Too Cold to Swim, & Who Cares

It is the beginning of my third week in Seattle, and I still haven’t swum in Green Lake. There is a sign that says, ‘Early Season at Madrona and East Green Lake begins Memorial Day weekend’.

So, I was hoping it would be warm enough to go swimming Monday/Memorial Day, but with the surface water temperature just 15.6°C/60°F – and after some discussion with the lifeguard who was on duty. I declined.

The lifeguard explained that there was no issue with water quality despite all the duck poop, but that my body may be shocked by the cold. I am unaccustomed to it – swimming at 60°F.

Noone else was swimming – not a single local. Rather many people were walking, running, skating, biking around the perimeter.

My daughter tells me that there are indigenous American peoples who following tradition (pre-European settlement) would dunk their newborn babies in cold water every day for the first year of the baby’s life. So, the child becomes accustomed and resistant to cold. Perhaps also to hard things – and the mother as well, who would wade out often into icy cold water.

I am a fan of Wim Hof who teaches the benefits of cold-water exposure for building resistance and immunity, both physically and psychologically within our bodies – though so far, I have only done his breath work. I have never tried an ice bath – not yet.

That noone was swimming in Green Lake this Memorial Day would suggest that the population of Seattle has become somewhat resistant not to cold, but to the idea of being exposed to the benefits of cold – perhaps even hard things.

Another possible explanation is that it was unseasonally cold – never mind the claims that it is getting warmer and warmer, year on year because of all the carbon dioxides.

Given all the measuring you might assume it would be easy to know how cold it is now at Green Lake (Seattle) relative to how cold it was back in 1928 when the bathhouse was built, and everyone was swimming on Memorial Day. You might think, of course we know. We know the average global temperature to some fraction of a degree – if you believe the propaganda.

I’ve been reading ‘Our Polyvagal World’ by Stephen & Seth Porges – explaining why it is safer to believe. To believe the propaganda, I mean. At least for the individual.

It should be easy to know how air and water temperatures have changed at Green Lake over the last few decades. But with all the equipment changes, and all the adjusting of the temperature measurements here and in Australia, I can reliably inform you that no one really knows. Not for Green Lake or even equivalent bodies of water in Australia, not even for air temperatures.

More importantly perhaps, no one cares. It is actually dangerous for the individual to care about such things in a world where temperature and its year-on-year increase has become so politically important.

Very few ask the hard questions anymore – because it is not safe.

Almost everyone wants to believe together that somehow it is hotter, and if not hotter, then maybe colder. That the climate has become catastrophic.

Of course, those of you who have been following my work for some years know the effort that I have put into attempting some integrity in temperature measuring.

It is exactly ten years ago now, that I was working really hard and being very transparent with my numbers, showing that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology produces fraudulent remodelled temperature series that are then promoted as historically accurate records of our temperature history in accordance with the theory of catastrophic human-caused global warming.

Gerard Henderson from The Sydney Institute was kind enough to give me a platform to explain this, though he asked I not use the word fraudulent.

What I said that evening on 25^th June 2014 – ten years and one month ago – is still relevant so relevant, and the notes are still available at my website, CLICK HERE. Of course, I have expanded on this, demonstrated again and again not only problems with the remodelling but also, subsequently, problems with how the actual temperatures have been recorded beginning with the transition to platinum resistance probes in November 1996. I’ve explained how the Bureau needs to make the parallel data public so we can compare measurements today from platinum resistant probe with the measurements decades ago taken with mercury thermometers, CLICK HERE.

But who really cares – and how are they helping?

If they really cared, they wouldn’t have let Greg Hunt ‘kill’ the idea of a review into the Bureau. The article published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is quite blasé about it all – there is mention of ‘following reports in The Australian newspaper’, CLICK HERE.

Each one of those articles in The Australian newspaper followed an extraordinary effort on my part, with checking done by Ken Stewart, to convert daily to monthly to annual values for whichever temperature series journalist Graham Lloyd requested. Since then, over the last ten year a lot more of the data has subsequently become available, including monthly values for the remodelled ACORN-SAT series. And so many numbers for other temperature series were crunched, with corresponding articles never written.

I was converting daily to monthly to annual and then charting the difference to shown the extent of the deceit. I was crunching numbers no one had crunched before so the comparisons between the adjusted and the raw for the individual weather stations could be seen – along with the step changes. Then my numbers were sent by Lloyd to the Bureau, for more checking. It was never reported back to Lloyd that I got anything wrong. Just that there was always good reason to remodel the original temperatures – to change what had been measured at the official recording stations by accredited officers decades ago.