As a youth, I read ferociously, Louis L’Amour and such, to the detriment of my schoolwork. Fast forward to modern times. As the rona scare was just starting, in a state wide electric co-op meeting in Columbus, the question arose how will this play out? I did some research, and concluded the most likely path would be similar to the influenza pandemic of 1918, and had the audacity to email my conclusion to my fellow board members across the state. Luckily, the rona behaved much as I predicted, viruses mutate, gasp, and I started regularly sending out what I eventually called “Nick’s musings.” My subject matter was mostly limited to issues affecting the electric industry, Biden and other nuts anti carbon views and scare tactics, historical climate variability, etc. To back up my views, I researched endlessly, often would get out of bed to take notes. It became all consuming. An example….
Global warming, er, climate change. 750 million years ago, the planet was frozen, that period, referred to as snowball earth, although the oceans at the equator might have only been slushy. 56 million years ago, the Earth was much warmer than today, essentially ice free, palm trees grew in the arctic, the climate in the arctic similar to what Florida experiences today. The ice age we are currently living in started about 2.6 million years ago, and there have been, arguably, 33 major advances and retreats of the ice sheets in that time, the last four longer and deeper than the previous 29. At both 2 million and 1 million years ago, during interglacial periods, for periods estimated at 10-40,000 years each, life flourished on northern Greenland, which today is a barren arctic desert. 18,000 years ago, here in northern Ohio, the most recent ice sheet is estimated to have been a mile thick when it carved out Lake Erie. Ocean levels vary by some 500 feet from one extreme to the other, as the water is retained as ice, then melts.
A tangent. Continental drift has only become mainstream in the last sixty or so years. Current research indicates much of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and adjacent areas formed near what is now Mexico, and were transported some 3,000 kilometers north as the plates moved, over the last hundred or so million years. Siletzia, an oceanic plateau, maybe similar to Iceland today, was formed by the Yellowstone hotspot, off shore from California, and half was accreted some 50 million years ago onto North America, forming large portions of western Washington and Oregon. The other half of siletzia, known as Yakutat, is still accreting into Alaska today.
There are many factors affecting Earth’s climate, continental drift only one. The number one greenhouse gas by a country mile? Water vapor. Carbon dioxide only a minor irritant.
I always had a paragraph or two reserved for abused or missing girls and women. Little Summer Wells from Tennessee is still missing.
In the summer of ‘23, a ladder I was working off of fell over, cracked my noggin and I was unable to concentrate and type for some months, truthfully, still recovering. Haven’t sent out a musing since, much to the disappointment of some of my friends and colleagues.
Everyone has a story, I’d bet yours is as interesting as anyone’s Kentucky.
But take this as a warning, despite any encouragement, don’t let it consume you.
Nick
Sorry I couldn’t pass on that one ! 
