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The Club Publication 07/30/2018

7/30/2018

The Club
PUBlication

GLOBAL WARMING!
OUR FAULT?

OK! What the heck are scientists saying about Global warming and why should I believe it's our fault?

I found this video and felt we should all take a moment and look hard at what the scientific community is saying.

Our current administration does not believe in global warming and therefore sees no reason to prepare for it. We are now being separated from worldwide efforts to change processes that will slow or mitigate global warming and are promoting a reversion to a path that will magnify and speed the event.

This is what the scientific community is saying: There are "7 videos" stacked inside the following video. Each video is 2 to 4 minutes in length. If you wish to see them all (recommended) just click on the link that presents itself at the end of each module. Total time commitment less than 20 minutes. Even if you don't believe in global warming this will show you why others are alarmed.

Trump administration tells EPA to cut climate page from website: sources

JANUARY 24, 2017 / 8:12 PM / 2 YEARS AGO
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives. The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA’s communications team to remove the website’s climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said.

“If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it.

The sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

A Trump administration official did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The order comes as Trump’s administration has moved to curb the flow of information from several government agencies who oversee environmental issues since last week, in actions that appeared designed to tighten control and discourage dissenting views.

The moves have reinforced concerns that Trump, a climate change doubter, could seek to sideline scientific research showing that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, as well as the career staffers at the agencies that conduct much of this research.

Myron Ebell, who helped guide the EPA’s transition after Trump was elected in November until he was sworn in last week, said the move was not surprising.

“My guess is the web pages will be taken down, but the links and information will be available,” he said.

The page includes links to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which contains emissions data from individual industrial facilities as well as the multiagency Climate Change Indicators report, which describes trends related to the causes and effects of climate change.

The Trump administration’s recently appointed team to guide the post-Obama transition has drawn heavily from the energy industry lobby and pro-drilling think tanks, according to a list of the newly introduced 10-member team.

Trump appointed Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a longtime foe of the EPA who has led 14 lawsuits against it, as the agency’s administrator. The Senate environment committee held a tense seven-hour confirmation hearing for Pruitt last week. No vote on his nomination has been scheduled yet.

Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Lisa Shumaker

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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The Club PUBlication 07/23/2018

7/23/2018

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The Club
PUBlication

Well, here we are again. Won't this global warming just go away??? Well . . NO!

No matter what the cause global warming is here! The question is "what can we do to mitigate its effects."

Here's what Boston is doing! . . . . . . . . . . . . Harv

Special note: In the video they make special mention of "Leslie Hudson" the digital meteorologist for the weather app "My Radar". If you have a Smart Phone get the app! It's the best!

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The Club PUBlication 07/16/2018

7/16/2018

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The Club
PUBlication

Farewell

Ron Kaminski
Graduated Lincoln HS
1961

Ron Kaminski

Manitowoc - Ronald A. Kaminski, of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, passed peacefully on Monday, July 9, 2018 at Brookdale Memory Care, Brookfield, WI.

Ron was born on November 5, 1942, in Manitowoc, Wisconsin to the late Alex and Anna (Ludwig) Kaminski. He graduated from Lincoln High School with the class of 1961 and was instrumental as class President in procuring the Lincoln statue that stands in front of the school.

Obit - https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/htrnews/obituary.aspx?n=ronald-a-kaminski&pid=189587171&fhid=14025
(Copy & paste above address into URL to see Obituary)

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A personal Tribute
by jerry leyendecker

Thanks for letting me know about the recent passing one of Manitowoc's favorite sons, Ron Kaminski. He was a very prominent attorney and community leader in Manitowoc for many years. But few will remember that he was also a rock'n'roll singer back in the early 1960s performing with the band Peter and the Saints, led by Peter Christensen of Manitowoc, former drummer for the first such band in 1957 in Manitowoc, JL & The Comets, you may remember. Ron's most favorite tune to sing was 'The House of the Rising Sun'. He last performed the tune in 2005 with The Comets at the 45th reunion of the LHS class of 1960, as documented by The Comets reunion performance (DVD) at the Silver Valley Supper Club in Manitowoc.

He was an outstanding civic leader during his later life and should be remembered as such.

JL

Ron Kaminski Remembered During Gathering
Lakeshore News, State News

Manitowoc attorney Ron Kaminski died early yesterday in Milwaukee. The founder of Kaminski & Pozorski Law firm had a long list of community contributions, including being the point man to completely restore the downtown Capitol Theatre into the showcase it is today. He retired from his law practice in 2014 and during a gathering at Kathy’s Stagedoor Pub to honor him, a friend Rick Gerroll created and recited a poem about his life.

Kaminski was a graduate of the 1961 class at Lincoln High School and earned his law degree from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Besides spearheading the renovation of the Capitol Civic Centre, which re-opened in the fall of 1987, his other community credits included: the Little Sandwich Theatre in Manitowoc & the Forst Inn at Tisch Mills.

Ron at the Little Sandwich Theatre in Manitowoc

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The Club PUBlication 07/09/2018 - Spiders

7/9/2018

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The Club
PUBlication

These spiders crossed an ocean to get to Australia

The ancestors of the trapdoor spider Moggridgea rainbowi may have survived an ocean journey from Africa to Australia, a new study concludes.

PBS NEWS HOUR
By — Amanda Grennell
Science Jul 5, 2018 4:20 PM EDT
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Spiders fly on the currents of Earth’s electric field

Spiders don’t have wings, but they can fly across entire oceans on long strands of silk. For more than a century, scientists thought it was the wind that carried them, sometimes as high as a jet stream — in a process known as “ballooning.” A new study shows that the Earth’s electric field can propel these flying spiders too.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, found that when spiders are in a chamber with no wind, but a small electric field, they are likely to prep for take-off, or even fly. Plus, the sensory hairs covering the spiders’ bodies move when the electric field is turned on — much like your own hair stands up due to static electricity. This “spidey sense” could be how the creatures know it’s time to fly.

This makes spiders only the second known arthropod species, after bees, to sense and use electric fields. Because humans don’t feel Earth’s electric field, its role in biology is often overlooked, said Erica Morley, the study’s lead author.

The origins of Morley’s study date back five years to an unlikely source: an astrophysicist at the University of Hawaii named Peter Gorham. Gorham was reading Charles Darwin’s observations of spiders ballooning en masse aboard a ship at sea. Darwin wondered if the spiders were using electrostatics to take off. Gorham wondered if Darwin was right. So he turned the question into a simple physics problem.

“When I worked through the numbers it looked quite compelling,” Gorham said. “This was a plausible explanation for not all of the flight but at least for some of it.”

Gorham published his work on arXiv, an open-access platform, hoping someone with more expertise in biology would pick it up. Enter Morley, a sensory biologist at the University of Bristol. When Morley saw his paper, she saw an opportunity.

Scientists have long known that air currents can lift spiders high into the air, allowing the eight-legged critters to disperse hundreds of miles to new ecosystems. But most of these “ballooning” events take place on quieter days and can’t explain the loft of larger spiders.

But the idea that an electric field can also pull on spider strands had been dismissed 200 years ago.

“In the early 1800s, there were arguments that spiders might be using electric fields to balloon, but then there were also people arguing that it was wind,” said Morley. “And the argument for wind won over probably because it’s more obvious.”

Since then, scientists discovered a naturally-occuring global electric field — located between the negatively charged surface of the Earth and the positively charged air residing 50 to 600 miles up, known as the ionosphere. But until five years ago, no one had revisited the effect this electric field might have on spiders.

A flight simulator for spiders
Morley built an “arena” the size of a mini fridge sheltered from air currents and from electric fields to observe spider behavior under controlled conditions. She then created electric fields to mimic those found in nature by installing charged metal plates — electrodes — on the bottom and the top of the clear plastic box.

The spider goes somewhere, sticks his bum in the air, lets out some silk, and then waits to take off.
When she switched the electric field on, spiders began “tiptoeing” on the top of a vertical cardboard strip — mimicking the behavior that spiders exhibit before they launch off branches or leaves.

“The spider goes somewhere, sticks his bum in the air, lets out some silk, and then waits to take off,” said Fritz Vollrath, an evolutionary and behavioral biologist at the University of Oxford, who wasn’t involved with the study.

Morley observed a dramatic increase in this spider tiptoeing when the field was turned on. And in some cases, the spiders even began to fly in the box.

What’s more, when a spider took off, Morley could move the spider up and down by switching the electric field on and off. “I was really excited when that happened,” Morley said.

Morley knew spiders grow thousands of sensory hairs on their bodies, which can detect sound and tiny currents of air. Suspecting these hairs might sense electric fields too, Morley then focused a small laser beam onto individual hairs to see if they moved.

When the laser reflects off of a hair that has moved, the wavelength, or color, of the laser light slightly changes.

“Spiders have a lot of spines and other kinds of hairs. But it’s this one particular kind of hair — called trichobothria — that was moved in the electric field. The other ones didn’t seem to move at all,” Morley said.

Understanding spider migration is important, because as top insect predators, spiders play a major role in all ecosystems, Vollrath said. Monitoring fluctuations in natural electric fields caused by weather could help scientists predict the occurrence of mass ballooning events — that’s when thousands of spiders take off at once. Such events can impact populations of insects across whole continents.

One possible application of this research: pest control. Spiders are the predators of many agricultural pests, such as fruit flies in California. Vollrath joked that perhaps a human-generated electric field could attract spiders to the cropland to eat the fruit flies.

Gorham said he was impressed by the statistical certainty in Morley’s experiments. The chance of the spider tiptoeing in this study being just a coincidence is extremely small.

“These authors have done exactly the right kind of experiment,” Gorham said. “I think Charles Darwin would be thrilled.”

By -- Amanda Grennell
Amanda Grennell is PBS NewsHour’s 2018 AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow. She recently earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Colorado Boulder as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Outside of the lab, Grennell acted as senior editor for the graduate student blog Science Buffs, artistic director for the first annual ComSciCon Rocky Mountain West and a writer and social media manager for Chembites.

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The Club PUBlication 07/02/2018

7/2/2018

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The Club
PUBlication

CD's are again getting peoples attention as a safe place for short/medium term fund storage.

Rates are coming back to levels that are meaningful.

Check this article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Harv

A Minneapolis StarTribune Article
  After long lull, CD rates on rise again
  By SPENCER TIERNEY
    July 1, 2018 — 12:40PM
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rates on certificates of deposit are finally rising. If you are looking to kick-start your savings strategy, consider adding CDs to the mix.

CDs are seen as safe bets for saving or investing since they are federally insured and returns are guaranteed. And when CD rates go up, as they have in the past year, you will earn more money.

“It’s important for people who have been disappointed by CDs in the past to bring them back into their rotation,” said Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union.

CD rates took a big hit after the financial crisis, and they have remained low for a while. That started to change at the end of 2015, when the Federal Reserve made the first of several rate increases.

While the national average rates rise gradually, online bank CDs have been skyrocketing.

A NerdWallet analysis found that the average one-year CD rate across five online banks climbed from 1.46 percent to 2.20 percent annual percentage yield, or APY, in the past 10 months alone.

The best five-year CDs can come with rates near or even above 3 percent.

But just because CDs tend to offer some of the highest guaranteed returns doesn’t automatically make them the best home for your savings or investments. Here are three scenarios where CDs can work well:

Protecting savings: These may include saving for a down payment on a home or car. Whatever the goal, the money won’t be used for years and can stay safely out of reach in CDs.

Building short-term wealth: CDs with short terms, such as one or two years, can make sense if there’s a plan to later invest that money.

Ensuring returns without risk: Investing in long-term CDs is generally best for people, typically retired, who want to avoid risking their money in the stock market.

If rates sound good right now and CDs work for your situation, be sure that you are comfortable with two potential downsides: early withdrawal penalties and missed opportunities for higher rates later. If you end up needing money that’s in a CD and you withdraw it before the term expires, there’s usually a penalty that cancels out some or all the interest you have earned.

CD ladders can minimize the downsides. A CD ladder is a way to spread out a large amount of money into multiple CDs of varying term lengths, such as one year, two years and three years. When each CD expires, you either withdraw funds if you need them or reinvest in another CD.

Spencer Tierney writes for NerdWallet, a personal finance website.

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The Club Publication 07/30/2018

​Trump administration tells EPA to cut climate page from website: sources

The Club PUBlication 07/23/2018

The Club PUBlication 07/16/2018

The Club PUBlication 07/09/2018 - Spiders

The Club PUBlication 07/02/2018

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Trump administration tells EPA to cut climate page from website: sources