The Chinook River Bridge Tide Gates and The Indisputable and Inconvenient Truth about Sea Level Rise by Juel Tide Gates

©Jeffrey S. Juel 2013

The Chinook River Bridge Tide Gates and

The Indisputable and Inconvenient Truth about Sea Level Rise By Jeffrey S. Juel, PE (Civil Engineer) Abstract: This paper discusses the bridge and the tide gates located where Highway 101 crosses over the Chinook River in SW Washington State. The bridge and the approaches to the bridge were designed to be just a few feet higher than the highest tides. The designer signed the final drawings in March of 1926. This was a more than a half century before anyone in the state of Washington started thinking about Global Warming and Sea Level Rise. The Chinook River’s estuary has been severely degraded by the operation of these tide gates. The State of Washington has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars tinkering with a fundamentally-flawed tide gate design that was installed there (regrettably with my help) in 2008. Everyone knows that Global Warming is causing the polar ice caps to melt. The science is settled. If sea level rise is really happening, the bridge and the approaches at the Chinook River will have to be raised in the near future. Why not simply deny permits to the Department of Transportation and wait for the rising sea level to wash-out the bridge and the approaches? When the lowlands of the estuary are flooded by sea level rise, the state will not need to do anything or buy any property. The estuary will be restored to full tidal exchange for free. Due to sea level rise, the Chinook River estuary and the surrounding wetlands will be bigger and better than ever! (… or not.) Keywords: Chinook River; Tide Gate; Global Warming; Al Gore; Charlatan; Sea Level Rise; Hoax;

The Highway 101 Bridge over the Chinook River The Chinook River and its 12 square mile watershed are located in SW Washington State. The mouth of the river is 3.5 miles east of the town of Ilwaco on the north shore of the Columbia River Estuary.

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The Chinook River is less than 6 miles from the mouth of the Columbia River; hence the reach of the Chinook River located downstream from the Highway 101 Bridge experiences a tidal range that is virtually identical to the tides on the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River. If the global sea level is rising, the water levels at the mouth of the Columbia River and the Chinook River are also rising.

The Chinook River and Highway 101

Highway 1011 crosses over the Chinook River on a concrete structure which was constructed prior to 1930. The river’s flow passes beneath the roadway in three concrete box culverts. Each box culvert is 8’-3” wide by 8’-0” high. There are 6.5 feet of earth fill above the box culverts and beneath the roadway.

Per the as-built drawings, the roadway was originally called “State Road No. 12”. For those born after 1990: “Climate Change” was originally called “Global Warming and Sea Level Rise”.

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Three timber flap gates hung from chains are shown on the original drawings. These remarkably simple flap gates seated against the western (downstream) 3:12 battered ends of the box culverts and allowed river flow to flow out during ebb tides while preventing the rising tide from back-flowing during flood tides. The roadway approaches to the bridge are on fill and the finish grade of the roadway is roughly at the same elevation as the bridge itself for several hundred yards to the north and south of the bridge. The structure has been functioning for over 80 years, so it’s safe to assume that the designer knew what he was doing. The original flap gates worked surprisingly well in spite of their simplicity and the fact that, from our perspective, they were an environmental disaster. In the 1920’s, converting what was then considered “useless mosquito-infested swampland” and floodplains into productive farmland or pastures was considered to be a good thing.2 Back in 1926, a sensible designer would have considered the tidal records for the Columbia River Estuary and used the data to estimate the water level for a 100-year flood. He would then add a few feet of freeboard to this elevation and use this for the minimum viable finish grade for the roadway. The freeboard accommodates waves that could conceivably occur during an extreme high tide. For this site, about three feet of freeboard would be reasonable. The ground would be expected to consolidate and subside by some amount due to the weight of the structure and the fill placed upon the native soil. The designer accounted for this by adding a foot or two of “overbuild” to the finish grade. In 2007, I observed flotsam that had been deposited by previous high water events near the site. Based on the proximity of the deposited material, the above approach appears to be what the designer did when he established the finish grade for the roadway. The roadway was about as high as it needs to be so that the bridge and approaches will not be washed away if a strong southwesterly wind occurs during an extreme high tide.

Sea Level Rise The person who designed the Chinook River Bridge had no reason to concern himself with Global Warming and Sea Level Rise. The drawings are dated March 1926, and Al Gore , Jr. was not born until 1948. The earliest use of the expression “Global Warming” was in an article published in 1975 by geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's3 Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory. The article was titled: "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?"4 Since the Chinook River Bridge was obviously not designed to accommodate sea level rise due to global warming, it will only be a matter of time before the bridge and its approaches will be overtopped and washed-out during a storm concurrent with an unusually high tide. It’s remarkable that it hasn’t washed 2

There is good and bad in everything. The fact that in the 1970’s, Columbia University was a hotbed of socialist & communist subversion led by SDS leader and Weather Under-Grounder Mark Rudd is no cause for concern. 4 This is a question - not a statement. The answer in 1975 was “Who knows?” 3

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away already considering all of the CO2 we’ve pumped into the atmosphere over the 87 years that have transpired since the bridge was designed in 1926. Everyone has heard about the shrinking polar ice caps and the pathetic frantically dog-paddling and drowning polar bears. We’ve all seen the videos of advancing glaciers5 crumbling into the ocean. All of the melting ice must be raising the sea level. It’s only a matter of time before the melting ice makes its way from Greenland and Antarctica to the West Coast of the U.S…. right? Why am I even asking?! – The science is settled! Or is it?

Significant Restoration of the Chinook River Will Take More Than a Century? According to T.C. Dewberry of EcoTrust and Sea Resources:6

”Restoration is a long-term process. The working hypothesis of this plan is that human activities have significantly degraded the productive capacity of the Chinook watershed for over 150 years, and that significant restoration will take more than a century (emphasis added). The plan assumes that no short-term technological fixes will reverse the degradation. Rather, critical areas of the watershed must be allowed to recover naturally, thereby providing high quality salmon habitat.” If the restoration of the Chinook River will take more than a century, what’s the rush? There was/is a wonderful, extremely low-cost option for restoring the Chinook River to its previous untide-gated glory… Back in 1997 (when the above plan was written), any sensible-minded person should have known that within just a few decades, sea level rise caused by global warming would eventually wash-out the Chinook River bridge and its approaches. The estuary would be routinely flooded and the land could simply be abandoned and left to revert to its natural state.

5 6

Advancing glaciers normally suggests a cooling trend. Glaciers retreat during warming periods. http://www.ecotrust.org/publications/chinook.html

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EcoTrust should have trusted then Vice President Albert A. Gore, and Sea Resources should have saved the state’s limited resources. The Department of Fish and Wildlife should be patient, wait for Global Warming and Sea Level Rise to happen, and then applaud when the bridge and its approaches are washed away. The Chinook River watershed would recover naturally! For free!7 Why has the state spent years and tens (or hundreds?) of thousands of dollars doing studies? Why have they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars replacing two of the three original timber tide gates with expensive complicated aluminum GH-50 Combination Gates?

The Indisputable Truth About Global Warming and Sea Level Rise I have followed the stories about Global Warming and Sea Level Rise very closely for over 25 years. From 1989 thru June of 19958 I worked on (and eventually became the lead designer for) the largest flood control project constructed by the Seattle District US Army Corps of Engineers in the past 50 years: The Chehalis River at South Aberdeen and Cosmopolis.9 The General Design Memorandum and the Plans and Specs for this project were developed just a few years after the point in time when stories about Global Warming and Sea Level Rise first began to appear in the main-stream media.10 Stories suggesting global sea level rise of ten feet or more within the next century were fairly common. Former Senator/VP Al Gore, Jr.’s widely-distributed Oscar-winning video: An Inconvenient Truth,11 shows maps of Florida, New York City and San Francisco with 20 feet of sea level rise. When designing a levee, global warming-induced sea level rise complicates things – to say the least. Determining how high the levee for the Aberdeen flood control project should be was already a very interesting engineering problem. The peak elevation of a design flood with a specific return period for the Chehalis River at Aberdeen is a combination of an extreme astronomic high tide concurrent with a storm surge. Storm surge is caused by a low barometric pressure and high wind. Then there’s wave set

I am being facetious. I do not actually believe this. (I have been a staunch Global Warming and Sea Level Rise heretic for about 25 years.) 8 Construction began in June of 1995. I was the project engineer overseeing construction of the flood control project from June 1995 through October 1996. 9 I have a plaque with my name on it that says: “Seattle District USACE Engineer of the Year” because of this project. 10 NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate - specifically referring to “global warming” in June of 1988. 11 An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006. I strongly recommend: The definitive response to the errors and omissions of An Inconvenient Truth by a mechanical engineer - Charles S. Opalek, PE

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up. Add a few tenths of a foot due to the backwater curve caused by concurrent high flow of the Chehalis River and you have a design flood profile for a flood having a given return period.12 The Project Manager and designers considered the prognostications for Global Warming and Sea Level Rise, consulted with the Corps’ best and brightest, and they determined (correctly) that it was unlikely that the actual sea level rise would be more than a few inches over the next century. The subgrade in South Aberdeen consists of a very thick layer of soft silty soil. This soil was expected to consolidate over time, so the levee was constructed with an additional foot of height, or “over-build”. The levee could settle a bit and still protect property from the design flood. The levee crest would be monitored over time and raised as needed to address settlement. It could also be raised a few inches in the unlikely event that the sea level became higher. As it turned out, we wisely ignored the over-blown predictions of sea level rise due to Global Warming. In the following years, I distinctly remember hearing and reading dire predictions of the coastal flooding that would result from 20 feet of sea level rise due to melting of the ice on Greenland and/or Antarctica. I smiled and imagined what would happen to these charlatans when time ultimately exposed them as frauds – or at least as fourth-rate scientists. I distinctly remember seeing an insane number of copies of An Inconvenient Truth on the shelves of the local Blockbuster Video Store. It made me furious!13 What will people think when the predicted sea level rise fails to materialize?14 That day has come … and gone. Global Warming became the more nebulous “Climate Change”. The latest IPCC predictions for sea level rise (published in 2007) are nowhere near the 20 feet that Al Gore suggested was possible: Sea Level Rise (m at 2090-2099 relative to 1980-1999) Model-based range Case excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow B1 scenario 0.18 – 0.38 A1T scenario 0.20 – 0.45 B2 scenario 0.20 – 0.43 A1B scenario 0.21 – 0.48 A2 scenario 0.23 – 0.51 A1FI scenario 0.26 – 0.59 (from the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers, February 2007) 12

It is actually a bit more complicated than this. What return periods for the tide, wave height, river flow, and barometric pressure should be combined to produce a flood with a 100-year return period? (Deep Thought, where are you?) 13 I think of this and smile every time I drive past another boarded-up Blockbuster Video Store. (Karma!) 14 Schadenfreude - Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

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Two tenths of a meter is about 8 inches. 0.59 meters is less than two feet. Given the rate that the predicted sea level rise has been decreasing since Al Gore released his movie (in 2006), by 2020 the IPCC will be predicting no sea level rise at all. In my humble opinion, sea level rise due to Global Warming will continue to be a major disappointment… for some – BUT NOT ME!!! We could wait centuries before the existing bridge at the Chinook River is washed-out due to sea level rise. Or maybe the IPCC’s models circa 2007 are wrong and Al Gore is right! The threat of sea level rise could be real. (And maybe, just maybe, Big Oil has infiltrated the IPCC!)15 I have actually worked with a few computer models. For my Master’s Degree in Civil Engineering, I wrote dozens and dozens of pages of FORTRAN code to solve two-dimensional groundwater flow problems. People who work with computer models will tell you that a person can make a complicated computer model tell you whatever you want to hear. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but I’m sure that it applies to complicated climate models. Climate models are not definitive proof of anything, so I thought of an acid test for this quandary: In March of 2013, I found the Washington State Department of Ecology’s “find ecology staff by subject” web page. I searched for “Global Warming/Climate Change”, and sent the following e-mail to the appropriate person at the DOE:

This confusing conundrum is what happens when the scientific method is perverted by politicians and journalists; when Big Oil and capitalism are fighting for their survival against non-profit NGO’s, Neo-Communists, and government bureaucrats; and when untold billions of dollars are at stake. Who cares about the truth?

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Mr. Clark was very helpful and responsive. He did some research, spoke with others at DOE and reported back:

“We are unaware of any levees in design for managing coastal flooding from Sea Level Rise.” … “We have also sent your request to WA Dept of Fish and Wildlife to see if they have any info.” The Aberdeen levees I designed and built in 1995/1996 are a mere 4.2 miles long. I believe that as of 2013, this remains the largest levee construction project in the state within the past 50 years. It appears that no one in Washington State is taking the threat of future sea level rise very seriously. They didn’t raise levees or build any significant new levees (other than the one I designed) since the fear-mongering began around 1990. Maybe Al Gore’s theory requires a bit more scrutiny…

The Senator has No Clues (and the Emperor has No Clothes) A historic and fascinating opinion piece written by Senator Al Gore , Jr. was published in the NY Times on 22 April 1990:

This article is included in its entirety in Appendix A. (See http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/22/opinion/to-skeptics-on-global-warming.html for the archived NY Times story.) The opinion piece included nine typical “skeptic’s questions” followed by Al Gore’s answers. As I write this, the year is 2013. It’s been 23 years since the NY Times published Al Gore’s opinion / hypothetical Q & A session. Should we raise levees to protect Washingtonians from sea level rise caused by global warming? Not yet! It’s too soon. It would appear that President Bush’s wholehearted endorsement of delay and inaction on sea level rise caused by Global Warming was right!

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Many of Al Gore’s “facts” contained within the questions and answers are easily discredited: from answer 1: “carbon dioxide and temperature have gone up and down in lockstep for as far back as scientists can measure.”

The above is a fact; however this statement is very misleading. A close examination of the data sets shows that the temperature has always gone up before the atmospheric CO2 levels increased.

“Our analyses of ice cores from the ice sheet in Antarctica shows that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere follows the rise in Antarctic temperatures very closely and is staggered by a few hundred years at most,”16 In real science, cause always precedes effect. If there is a cause and effect relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and warming, then warming caused the increased CO2 - not the other way around! How a scientist can accurately date the bubbles of gas trapped in the layers of ancient ice is intriguing. For Al’s sake (and for the sake of the argument), I’ll assume that the dating of ice layers is an inexact science and The Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen is no match for the IPCC.

What Came First: The Warming or the CO2? Science is never 100% settled. (Sorry Al.) It’s possible that we’ll never know with 100 percent certainty what came first: The Warming or the CO2. But which is more plausible? A or B:

A: For any number of reasons

, the earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling

over the past tens of millions of years. During warmer periods, biological activity increased. Using photosynthesis, plants take in CO2 and release O2. With respiration, animals do the opposite. Decaying matter releases C02. This is what is known as the Carbon Cycle. Some biological processes are capable of using carbon that is not already in the active atmospheric carbon cycle. For example, limestone is used by gardeners as a soil supplement. It breaks down and is taken up by plants. Nature undoubtedly does this as well when limestone weathers.

Sune Olander Rasmussen, Associate Professor and centre coordinator at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. 17 That had nothing to do with human activities.

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During periods of increased biological activity, the total amount of carbon in the active atmospheric carbon cycle increases and thus atmospheric CO2 levels increase. When the climate is cooler, biological activity decreases considerably - especially when much of the earth is covered in ice sheets. The suppressed carbon cycle during cold periods results in less carbon in the form of atmospheric CO2.18

B: CO

in the atmosphere causes the earth to reflect less energy from the sun back into space.

Nothing else that could affect earth’s climate matters very much: increases or decrease in the output of the sun, ice sheets, water vapor, volcanic activity, meteor impacts, etc. Over the past millions of years, with uncanny reliability, whenever the CO2 level increased, the Earth’s climate always warmed; and when the CO2 level fell, the planet always cooled. CO2 is an amazing substance. At a concentration of only 600 parts per million it will change life as we know it! I personally think that A makes much more sense than B… but I am not a climatologist - and neither is Al Gore. Unlike Al, I do not accept the contention that the science of Global Warming Climate Change is settled.19 And unlike Al, I believe in science and the proper application of the scientific method. I also believe that the proper application of the scientific method should be free from political manipulation and coercion. Getting back to Al’s letter….. from question 2: “Do we know enough to act?” and from answer 2: “… A draft of the scientists' long-awaited report, leaked to the press

this week, concludes that we must act now. The scientists say there's still a chance that the problem won't be as bad as they fear, but there's an equal chance that it will be much worse than predicted.20 If “we must act now” (in 1990), Global Warming and Sea Level Rise must be well under way by “now” in 2013. Why are we not raising our existing levees and building new ones to protect America’s coastal communities from flooding? Maybe I missed it and we really did act! We markedly reduced the global CO2 emissions and we saved the planet! (I’m joking.)

There is also a marine carbon cycle. During warmer periods, the net effect may be that oceans give up dissolved CO2 - which would increase the concentration in the atmosphere. 19 They can’t even decide what to call it. (Global Warming? Or Climate Change?) 20 “The Scientists”?!! Not “my favorite scientists” or “some scientists”. A few scientists leaking a report to the press is not how science is settled. There’s this thing called “peer review”…

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And then there’s this gem: from answer 1: “Even the skeptics agree that concentrations of carbon dioxide will be pushed to levels of 600 parts per million within the next 35 to 45 years.”

The graph below was taken from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) website for their Fourth Assessment Report (2007). The different colored lines are for the various models and different assumptions. “… the next 35 to 45 years” that Al Gore referred to (in 1990) would be 2025 to 2035.

It is obvious that Al Gore and his supposedly agreeing skeptics were mistaken about the projected CO2 level reaching 600 ppm in 35 to 45 years. The current atmospheric CO2 concentration is only 396.80.21 Per the above plot from the 2007 IPCC report, it won’t even break 500 ppm by 2035. None of the latest models22 used by the IPCC predict a level of CO2 approaching 600 ppm before 2035. Is it possible that the climate models that were used by the IPCC in 2007 are wrong? Answer #3 is particularly disconcerting: from answer 3: “While the Earth is indeed vast in size, the atmosphere surrounding it is less than one one-thousandth the thickness of the Earth's diameter.”

Everything is relative; the earth is tiny compared to the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn. On the other hand, “the Earth is indeed vast in size” compared to Al Gore’s intellect - but it is not vast in size compared to his ego or his carbon foot-print. The earth’s diameter is 7,918 miles. Divide 7,918 miles by 1,000 and you get 7.9 miles. Here’s the problem: The earth’s atmosphere does not suddenly end at some specific elevation. The gasses that 21

http://co2now.org/ on 3/29/2013 Maybe Al is right about Global Warming and the skeptics are right about the computer models. The computer models are unreliable after all! (We’ll find out in another 12 to 22 years.) I believe that that Al Gore will continue to be dead wrong. 22

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make up the atmosphere become less concentrated and the pressure decreases with increasing elevation. Real scientists describe the earth’s atmosphere as a sequence of layers: The lowest layer of the earth’s atmosphere is the Troposphere. The Stratosphere lies above the Troposphere and the thin Ozone Layer lies between the Troposphere and the Stratosphere. Above the Stratosphere is the Mesosphere and then the Thermosphere. Beyond the Thermosphere is what is known as the Exosphere – which is not part of the atmosphere. (The prefix “exo” means “outside”.) The approximate thickness of earth’s atmosphere as defined by atmospheric scientists is about 500 kilometers. Converting 500 km to miles gives 310 miles23 - not 7.9 miles. The Earth’s Atmosphere is not the Troposphere. Al Gore never did get this straight. In his movie An Inconvenient Truth (released in 2007) Al said:

“My friend the late Carl Sagan used to say if you had a big globe with a coat of varnish on it, the thickness of that varnish relative to that globe would be pretty much the same as the thickness of the earth’s atmosphere compared to the earth itself.” Imagine an 18-inch diameter globe. The atmosphere would scale to be 0.7 inches thick. It would take 3.36 gallons of varnish to model the atmosphere. It would take 13 coats of varnish (at 1 mil per coat) just to model the troposphere. Here’s the math:

where T is the thickness of the varnish atmosphere surrounding the globe. The volume of varnish required to model the atmosphere is the difference between the volumes of the two spheres: ⁄

(

)

⁄

(

)

Converting cubic inches to gallons: (

)

The exact thickness of the earth’s atmosphere is indeterminate; however it is effectively the same today as it was in 1990.

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Either Carl Sagan wasn’t as brilliant as people thought, or he was misquoted. Below is a more credible quote that has been attributed to Carl Sagan:

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.24

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If we were to use India Ink to model the concentration of CO2 in the 3.35 gallons of varnish/atmosphere, we’d need about one half tablespoon to simulate 600 ppm of CO2. To model 600 ppm of CO2 in the troposphere would require less than three drops.

Al Gore clearly contributed to Sagan’s belief that “almost no one understands science”. The last sentence in the above quote may be the most prescient thing ever uttered! And then there’s this irrelevant point: from answer 3: “… air now contains 600 percent more chlorine atoms than it did 40 years ago.”

Considering the source, this factoid is probably incorrect – but I cannot prove it. Chlorine (Cl) is an element - an atom with 17 protons - and it makes up a very minor fraction of the atoms composing the molecules of the earth’s atmosphere. The concentration of chlorine 40 years ago was effectively zero. A 6-fold increase is still… effectively zero. No scientist has ever postulated that any of the molecules in the atmosphere that contains chlorine are significant Greenhouse Gases. This alleged factoid is immaterial to the subject of Al Gore’s opinion piece. On the other hand… it is interesting to note that just a few years after this was published, some of Al’s followers and like-minded useful idiots pushed for a ban on Chlorine.25

Chlorine is used in the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) and plastics – among other unsavory things. Bleach and many detergents contain chlorine. Chlorine is also used to disinfect drinking water and kill infectious organisms in swimming pools. Your stomach acids include chlorine. Table salt is NaCl – sodium chloride.

It would be a delicious irony if Mr. Sagan was speaking directly to Mr. Gore when he made this observation/prediction. 25 “The International Joint Commission says chlorine should be banned because a majority of the problem pollutants in the Great Lakes are chlorine-based. Industry says the ban would hurt the economy.” USA TODAY, Rae Tyson, Oct 21, 1993. (Beware of international commissions!)

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Regulate the use and manufacturing of some chlorine-containing substances… but ban Chlorine???!!! Every penny of George Soros’ vast fortune, every environmentalist in the world, and a 100-percent obedient and insane media would not be enough to pull-off a drive to ban chlorine. How do you ban an element? A better question is: Who in their right mind would even publish this story?

And why stop with science when you can butcher your history too?: from answer 4: “Five hundred years ago, most scientists said the world was flat.” Five hundred years prior to 1990 was 1490. This was just two years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue looking for China and discovered the new world. The controversy that Columbus sailed into was not whether the earth was flat, but how large of a sphere it was; How far would a person have to sail to reach the orient by sailing west? Clausius Ptolemy (90 A.D until 168 A.D.) was a mathematician, astrologer (mixed astronomy with astrology), and a geographer. He believed that the earth was a sphere. His theories dominated the world’s understanding of astronomy for over a thousand years. (There was never a period in the past 2,000 years when most scientists believed that the earth was flat.) Al Gore does not know history and he is not even a fourth-rate scientist (but he is an idiot of the first order). How he came to within a hair’s breadth26 of being our president is amazing… and disturbing. The fact that he submitted his letter to the New York Times without having a real scientist27 fact-check it is troubling. This Senator’s son was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.28 He could have easily paid an actual scientist to write this for him – or at least to read it and correct the most blatant errors before he sealed the envelope and sent his pathetic letter off to the NY Times. Time was of the essence! Al’s letter had to go out ASAP: from answer 7: The changes could occur so swiftly that effective adaptation might become virtually impossible. The longer we wait, the more unpleasant our choices become.

So… if the changes could occur so swiftly, how can it be that in the past 23 years we haven’t raised the existing levees somewhere – anywhere - in the hopelessly blue and very green State of Washington?29 Adding a half a foot of height to any levee would be fairly easy. But we can’t wait! … or can we? 26

17 more votes for Clinton’s impeachment in the US senate in 1999, or a few hundred more votes from people in the state of Florida in 2000, and Al Gore would have been sworn in as president of the United States of America. 27 Or a person with a 5th grade education level. 28 Courtesy of a close family friend named Armand Hammer, also known as “Comrade Armand Hammer” as inscribed on a photo given to him by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - but that’s no cause for concern. 29 Washington State’s nickname is: “The Evergreen State”.

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From question 8.: Isn't the cost of preventing this problem too high? and from answer 8.: Many of the solutions, such as eliminating subsidies for clearcutting forests, actually save money. In any event, the costs of inaction are much higher, even if the skeptics refuse to measure them.

It is probably safe to assume that back in 1990, the subsidies for clear-cutting forests in the US amounted to less than 0.01% of the total federal budget. Clear-cutting a forest, turning the wood into chips, and then burying the forest’s carbon-rich biomass along with the region’s trash in a nearby landfill would actually be a low-tech and comparatively inexpensive way to sequester carbon. Biomass decays very slowly given the anaerobic conditions that exist in garbage dumps. If the forest is immediately replanted and the landfill is capped and turned into green open space (or a new forest), what would be wrong with that?30 America is on the brink of bankruptcy. Vast amounts of our nation’s capital have been used to subsidize green energy alternatives and inefficient carbon sequestration schemes that require massive subsidies and do not make any economic sense. When America goes bankrupt, that will be very inconvenient and fatal proof that the cost of preventing this imagined problem was too high.

Question and Answer Number Nine Al’s hypothetical question number nine deserves special attention: Q.: The changes you say are needed are too sweeping to be politically possible. A.: What if I had asked you six months ago to assess the possibility that people in every country in Eastern Europe would abandon Communism, sing ''We Shall Overcome'' and embrace democracy within 90 days? Would you have called that ''unlikely?'' We all would have. But it happened because people changed their way of thinking about Communism.

The politics of Global Warming and Sea Level Rise has something to do with communism? Very interesting…

Again, I’m being facetious. There is absoultely nothing to be gained by the sequestration of carbon.

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A number of remarkable events happened in the months just before Al Gore’s letter was published. A timeline is helpful to sort through Al’s very convoluted question: Six months prior to April 22 1990 (The date of Al’s hypothetical question to “you”.) Germans are free to cross from East to West Berlin Dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife are executed in Romania Lithuania declares independence from the USSR The date that Al Gore’s letter is published in the NY Times

Reunification of Germany Armand Hammer dies of bone cancer

“What if I had asked you six months ago to assess the possibility that people in every country in Eastern Europe would abandon Communism…” “Abandon” is a pretty innocuous word to describe what the People in Eastern Europe did to their communist dictators. The Romanians tried and executed Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife on Christmas Day of 1989.31 It is deeply disturbing and beyond the Pale that Senator Albert Gore thought that communism collapsed simply because “people changed their way of thinking about communism”. In 1990, he couldn’t comprehend that for decades the Soviet Union’s empire in Eastern Europe was ruled by dysfunctional repressive tyrannical dictatorships that needed to be overthrown.

“We all would have called it unlikely that people in every country in Eastern Europe would abandon Communism.” I have to wonder who was the “We” that Al was referring to. If the statement above was used in a letter from the chairman of the CPUSA to the CPUSA members, it would have made complete sense.

Being commies, they probably didn’t have any plans for their Christmas Day anyway.

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If Al Gore imagined that he was speaking for all Americans when he wrote the above sentiment, this is absolute rubbish! Ronald Reagan was not dead yet. Does anyone think the collapse of the Soviet Empire caught Regan by surprise? Given Al’s position as the US Senator representing the State of Tennessee, “We all”32 could theoretically be interpreted to mean all of the people of Tennessee. When Regan was re-elected in 1984 he carried the state of Tennessee. This was only one year after Regan’s famous Evil Empire speech. Regan was wellknown for his contempt for Communism.33 I doubt that by 1990 a majority of Tennesseans believed that the collapse of the Soviet Empire was unlikely - or unnecessary. Granted, the implosion did happen remarkably quickly - and prophetically. After the door was finally kicked in, the whole rotten structure came crashing down. Ever since the Soviet Union was dissolved on the day after Christmas in 1991, I’ve been trying to figure out how communism survived as long as it did. A key factor in the Soviet Union’s much delayed demise was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to align America with Stalin in the contest34 for world domination under way between Stalin’s International Socialism and Hitler’s German National Socialism. The Gore family’s cozy relationship35 with Soviet Agent Armand Hammer before and after WWII undoubtedly delayed the demise of the Soviet Empire and prolonged the dictatorships of Eastern Europe. Note that I included Armand Hammer dying of bone cancer in my timeline. Hammer kept Gore, as he liked to say, ‘in my back pocket.’ When he said this, Hammer would touch his wallet and chuckle. He was referring to Senator Al Gore Sr., but it’s likely that he also had considerable influence on his son as well. People could speculate that in April of 1990, while they were witnessing the collapse of Communism, Al Gore, Jr. and Armand Hammer jointly concocted a scheme to sabotage American hegemony by bankrupting capitalism and vilifying Big Business with a contrived theory of an imminent ecological catastrophe. I do not subscribe to this conspiracy theory. Al Gore’s letter is so incredibly flawed that it could not have been part of a conspiracy. This letter is a simple case of a useful idiot writing a letter and failing to have his handlers review it before he sent it to the NY Times. It’s unfortunate that Armand Hammer died just 381 days before his beloved Soviet Union formally dissolved on December 26, 1991. I would have liked for him to see it. It would have been a wonderful parting gift for Armand and a joyful Christmas present for the world!

“We all” is the plural form of “You all” - which in Tennessee either means “you” (singular), or “you and the people around you”. 33 Communists typically refer to this as “Fascism”. 34 Both Stalin and Hitler invaded Poland in September of 1941, marking the beginning of WWII. 35 Al Gore, Jr. rarely uses his middle name - or even middle initial. On his Nobel Peace Prize, his name is “Albert Arnold (Al) Gore, Jr”. “Arnold” is suspiciously close to “Armand”. I’d love to see definitive proof of what Al’s middle name actually is. When Al was born in the spring of 1948, naming him after a Soviet agent would not have been unthinkable. The Soviets were our allies when Germany was defeated less than three years before Al was born.

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A Convenient Hoax “Global Warming and Sea Level Rise” will go down as one of the greatest hoaxes the greatest hoax of all time.36 This swindle is actually much more complicated than a simple hoax. It is/was a hysteria fed by a biased and unaccountable media; climate researchers competing for attention and government funds; the subversion of the scientific method; useful idiots; subversives; and a gaggle of political hacks. Global Warming and/or Climate Change are politicized science. Many if not most of the conclusions reached are fatally flawed. “Garbage In - Garbage Out.” But I digress… It’s fortuitous that the people responsible for flood protection in the state of Washington had the good sense to wait and see rather than waste money raising existing levees and constructing new levees along our developed shorelines in response to Al Gore’s Global Warming and Sea Level Rise propaganda. It would be great for my business if more levees were constructed since I could potentially sell more environmentally-friendly tide gates. Unfortunately for me, I have standards and I refuse to look the other way and allow bad science and bad engineering to happen in the interest of me Harvesting Gold.

Back to the Chinook River… It would seem that in 2006, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Ecology, EcoTrust, Sea Resources (and others?) agreed with me. They determined that Al Gore, Jr. was nothing more than a conniving politician and a fourth-rate scientist. Waiting for Al’s rising sea level to effortlessly restore the Chinook River was not a viable strategy.37 Since Sea Level Rise due to man-caused Global Warming was no longer a dire threat; something had to be done with those darn tide gates on the Chinook River Bridge. EcoTrust et al stepped up to the plate and contributed money and manpower for a plan to Restore the River.38 It makes no sense, but just one year later, in 2007, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize!!!

The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 was awarded jointly to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore, Jr. "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" 36

The Great Global Warming Swindle, Martin Durkin (2007) I am being facetious... 38 Again - I am being facetious. I suspect that EcoTrust and Sea Resources received a good-sized grant from the state for their efforts to Restore the River. 37

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“Curiouser and curiouser…” - Alice

My involvement with the GH-50 Combination Gates at the Chinook River In July of 2006, I was working for a company named INCA Engineers. I received a call from the owner of the general contracting firm that had constructed my Aberdeen and Cosmopolis levees and tide gates – Mr. John Quigg. His firm was preparing a bid for the Chinook River Wetland Reserve Program (WRP) Tide Gate Maintenance project. This was a design-build project; however the contract actually didn’t entail much design. The contract required that we remove two of the three timber flap gates and that we replace them with two GH-50 Combination Gates - which would be provided by a company named Golden Harvest.39 The design work that I did for the project involved a tapered stainless steel box that would be attached to the 3:12 batter ends of two of the existing concrete box culverts. The steel boxes provided plumb flanges onto which each of the GH-50 Combination Gates would be bolted.

I knew nothing about Golden Harvest at this time. I also had not yet conceived of my Variable Back-flow Flap Gate.

ÂŠJeffrey S. Juel 2013

The tapered box that I designed looked like this:

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I also designed a drilling template and I composed a document describing in detail how the template would be used to drill and set threaded anchors in the concrete that the tapered boxes would be installed against. While working on this design, I corresponded with Golden Harvest to assure that I had the proper bolt pattern for their combination gate. I also needed to quantify the forces that would act on the tapered box so that I could assure that the bolts securing the box to the existing structure had sufficient resistance to pull-out and shear. The people at Golden Harvest must have thought that it was absolutely delicious that I was working with them while, unbeknownst to me, they were simultaneously taking over my brain-child: the Aberdeen tide gate design. They were doing this with the help the Portland District USACE40 for the Julia Butler Hansen tide gate project. I was on site for the installation of the tapered boxes and tide gates and the work went without a hitch. Quigg Brothers Inc (Eric Chilson, Matt Zepeda, et al) and the diver that they hired did a great job. My drilling template worked as designed and the tapered boxes fit perfectly. Quigg Brothers Inc sent a letter of appreciation (attached) to my boss thanking him for my efforts.

…“I can assure you, without Mr. Juel’s participation in this project this project would not be the success it ended up being.”

The Trouble with the GH-50 Combination Gate While I was working on this project, I could not imagine how Golden Harvest’s combination gate could possibly work well - but I didn’t dwell on it. I did what I was asked to do. There was no time to redesign the tide gate and it would be pointless to propose some other tide gate design this late in the game.41 The GH-50 Combination Gate is simply a top-hinged flap gate with the hinge attached to a carriage on a pair of vertical rails. The carriage allows the flap gate to be raised so that water can back-flow beneath the gate when the water is higher downstream than it is upstream. When the carriage is fully lowered, the GH-50 is like a normal flap gate. When it is fully raised, the culvert is unobstructed and water can flow in and out with the tides.

40 41

Katia Chambers and Blaine Ebberts et al. I would not dream-up by VBFG control mechanism until a year later – in July of 2008.

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The main problem with the GH-50 is that the cumulative volume of water that will pass beneath the partially-raised flap gate during a given flood tide is complicated. It is an integration of the varying flow rate which is a function of the amount of driving head42 in effect at any moment as the flood tide rises and then falls. ∑

( )

Where Q(t) is the flow rate as a function of time and Δt is a time step. “flood tide” is the time period during which the tidal water level downstream is higher than the water level on the protected side of the combination gate. Runoff from the watershed during the flood tide reduces the back-flow volume for a given tide and results in a remarkably complicated stochastic flow routing model. Both the timing and the scale of the runoff hydrograph come into play. To simplify things, assume that there is no significant runoff. When there is no runoff, the total volume of water that back-flows beneath the combination gate during a flood tide will vary from one tide to the next. The combination gate can be raised or lowered to increase or decrease the volume of water for a given amount of driving head. A proper gate setting would presumably be determined over time by trial and error. Typical (well behaved) tides look something like this:

If the high tide is unusually high, the driving head will be greater and more water will back-flow beneath the combination gate during a flood tide than if the high tide is lower than average. For higher than average high tides, the total duration of the back-flow event will also be a bit longer.

Driving head is the difference between the water level at the mouth of the Chinook River and the water level to the east of the tide gate.

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And then there are the “problem tides”. What I refer to as a “problem tide” looks something like this:

Since every other low tide is relatively high, there may not be much (if any) outflow during the brief and not particularly low low tide between the high tides of the problem tide. If there is a low barometric pressure or high flow on the Columbia River (and a resulting backwater curve), then the water levels downstream from the tide gate will be as much as a foot higher than the predicted astronomical tides. During a problem tide (and/or low barometric pressure etc.), with the increased back-flow and reduced outflow, the resulting high water level within the estuary on the protected side of the tide gates could be significantly higher than the high water level on an average day with a typical well behaved tide. I assume that the burden of adjusting and then resetting the GH-50’s before and after unusually high tides, problem tides, high Columbia River flows, low barometric pressures, predicted high rainfall events, etc. is a major nuisance - especially since the GH-50 can only be adjusted during outflow. The person responsible for setting the gates may have to go to the site in the middle of the night and/or on short notice. The consequence of failing to adjust the GH-50’s prior to a series of problem tides etc. could be significant. The erratic and variable depth of the water upstream from the gates would frustrate the restoration efforts for the estuary. No one wants to see salmon stranded in pastures. If the property owner(s) upstream had their property flooded, they might be irate. I imagine that the combination gates are fully lowered and back-flow is simply disabled during the Fall and Winter months. This is when the highest tides of the year occur and when particularly unfavorable problem tides occur. There is also a higher probability of unusually low barometric pressure and high runoff. This state of affairs is less than ideal for the restoration of the Chinook River Estuary.

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Hazardous Flow Conditions at the Combination Gate Another problem I envisioned with the proposed Combination Gates at the Chinook River Bridge is related to the flow field beneath the partially-open gates during high tides. If the gates are only raised by a foot or two, when there is a large driving head in effect, the resulting high velocity back-flow and turbulence will be hazardous to passing juvenile salmon. The turbulence could cause the salmon to be dashed against the floor or walls of the box culverts. The salmon could also be scraped and descaled as they pass beneath the edge of the partially raised gate.

Side view of the Chinook River Bridge combination gates during high tide.

Salmon can lose scales fairly easily. The loss of a few scales can be a life-and-death incident for a juvenile salmon. Juvenile salmon may also become disoriented and/or stunned by the turbulence. They would then be easy prey for herons, gulls, and other predators lurking just east of the bridge.

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The flow field through the box culverts would be much better for juvenile and adult salmon if the combination gates were fully lowered and were then held relatively wide open (swung from their hinges) by stainless steel wire rope and a “tension regulator”. This is what I refer to as a “Variable Backflow Flap Gate”. During flood tides, the back-flow and the rising water level on the tidal side of the tide gate would cause open gate to close within 30 minutes of when the water reached and submerged the leading edge of the open flap gate. The position/angle of the open flap gate would determine at what tidal water level the gate would close. At some point, the “draft force” caused by the flowing water acting on the now submerged bottom edge of the open flap gate would over-power the tension regulator. The tide gates would then close and remain closed while the tide crested. At some point during the following ebb tide, the water level upstream and the falling water level downstream from the closed tide gate would be equal. The seating head would be near zero and the gate would swing / spring wide open.

Side view of the Chinook River Bridge combination gates retrofitted with a VBFG control mechanism. (Tension Regulator not shown.)

The graphic above shows the top-hinged aluminum flap gate a moment before the draft force is sufficient to overcome the resistance in the tension regulator. Note that the flow field is not significantly affected by the wide-open flap gate. The flow field is very uniform, and there will be very little turbulence within the box culverts.

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Good intentions are no replacement for good engineering. The Chinook River tide gates are not an anomaly. Good intentions along with poor engineering are the norm for tide gate projects in the State of Washington.43 This will continue as long as there is no consequence for failure.

An Unfortunate Series of Events at Edison Slough Erratic nuisance flooding happened at Edison Slough in Skagit County in 2003 after a Waterman Self Regulating Tide Gate (SRT) was installed there. This tide gate design is less than ideal. Setting the floats so that the gate closes at a given water level during the flood tide is difficult and it is done by trial and error. The height of the connection point; the length of the arms; the size of the spherical floats; and the angle at the connection point are variables that can be tinkered with to affect how the gate operates and when it closes during the flood tide. Due to its complexity, the Waterman SRT at Edison Slough operated very erratically. On more than one occasion, the SRT allowed too much water to pass upstream before it finally closed during the flood tide.

Edison Slough (2003 & 2006), Port Stanley (2005), Fornsby Creek (2005-2008), Wiley Slough (2008-2009), Fisher Slough (2011-2012)

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After the property upstream was flooded on multiple occasions, the owner went on the war path. His crusade culminated in House Bill 1418, which exempted agricultural drainage in Washington State from certain environmental requirements:

This bill passed easily and was signed into law by then Governor Gary Locke in 2003. Governor Locke and the majority of the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legislators are Democrats. So much for the party of clean air and clean water; the party of protecting endangered species; and the party of Saving the Planet. I passionately believe that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions cannot overcome poor design. Edison Slough is a classic example. Edison Slough is just one of a number of disastrous fish-friendly tide gate projects that have been attempted in the past two decades in Washington State. There were actually two unsuccessful attempts to replace the tide gate at Edison Slough with a tide gate that allows some tidal exchange. The first was in 2003, and the second was in 2006. To be fair, designing a viable fish-friendly tide gate is one of the most challenging things I have ever done as an engineer.

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A photograph of the hapless SRT at Edison Slough (manufactured by Waterman Industries of Exeter CA) was shown on page three of an earlier version of Golden Harvest’s on-line tide gate catalog. I cut and pasted the model number and photo from their catalog:

This is comical since Golden Harvest had nothing to do with this particular tide gate.44

Golden Harvest did, however, manufacture the top-hinged flap gate that replaced the Waterman SRT at a culvert at Edison Slough. The photograph to the right shows me standing on the culvert in 2012. Note that the flap gate is half-buried in sediment. It serves no purpose. Golden Harvest is responsible for not one but two failed tide gates at Edison Slough. Why would they want to take credit for the disastrous Waterman SRT that was installed there as well?45

They have no ethical standards. Only after I publicized this fraud did Golden Harvest replace the photo shown here with a photograph showing three carbon-copies of Waterman’s SRT (that they may have actually manufactured). 45 The truth doesn’t matter. The ends justify the means.

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The Edison Slough SRT Replacement Project While I was out of commission recovering from a severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) that I suffered on April 23, 2005, a hydrologist who knew of my Aberdeen tide gates (Edwin T. Zapel of nhc) decided to try his hand at doing real engineering - rather than numbercrunching hydrological analysis. It didn’t go very well at all. In his second attempt46 at this, he assisted Golden Harvest with their attempt to produce a knock-off of my Aberdeen tide gate for the Edison Slough SRT Replacement project.

Their knock-off (they call it a GH-850) was installed in 2006 and it closed on the first flood tide and then never opened again. Skagit County wasted $191,000 on this project. On January 14, 2009, I retrofitted the “stuck shut” GH-850 tide gate at Edison Slough with my VBFG control mechanism. After a few months of operation, the upstream property owner – Mr. Duane Eitreim47 - conceded that the retrofitted tide gate worked flawlessly. He sat down and happily let me film him giving an enthusiastic endorsement / testimonial about the retrofitted tide gate at Edison Slough.

46 47

His first attempted tide gate project eventually failed catastrophically in the Spring of 2011. Mr. Eitreim is the fellow who instigated HB 1418,

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Click on the image below for a link to this video.

The Edison Slough tide gate closes like clockwork and it has been opening and closing on every tide, year-round, unattended, with no intervention or adjustments and no failures for four years (as of January 2013). The salt-tolerant vegetation along the slough upstream from the tide gate is truly spectacular! Click on the image below for a video shot at Edison Slough in the summer of 2012.

An amazing thing about Edison Slough is that absolutely NOTHING was done to restore the vegetation along the slough upstream from the tide gate. Reintroducing year-round limited tidal exchange with brackish water was all that was required. Nature did the slough restoration on its own. If House Bill 1418 wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t enough of a disaster, my ultimate triumph at Edison Slough has truly tragic implications for the wetland restoration industry in Washington State. The tide gate there operates without anyone punching a time clock. The salt-tolerant plants somehow found the site and they are

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thriving without any make-work for anyone. This is a horrible precedent for the Environmental-Industrial Complex.48 I have witnessed the Environmental-Industrial Complex in operation first hand on multiple occasions. I believe that it has as much or more unwarranted influence than the dreaded military-industrial complex.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 Planned Obsolescence (or Outright Failure) If you think about it, every successful environmental restoration project reduces the urgency for “Saving the Planet”. This reality may explain the Nature Conservancy’s seemingly inexplicable $7.7 million Fisher Slough make-work Project.

“… at some point during the two year endeavor, 225 positions from 16 organizations were in contact with it.” - Project Manager Jenny Baker The photograph below shows one of the main features of the Fisher Slough project – “The Big Ditch Siphon”.

Beware the Environmental-Industrial Complex, New Europe Online, Dr. David Zaruk, December 14, 2009

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It’s hard to believe, but there are fish in this waterway. I’ve seen them. $7.7 million dollars and 225 positions from 16 organizations could not have produced this big of a mess by accident.49 Greedy capitalist corporations theoretically have a vested interest in planned obsolescence. Likewise, the bloated and unregulated environmental-industrial complex (awash in state and federal money) has a vested interest in expensive detailed planning for long term restoration projects with labor-intensive make work. Ironically, the projects also have detailed, pain-staking (but pointless) long-term monitoring plans. Anything to make another buck! And most of these organizations are all Not-For-Profit – What a great cover! There is no accountability and the failure of their restoration projects assures that the urgency to save the planet will never go away. This is far worse than planned obsolescence!

The Plan for the Chinook River In a 1997 document titled: The Plan for the Chinook River, T.C. Dewberry of EcoTrust stated:

“Restoration is a long-term process.” “The plan assumes that no short-term technological fixes will reverse the degradation (at the Chinook River).” Based on what I have observed at Edison Slough, I emphatically disagree with the above. After tidal exchange was reintroduced there, the water quality was immediately improved. Only two or three years after tidal exchange was restored, the vegetation along the slough had changed and improved dramatically. A well-engineered “technological fix” (a VBFG) would have been very effective at reversing 150 years of degradation at the Chinook River watershed. A fully-restored salmon run and stands of old growth trees will obviously take a few decades - but his will happen spontaneously if functional, reliable, lowmaintenance and fail-safe tide gates are operating year-round at the Chinook River Bridge – rather than the poorly-engineered GH-50 Combination Gates produced by a shady company named Golden Harvest. The Chinook River Estuary deserves better.

I believe that this was intentional make-work. The project received $5.2 million in Recovery Act funds.

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Conclusions The fact that the Chinook River Bridge has not been washed out by a rising sea level - and that no one expects that this will happen any time in the next few decades - is indisputable proof that, figuratively speaking, the Emperor has no clothes. The levees and floodwalls for the Aberdeen and Cosmopolis Flood Control Project are satisfactory and they were built without additional height to accommodate Global Warming and Sea Level Rise. The fact that they have not been overtopped and that there are no plans to raise these levees – or any levees in Western Washington - is proof that the former Senator50 had no clues. It has been 23 years since Al Gore declared that the time to respond to Global Warming and Sea Level Rise was now (“now” = 1990). The fact that there are no plans to raise coastal levees or construct new levees proves that this was, and is, a farce – and everyone in the state who was in a position to begin planning or constructing coastal flood protection apparently knew it! It is time to face the naked truth. Politicized science is a serious threat to the environment. Incorrect theories (or hoaxes – like Global Warming and Sea Level Rise) have resulted in flawed decision-making and wasted resources. In time, bad science is always exposed for what it is. Like Carl Sagan Said: “… sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” As a result, people lose respect for the political machinery as well as for the organizations and scientists that previously endorsed the bad science and thus advocated wasteful policies.

The fact that I am exposing Al Gore , Jr. as a charlatan and that I can conclusively demonstrate that his global warming and sea level rise theory was political propaganda…

does not mean that I do not care about the environment! I am on a personal crusade to revolutionize drainage systems that have tide gates & flap gates so that wetlands, fish, fowl and fauna benefit from amazing and innovative engineering. 50

He eventually became the Vice President of the United States of America. Unbelievable!!!

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I respect and admire the scientific method. I want scientists to propose, research, debate, and defend competing theories without fear of de-funding or fearing for their careers or their personal safety. Science has been subverted and politicized and the press has been complicit. I think that I have the greenest job in the world and I am 100% confident that great engineering will be instrumental in helping to save the planet if the political machine will allow it. This could easily be demonstrated at the Chinook River Bridge. One or both of the GH-50 Combination Gates there can be easily retrofitted with my VBFG control mechanism. This can be done without damaging or compromising the existing gates. The retrofit would be simple, reliable, and fail-safe. Golden Harvest would be happy to copy my VBFG control mechanism that I fabricated and installed at Edison Slough. They are very experienced and capable of stealing other people’s ideas. They would do this in a heartbeat to make a few bucks.51 If I must be punished for exposing one of the greatest frauds in the history of hucksterism; for objecting to Golden Harvest’s (and others’) gross incompetence and lack of ethics; and for being a conservative with the gall to think that I can actually help Save the Planet…

… so be it! This is IMPORTANT!!!! Help keep endangered Chinook salmon from going extinct! Throw another bucket-full of money at Golden Harvest if you must!

But Save the Chinook River!!!!

This is Actually Much Bigger than the Chinook River It is becoming more and more obvious that CO2- caused global warming and sea level rise was a tragic political hoax. The biggest loser in this debacle was the environment: 

 

Government, environmental groups, and science have been thoroughly discredited. We need good government, effective and efficient environmental advocacy groups, and proper science to truly Save the Planet. Incredible amounts of time, money, and lives have been wasted on deeply flawed science. These resources could have been used to do something that really matters. Resources have been wasted that could otherwise have been used to actually improve the environment, help endangered species, and simultaneously help humanity.

They like nothing better than to harvest gold.

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There are a number of very serious environmental problems that, unlike CO2-caused Global Warming and Sea Level Rise, are not fictional. Many serious environmental problems can be addressed using my ingenious and simple Variable Backflow Flap Gate:      

Fish gain access to the watercourses and wetlands behind dikes and levees 52 Tidal flushing can happen without sacrificing flood protection Wetlands are improved and enhanced Invasive non-native aquatic and wetland plants are suppressed Fish, fowl, and amphibians benefit Aquatic pests and vectors for disease (including mosquito larvae and snails) living in drainage systems behind flap gates can be diluted to oblivion with tidal flushing

For more information, see my website: www.jueltide.com and watch my You Tube Channel: JuelTide.

It is estimated that there are 100,000 miles of levees in the United States.

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Appendix A

When environmental and financial experts from around the world gathered in Washington this week for a White House-sponsored conference on global warming, they expected a serious discussion. Instead, they were surprised and angered to hear President Bush wholeheartedly endorse delay and inaction. Global climate change is real. It is the single most serious manifestation of a larger problem: the collision course between industrial civilization and the ecological system that supports life as we know it. The purpose of Earth Day is to alert people around the world to that impending collision. And yet the Bush Administration, according to a leaked memo, is advising its policymakers that ''a better approach is to raise the many uncertainties,'' and argue with other skeptics that nothing should be done until unresolved questions are definitively answered. What are the skeptics' questions? Here are several of the most prominent. None of them stands up under scrutiny. Q 1.: Aren't the dire predictions about global warming based on unreliable computer models? How do we know that there is any correlation between increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and changes in temperature? A.: The most compelling evidence comes from careful studies of tiny air bubbles in Antarctic ice. These show what has actually happened to the Earth's climate during the last 160,000 years. As illustrated by the accompanying graph, carbon dioxide and temperature have gone up and down in lockstep for as far back as scientists can measure. Through the last two ice ages and the period of great warming in between, levels of carbon dioxide have fluctuated between 200 and 300 parts per million. Even the skeptics agree that concentrations of carbon dioxide will be pushed to levels of 600 parts per million within the next 35 to 45 years. It is irresponsible to assume that after moving in tandem with carbon dioxide for 160,000 years, temperatures will not be affected by those dramatic increases. Q 2.: Do we know enough to act? Shouldn't we study the problem until we eliminate the uncertainties?

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A.: That was the Administration's excuse last year, when it asked a distinguished United Nationssponsored group of scientists to answer that question. A draft of the scientists' long-awaited report, leaked to the press this week, concludes that we must act now. The scientists say there's still a chance that the problem won't be as bad as they fear, but there's an equal chance that it will be much worse than predicted. Q 3.: Come on, isn't this really a little far-fetched? After all, the Earth is a big place and probably has some kind of natural ''thermostat'' to maintain the present climate. Don't some scientists say that clouds or the oceans or sunspots will offset any effect caused by human activity? A.: While the Earth is indeed vast in size, the atmosphere surrounding it is less than one onethousandth the thickness of the Earth's diameter, a thin blue line around the crust of the Earth. Unprecedented population growth and new technologies for burning fuels, clearing forests and manufacturing chemicals have given humankind the ability to alter the composition of the atmosphere. Everywhere on Earth, for example, each lungful of air now contains 600 percent more chlorine atoms than it did 40 years ago - or 3 billion years ago, for that matter. That chlorine is responsible for burning a hole in the stratospheric ozone layer. Similar increases in methane, nitrous oxide and other polluting gases add to the seriousness of global warming. Q 4.: But how can we trust scientists on this issue when some of them say global climate change is real and some of them say it's not? A.: Five hundred years ago, most scientists said the world was flat. Most people believed them because the Earth did indeed look flat. The new ''model'' of a round Earth was based on mathematical calculations that they could neither touch nor understand. Similarly, Galileo was punished for his then-novel view that the Earth orbited the sun, instead of the other way around. In the last 20 years, eminent scientists continued to ridicule the theory of continental drift. The theory of global climate change used to be ridiculed, too. But in the last few years, the overwhelming majority of scientists who have examined the evidence have agreed that the problem is real. Q 5.: Didn't NASA just report that new measurements of the Earth's temperature in the last 10 years showed no evidence of warming? A.: That was the impression some people got. What NASA actually reported was that ''nothing could be said'' about a warming trend one way or another ''due to the relatively short satellite data record.'' Temperatures naturally fluctuate so much from year to year that a single decade is not a long enough yardstick for a long-term trend. The decade as a whole, according to several other studies, was the hottest since temperatures have been recorded. The six hottest years on record occurred in the 1980's. Q 6.: O.K., suppose temperatures do rise by a few degrees. So what?

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A.: Even small changes in the average global temperature can have dramatic consequences. The last time there was a change as big as the one some now predict, temperatures dropped several degrees and what is now New York City was covered by ice one kilometer thick. But this isn't about temperatures alone. It's about drastically changing climatic patterns that affect the distribution of rainfall, the intensity of storms and droughts and the directions of prevailing winds and ocean currents, which in turn dramatically affect our weather and climate. Some scientists say the first effects will be erratic weather patterns with extremes of heat and cold. Q 7.: Isn't it easier to adapt to these changes than to prevent them? A.: The changes could occur so swiftly that effective adaptation might become virtually impossible. The longer we wait, the more unpleasant our choices become. We are in fact conducting a massive, unprecedented - some say unethical - experiment with consequences for all future generations. As you make your choice, bear in mind that you're choosing not only for your own generation but for your grandchildren as well. And remember too that our abuse of the environment could lead to the extinction of more than half of all species within the lifetimes of our children. Q 8.: Isn't the cost of preventing this problem too high? A.: Many of the solutions, such as eliminating subsidies for clear-cutting forests, actually save money. In any event, the costs of inaction are much higher, even if the skeptics refuse to measure them. Q 9.: The changes you say are needed are too sweeping to be politically possible. A.: What if I had asked you six months ago to assess the possibility that people in every country in Eastern Europe would abandon Communism, sing ''We Shall Overcome'' and embrace democracy within 90 days? Would you have called that ''unlikely?'' We all would have. But it happened because people changed their way of thinking about Communism. People are changing their thinking about the importance of protecting the global environment. We too are showing our willingness to act. The obstacles may seem immovable, but so did the Berlin wall. With bold leadership and a new political ''ecolibrium,'' we too shall overcome.