A welcome perspective
How refreshing to read John Bagley’s editorial on global
warming. Many of us in the silent majority feel the same way. We’d
like to see more of John’s thoughts on the editorial page.
Well done, John, and thanks to the Pinnacle for something great
to read.
Mike and Francis Bishop
Hollister
A welcome perspective
How refreshing to read John Bagley’s editorial on global warming. Many of us in the silent majority feel the same way. We’d like to see more of John’s thoughts on the editorial page.
Well done, John, and thanks to the Pinnacle for something great to read.
Mike and Francis Bishop
Hollister
Another look at global warming
I appreciate the Pinnacle’s dedication to balance, and I respect Mr. Bagley for presenting his views. But I must respond to a couple of his points. I quote Kevin Throop, whoever he is: “everything is open to questioning. This does not mean that all answers are equally valid.”
We’ve only had good thermometers to measure temperature for a couple of centuries, true, but dendrochronology (studying tree rings) gives us data going back a few thousand years and glacial ice cores tell us a lot about climates going back hundreds of thousands of years. There are also lake bottom sediments, and fossil records that can go back hundreds of millions of years. They tell us what plants and animals were living where and when, and from that we can deduce a lot about climate.
As for the ice caps, the ones floating in the arctic and Antarctic oceans aren’t the ones that are worrying. It’s the ice caps on Greenlands (about 800,000 square miles and up to a mile thick) and Antarctica (about 2,000,000 square miles and equally thick). They are on land and can add as much as a couple of million cubic miles of water to our oceans. That’s a lot of water.
I’m not blaming just the U.S. for this; we Americans, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bolivians, etc., are all in this together. And I enjoy my comfortable life as much as anyone. But the U.S. is where I live and vote, it is my country, so my political activity and concern are here. I have as much right, and no more, to tell China or Mexico what laws to adopt as their citizens have to tell my government. And I’m responsible for what my country does, not someone else’s country.
Franz M. Schneider
Hollister
Sharing passions and causes
Kudos to the San Benito County Board of Supervisors “affordable housing” forum and the passions that filled the room for our County and our citizens needing housing. A room filled with businesses competing for the “no growth” out of town “consumer spending,” we were all working for the same goals. Realizing that we walk away knowing that we can combine gifts, talents, and passions and build as business schools teach, “from within.” We can do this house by house. Business by business.
The Mercury News and its coverage of our corrupt ways in this County defraying development and growth could be corrected with more positive forums, and political human warming.
My passions tend to be misunderstood by being overly ambitious, and assertive. By definition, passions stir, not sit. Annette Benning seemed overly ambitious and assertive, yet she won her lobby and the President. It is the passions that really drive success, money is the outflow of the productivity.
I have had experiences with persons who had desperate need of a home. They were good people. It frustrated them and me, they simply did not know how to care for their home. The affordable housing need to provide seminars to teach home ownership again, from the inside out.
At one time I was one of the 75 percent ( thanks to our new planning department and their availability of these records) of the women, single mothers in poverty. As major caregivers our joyful and not so joyful interruptions cause us to lose momentum and continuity in our business and financial goals. We appear to have no plan at all. Women are still not paid equal to the male wage earner. The worst moment of a 58 year old in the AARP bulletin stated “worst moment was the bank didn’t want to give me a loan because I am a single woman in a high-risk business”
I am passionate about these causes: single women, youth, obesity, seniors, the young families. The passions lead to a life with a better hyphen between the two other important days of your life, birth and death. It is good to see passions growing here.
Sally A. Haydon
Hollister
