on average gets closer to 32 inches during those two months. The temperature ranged between 4 and 10 degrees Celsius (40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit), when it is normally around minus 3 Celsius (mid 20's Fahrenheit ). Along the Ohio River, in eastern Ohio, 3 inches of snow fell on November first in 1801, but after that they suffered not even another hard frosts for the rest of the entire winter. In January of 1802 tulips and violets bloomed in New Haven, Connecticut, and on the 28^th of that month Salem, Massachusetts saw the thermometer hit 15.5 degrees Celsius (60 Fahrenheit). No less a numbers freak than Thomas Jefferson became convinced that “The change which has taken place in our climate is one of those facts which all men...are sensible of...”  And this was before the industrial revolution!

Less than 20 years later came the other extreme, the summer of 1816. On June 6^th, snow fell in Albany, New York. Ice was observed on rivers and lakes in July and August as far south as Pennsylvania. Farmers in Massachusetts got a crop in that summer, but so little that oats were selling for 10 times what they had sold for the previous year. World wide probably 40,000 people died of starvation. It was referred to as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death”, or “The Year Without a Summer”, and it was probably caused by the April 10^th , 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the largest volcanic eruption in the last ten thousand years. To my mind, that is the real difference between weather and climate – weather is a record of extremes, and climate is a record of the average between them.

Yes, the 700 volcanoes that erupt every year throw about half a million tons of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, and a super volcano like Tambora may doubled that amount once or twice a century. But ever day humans spew 88 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Can there really be any doubt about why old extremes are becoming our new normal, or what is responsible for it?

Every scientific method we use to look at the past 500 years, every experiment we come up with to test what has happened over the last five centuries, tells us that the new normal is climate change, and that our industrial revolution is the one new factor over the last five hundred years that is driving our new normal to new climate extremes.  From this point forward there really is only one question more we have to ask. Does the human species lack the intelligence to survive? And the answer is up to all those idiots who voted for Donald Trump.

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FIGHTING OVER SWAMPLAND - The Toledo War

“Politics have no relation to morals”
Niccolo Machiavelli - “The Prince” - 1513

I would say that 1835 was, like most years, a revolutionary year in America. Inspired by pro-slavery gringo emigrants, Texas rebelled against anti-slavery Mexico. In Boston, five thousand bigots broke into a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, and dragged abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison through the streets at the end of a rope. In South Carolina 36 slaves and one 60 year old free-black carpenter were hanged for trying to organize a slave revolt. Down in Florida the Second Seminole War broke out when Native Americans refused to surrender their freedom and their homes. And along the shores of Lake Erie, free whites did their very best to start a war over possession of 268 square miles of swamp known as “The Toledo Strip”.

In truth, the Great Black Swamp was what film maker Alfred Hitchcock would call a "magoffin'. It was not what people were really fighting over, even tho it was what people were fighting over. It was not even much of a swamp by Louisiana standards. It was great only because it occupied a swath of land 40 miles wide and 120 miles long, in the northwest corner Ohio – which was a little far north for a swamp.

It was really a remnant of the ice ages, a collection of ponds and marshes interspersed with hillocks, filled and drained by the 130 mile long Maumee River, which rose from the high ground around Fort Wayne,  Indiana and fed into Lake Erie.  It's only claim to fame was that it formed a natural barrier between the state of Ohio and the territory of Michigan. The Black Swamp was certainly not desirable  farmland, but it provided a bumper crop of mosquitoes each summer, and they, and the malaria they carried, made life difficult for any intrepid surveyors who might set up their theodolites upon such soggy ground.

“Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.”

Niccolo Machiavelli – “The Prince” – 1513

The first real attempt to draw the border was made in 1817, when Michigan Territory hired surveyor William Harris. According to the “Harris Line” the mouth of the Maumee River was in Michigan, below the swamp. In 1818 Ohio responded by hiring John Fulton to survey the border, which he found five miles further north, avoiding the swamp by going above it. Taken together the two lines bracketed the Great Black Swamp. And while the desire of a surveyor to avoid all those mosquitoes was understandable, the residents of Ohio and Michigan were confused. They appealed to Washington, D.C.  But abiding by the political rule that whatever you do will make somebody angry with you, the Federal politicians decided to do nothing. After all, nobody would fight for ownership of a swamp. Would  they?

Then in 1825 the Erie Canal opened, connecting the port of New York City with the Great Lakes. It proved to be such an economic revolution that plans were immediately drawn up for a port at the mouth of the Maumee River, and a canal up that river to Fort Wayne, Indiana (statehood granted in 1816), where it would connect to another canal to be built down the Wabash River, to the Ohio and thence to the Mississippi. Those canals would make the port at Toledo (which was established by Ohio in 1832) the hub of transportation for the entire center of the continent. A Toledo lawyer, John Fitch, noted that already it was the general opinion that “no place on the lake except Buffalo will rival it.” Quite a claim to fame - almost as big as Buffalo. The politically active residents of Michigan Territory became convinced that Ohio politicians were trying to steal Toledo from them. Which was true.

The politics finally solidified when hot-headed 23 year old Stephen Mason was appointed Territorial Governor of Michigan. He was a gift from President Andrew Jackson, a man who appreciated hot heads. And under pressure from other hot heads in the territory,  Governor Mason issued the “Pains and Penalties Act” of 12 February, 1835,  making it illegal for a non-Michigan resident to enforce Ohio law in Toledo, Michigan Territory.

The Cleveland, Ohio newspapers called the Michigan claim to Toledo “as absurd as it is ridiculous.” And on 23 February, the defiant Ohio General Assembly, playing to their own base, voted to “run the border” of the Fulton Line, meaning to mark it again as Toledo, Ohio, with stone posts that clearly said so. Then on April Fool’s day Michigan held local elections in the Toledo Strip. On 6 April, Ohio held competing local elections in the Toledo Strip. Somebody was going to have to disappoint their supporters..

“Before all else be armed.”
Niccolo Machiavelli – “The Prince” – 1513

Two days later a Michigan Country sheriff and an armed posse of 40 men rode into Toledo to enforce the Penalties Act. Several men snuck into the home of Benjamin Stickney, who was an “Ohio patriot” or an Phio Nut - depending on which side of the border you lived on. He was also a major in the Ohio militia. Now, even allowing for how little humanity knew at the time about dysfunctional parenting, the level of strangeness displayed by Benjamin Stickney toward his own children is staggering. This respected member of the Ohio community named his eldest son “Number One” and his younger son “Number Two”. Stickney also had a daughter, but we don't know what he called her. I suspect it might have been “Light Sleeper”.

You see, on the night of 8 April, 1835,  the girl was awakened by a noise, and she stepped into the hall to investigate. A creeping Michigan deputy clamped a hand over the startled child’s mouth, and held her silent, lest she shout a warning to her father.  Alas, Benjamin Stickney would not have heard her, as he was not at home. So two of his house guests were arrested and taken north for arraignment. Two days later they were released on bail.

In handbills and letters to Ohio newspapers Major Stickney inflated the posse to 300 men “armed with muskets and bayonetts". He claimed that the deputies had tried to gouge out his eyes (he wasn't there)  and had “throttled” his daughter.  He urged his fellow buckeyes to “turn out en masse to protect  their northern border and restrain the savage barbarity of the hordes of the north.”  Ohio Governor Robert Lucas, another Jackson Democrat,  sent 40 men to guard his surveyors and ordered the 100,000 members of the state militia to assemble in the tiny town of Perryville, Ohio, just up the Maumee River from Toledo. Only 10,000 actually responded and most of them never got to Perryville, because they got lost in the swamp.

Meanwhile on Sunday 21 April a Michigan posse 30 strong, caught the Ohio “line runners” relaxing in camp.   Most of the buckeyes broke for the woods, but nine of the protecting militia were caught in the open. When the Michigan posse fired a volley over their heads they wisely surrendered. All seven were unharmed but were arrested for violating the “Pains and Penalties Act”. And on Monday morning six were granted bail and two were released after a warning to behave. The only Ohioan who remained in jail was Jonathan Fletcher, a hot head who refused to post bail “on principle.” In the annals of Michigan this encounter was memorialized as the “Battle of Phillip’s Corner”, since the encounter had occurred in a field owned by Eli Phillips, who supported Michigan.

“The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.”
Niccolo Machiavelli – “The Prince” – 1513

The smell of gunpowder had brought a degree of sanity back to Governor Mason, and in the spirit of good will he suspended enforcement of his Pains and Penalties Act. But now it was the Ohio legislature’s turn to appease their base. Kidnapping was already illegal in Ohio, but buckeye politicians felt it necessary to pass a new law providing hard labor for kidnapping anyone from Ohio. And they made Toledo the capital of a new Ohio county.

In Toledo one observer noted “Men (were) galloping about – guns getting ready – wagons being filled with people and hurrying off, and everybody in commotion “ The little town of just 1,250 citizens had become a magnet for every nut case, political hot head and pugnacious drifter in the Midwest. In July, two Michigan deputies tried to hold an auction of property seized for non payment of Michigan taxes, and a gang of Ohio “patriots”, led by Number Two Strikney, broke up the auction. So, on 12 July 1835 a Michigan arrest warrant was issued for the son-of-a-patriot, for disturbing the peace.  Number Two, upon learning of the warrant, sent a message to the Michigan Sheriff to stay out of Toledo, if he wanted to live.

That threat set Michigan Governor Mason off again. He ordered 250 men into Toledo, under Deputy Sheriff Joseph Wood, to arrest Number Two and his "gang". Most of the Ohio “patriots” ran safely for the Maumee River border, but Number Two didn’t make it. When Sheriff Wood physically grabbed Number Two, he pulled what in Ohio was called a pen knife and in Michigan described as “a dirk”.  “Two” stabbed the sheriff in the leg and disappeared across the Maumee River. The wound was minor and the sheriff was able to ride back across the border that night, having paused to arrest Number Two’s father, Major Stickney, and drag him back to Michigan, tied to the back of a horse. But before leaving town the Michiganders also smashed the offices of the pro-Ohio Toledo Gazette, behaving, claimed the paper, worse than an “Algerian robbery or Turkish persecution.” It seemed the residents were finally running short of hyperbole. What was left but gunpowder?

“A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.”
Niccolo Machiavelli – “The Prince” – 1513.

It was at this point that Andrew Jackson finally stepped in and on 29 August, 1835 removed Mason as governor of Michigan Territory. Jackson also let it be known that Michigan would only be allowed to become a state after they accepted that Toledo was a town in Ohio. It was a bitter pill for the Badger rabble to swallow, particularly after all that rabble rousing, but as a sop for hurt feelings, the federal government granted Michigan the additional territory known as the Northern Peninsula. Michigan was finally admitted into the union, sans Toledo, on 26 January, 1837.

So Ohio won. The canals were dug, and the buckeyes benefited from the taxes paid by the port at the mouth of the Maumee River.  In 1842 1,578 barrels of flour and 12,976 bushels of wheat were shipped through Toledo, Ohio, and taxed.  By 1852 the totals were a quarter million barrels flour and almost two million bushels of wheat. But Toledo did not become the transportation hub for the Midwest, because canal technology was superseded by the railroads, and Chicago superseded Toledo; none of which the Ohio patriots could have predicted in 1835.

Meanwhile, in 1844, a party of surveyors was marking out the second place prize for Michigan, the Upper Peninsula,  when they found their compasses spinning wildly. This was caused by one of the largest concentrations of iron ore ever found on the planet Earth, the Marquette Range, which was surrounded by one of the largest concentrations of copper ore ever found on the Earth. Beginning in 1847 and continuing over the next one hundred years and fifty years, over a billion tons of iron and several billion tons of copper were removed from those hills. None of the Michigan patriots could have predicted that, either.

The truth was the future contained a bounty beyond the imagination of the patriots who willing to kill each other in 1835, all for possession of a swamp – and not a great swamp at that. Does that make any sense?  It is a basic rule of human history - That which people are willing to murder for today, they may give away tomorrow, and what they want to give away today may be worth a fortune to their children.  Folks, you might remember that rule, next time a hot head starts calling for a war.

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS Chapter Ten

I doubt anyone in the court room on Monday, 10 June, 1895 was surprise that the first words James Reavis-Peralta, Baron of Arizona spoke when he stood up. He asked for a delay, while he tried to find a new attorney. When Mathew Reynolds, lawyer for the government, objected, Reavis counter punched, and made a motion to have the case dismissed entirely. Despite being the plaintiff - he was sueing the government,  his motion was dismissed. But he was granted a one day continuance. And when the trial reconvened on Tuesday, June 11^th,  the Baron of Arizona announced that he was going to be doing a single: lawyer, plaintiff and witness. He spent most of his direct testimony by describing his dealings with Huntington, Crocker, various Senators and cabinet members. If the jury was impressed by his name dropping, they had little time to be, because Reynolds began his cross examination that very afternoon.

No matter what question Reynolds presented to him,  Reavis' answers were endless and rambling. Did he not notice that the documents he claimed to have discovered in the San Xavier record books, were on a different paper than the other pages in the book, and at right angles to the standard pages? What about his marriage contract with his wife? And what about the questionable testimony regarding Sophia's noble birth? Did he pay anyone to lie in  their testimony?  But no matter how long Reavis talked, no matter how many twist and turns he made in responding, Reynolds just kept attacking. By Wednesday, June 13, Reavis had been forced to admit that even he had doubts about some of his documents. His explanation was that he just filed them, he wasn't vouching for them.

On Monday, June 17, the Baroness Sophia Reavis Peralta took the stand. She admitted she had no knowledge about any of the documents filed supporting her noble birth. Perhaps it was the paternalistic Victorian machismo at play, but the courtroom was convinced the lady was telling the truth, as she believed the truth to be. Presented with convincing evidence that she was in fact the daughter of John A.Treadway and an Indian squaw named Kate Loreta, she broke down in tears, but still insisted, through her sobs, that she was the wife and granddaughter of the Baron of Arizona..

Having put his wife through this emotional torture, on Tuesday June 18th,  Reavis introduced a portrait he claimed was of Don Miguel Nemecio de Peralta de la Cordoba (above), and noted the facial resemblance to his own two sons (below).

After that he just ran out of gas, and was reduced to rants about grand conspiracies and lunatic explanations and justifications. During his closing Reavis did not even bother arguing his case, but rather entered a list of 52 objections to rulings the court had made. They would be ignored.

The government did not even bother to present a final argument. Ten days later, the Court of Private Land Claims, created by political allies to control the Peralta Grant case, found “the claim is wholly fictitious and fraudulent”, and dismissed it entirely. That was, of course, not the end. James Reavis (above) had gone too far for that to be the end of the affair.

Reavis was arrested as he left the courtroom, and charged with 42 counts of forgery, presenting false documents to the Land Court and conspiracy to defraud the United States Government. Bail was set at $500. And although the court allowed him to telegraph his connections in California and Washington, D.C., nobody stepped up with the cash. James Reavis-Peralta  spent the next year in jail, awaiting trial. It finally began on Saturday, June 27, 1896 and ended on Tuesday June 30, with a verdict of guilty. Two weeks later, on Friday July 17, James Reavis-Peralta was sentenced to two years in jail – one year of which he had already served – and a $5,000 fine –about $130,000 today.

To pay the fine, the mansion in San Francisco was sold. Arizola, the fortress that represented the single reality of the Peralta grant, was seized by the U.S. government. It was later used for a barn.  When James Reavis was released from prison in April of 1898, he and his family lived in Denver, where he tried for many years to find investors for his various schemes and plans. But all that any one was interested in buying from him was copies of his book, “The Confessions of the Baron of Arizona”, which had been serialized in his old newspaper, "The San Francisco Call".  He may not have even written it himself.

But whoever the actual author, it was presented as a classic Victorian morality tale. “The plan to secure the Peralta Grant and defraud the Government out of land valued at $100,000,000 was not conceived in a day. It was the result of a series of crimes extending over nearly a score of years. At first the stake was small, but it grew and grew in magnitude until even I sometimes was appalled at the thought of the possibilities. I was playing a game which to win meant greater wealth than that of a Vanderbilt. My hand constantly gained strength, noted men pleaded my cause, and unlimited capital was at my command. My opponent was the Government, and I baffled its agents at every turn. Gradually I became absolutely sure of success.”

"As I neared the verge of triumph”, wrote Reavis, “I was exultant and sure. Until the very moment of my downfall I gave no thought to failure. But my sins found me out, and as in the twinkling of an eye I saw the millions which had seemed already in my grasp fade away and I heard the courts doom me to a prison cell. Now I am growing old and the thing hangs upon me like a nightmare until I am driven to make a clean breast of it all, that I may end my days in peace.”

No where in his “clean breast” account did James Reavis mention Mr. Huntington, or Charles Crocker or any of the other wealthy and powerful men who had financed his scam. It seemed that Reavis had learned something from the affair, after all. Sophia had certainly gained in knowledge. In 1902, she filed for divorce on the grounds of “nonsupport”. And the old forger who began his career at 18, faking passes for his army buddies, died alone, at the age of 71 on November 20, 1914, in Denver Colorado. Cause of death was listed as bronchitis, but I suspect he just ran out of ideas. He was buried in paupers grave. Sophia, once the child of royalty and then just the daughter of an Indian squaw, lived the last years of her life under the name Sophia Treadway Reavis.  She died on April 5, 1934. Her obituary in the Rocky Mountain News failed to even mention the Peralta Grant. That was probably not an accident.

In 1963 the National Park Service decided that it was not financially feasible to save the the fortress south of Casa Grande. The ten room mansion of Arizola was allowed to slowly decay and collapse into the desert. The next year they erected a maker on Arizona route 84 at milepost 181, to explain the significance of the spot to passersby. It reads (inaccurately), “James Addison Peralta Reavis was a brazen forger who claimed over 12 million acres of Central Arizona and Western New Mexico as an Old Spanish Land grant. He and his family lived here in royal style until his fraud was exposed. From the barony he went to federal prison in 1895 “

And that is all most people will ever know about this story. But now,  you know better.

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