At 02:35 PM 1/5/98 -0800, Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
> But in
>my book, the real issue is still the reproducibility of the multithousand
>laminae counts and whether these can be reliably said to contain solar or
>Milankovitch cycles in the light of Pittock.
Since you have been surprising me, maybe now I get a chance to return the favor.
I got Pittock's work, which was published in Aug. 1978 and was submitted
Nov. 1, 1977. These dates are important because I am going to tell the
story of one of the most fascinating guys I ever had work for me and it was
he who got me interested in atmospheric physics which led to my first paper
in the CRSQ on the temperature under the vapor canopy (too hot for life).
The story is necessary as a tribute to this man who was instrumental in me
starting to publish. I also got to play a very minor role in an exciting
discovery.
But as the story unfolds, it is necessary to know that Pittock's paper,
published in 1978, says that there is no firm link between the solar cycle
and any weather phenomenon. Pittock wrote:
"Following a survey of the literature it is concluded that despite the great
number of recent papers on the subject, little convincing evidence has yet
been produced for real correlations between sunspot cycles and the
weatehr/climate on the 11- and 22-year time scales...." Pittock, Reviews of
Geophysics and Space Physics Aug 1978, p. 400
If Pittock is correct then the cycles in the Green River probably aren't
due to the solar cycle. But my friend, disproved Pittock's case.
In 1976, at an Atlantic Richfield Christmas party in Plano, Texas, I was
introduced to Robert G. Currie, a newly hired geophysicist in our research
department. Bob, I was told had been captain of a National Championship
football team, made bad grades but then talked his way into grad school by
telling the school that he had done wonders for their image by being on the
football team and now they had an obligation to give him a chance at going
to grad school. Bob then make straight A's after that and eventually got a
Ph.D. Bob could not teach at a university because he had the worst stutter
I have ever seen in anyboty. It would take him a couple of minutes
occasionally to get his mouth moving correctly. But he absolutely hated it
if I tried to guess what he was going to say. By the time I met him he had
been to South Africa, been thrown out of S.A. for anti-apartheid activities
as a U.S. citizen and had produced a publication list as long as my arm.
In 1978 I was made a manager of a processing group. Shortly thereafter they
told me that Bob was going to work in my group. I was a 28-year-old,
snot-nosed, wet behind the ears manager and Bob was 20 years my senior
Seeing that this looked like a ludicrous situation, I went to my boss and
found out that Bob had been thrown out of R & D because he couldn't get
along with the primadonnas over there. Apparently Bob out primadonna'd them
and they punished him by making him work for me a person who only had a B.S.
Bob liked me, but he was as unhappy working for me as he had been working
for R & D.
Bob and I had lots in common, a love for chess, a love of science and a
willingness to challenge the status quo. For a year and a half every day at
lunch I had the privilege of playing chess with Bob, who had become a chess
master at age 18. I beat him 3 times in that year and a half, only one of
which really counts. Once he lost because he decided to look up a phone
number while we were playing and was not paying attention, the other
non-counting loss was when my boss interrupted us. But I did beat him once
legitimately!!!!!
One day at lunch over the chess board, I learned that Bob liked hand-ball.
I too liked the game. And since I was tired of being beaten everyday at
chess, I challenged him to a game. Bob was 48, smoked like a chimney and
was a bit over weight. I saw an easy mark and was eager to take my revenge
out on him. We got to the court, flipped a coin to see who would serve and
Bob won. He served and I couldn't return his serve. In fact I couldn't
return ANY of his serves. I ran myself silly on the court while Bob didn't
even work up a sweat. Finally I asked him where he learned to serve like
that. He told me that he had learned handball in highschool from some Irish
cops who had befriended this otherwise isolated and lonely boy. H got so
good that he had turned down a handball scholarship to take the football
scholership. He laughed at my naievete at thinking I was going to beat him
at anything. :-)
Every so often one gets to be a bystander at a big event. My chance came
one day when Bob asked me if he could use about 60 seconds of mainframe
computer time for a personal project. I made my contribution to the
advancement of science by saying "Sure, I don't care". I didn't know
exactly what it was that Bob was doing other than that it was a couple of
papers he was working on.
About 2 months later Bob told me that the articles were accepted with a
couple of corrections needed. He asked for a bit more computer time to
correct a couple of things in the articles. I once again let him do it.
A few month's later, Bob started getting calls from some very interesting
people. Munk, the famous astronomer called him one day at work. Even the
chief meteorologist from the CIA called him. I got curious and asked what
was going on. He told me that the paper that he had used those 60 seconds
for was the first paper to detect a linkage between the average surface
temperature and the solar cycle. The second paper detected the solar cycle
in the earth's rotational rate. Ignorantly, I asked him who cared.
He pointed out that the CIA was interested because if the number of sunspots
was related to temperature, that would have an effect on growing season.
Bob told me that the wheat belt had pushed 100 miles further north into
Canada over the past 100 years and if the earth cooled off, all of this land
would be removed from production. This would lead to food shortages and
political unrest. Munk was interested because the other thing Bob had done
was detect the solar cycle in the earth's DAILY rotation rate. It seems
that the solar cycle had an impact on the westerlies which then imparted
momentum when they struck the Cordilleran mountains. The earth's rotation
was changed (very slightly by this).
In 1979, as I was getting another promotion and taking over management of
another group, I finally convinced a small research group to take Bob and
use him like he ought to be used. Bob was ecstatic to get back to research,
but his happiness didn't last long. He again became disenchanted with ARCO.
Shortly after, the two papers Bob published won an award. Bob got an offer
from the National Academy of Sciences (or some group like that, I can't
remember). They offered Bob a deal anyone would love to have. They would
pay him the same salary that Atlantic Richfield was paying him and he could
go to Washington D.C. and spend an entire year researching ANYTHING he
wanted to research--no restrictions. It was some special award for that
kind of paper. Since Bob hated the situation he was in at ARCO, he accepted.
We talked over the next year from time to time. At first he loved
Washington, but then the bureacracy began to wear on him and by the end of
the year, he called me asking if I could help him come back to ARCO. I did,
but once again he hated it and eventually left the company. I then lost
track of Bob.
Anyway, the point of this tribute is that when Pittock wrote his article, he
was correct. Currie proved the link between the weather and the solar cycle
so Pittock's objections no longer apply. Bob's paper, which I have an
autographed preprint of, is Robert G. Currie, "Distribution of Solar Cycle
Signal in surface Air Temperature Over North America," Journal of
Geophysical Research, 84:C2 Feb. 20, 1979, pp 753-761. Unfortunately, I seem
to have lost the other article.
As to Bob, while he could never understand my YEC leanings at the time, he
tolerated them. He was the one that taught me a bit of atmospheric physics
which I then used to calculate the surface temperature of the earth if it
had a vapor canopy. Since this produced a result that was too hot for
living things, and since I NEEDED an explanation for the flood, I was forced
to begin looking at all sorts of ways to resolve my theological problem. It
was the failure of every single possibility I tried, which eventually led me
to become an old-earth evolutionist. So thus you have Bob to thank, or
condemn for what I am today.
The moral: Even those who ignorantly say yes can be involved in great
scientific discoveries.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm