[00:00:29] The bushwhacks were some of the worst days I've ever had in the mountains, or life really. Whereas Pantsy Mountain is totally opposite, it's a mountain on top of a crater. I think the weather challenges on this incident were particularly difficult. It is really the development of New York State. Catskills will respond to it.
[00:00:52] You're listening to Inside The Line, the Catskill Mountains Podcast. Whatever they're called, man. He's cutting you off. That's why you're pausing all these times.
[00:01:13] Yeah. I'm being censored. That's what's happening. The government censor. I mean, they've infiltrated the hiker trash studio south. Exactly why we couldn't record with the Rangers last week. Yeah. Well, it's just like with that halftime show, how they were bleeping out the words and stuff.
[00:01:36] That's what's happening to me now, now that Musk is in control. He got my social security data. My payments have been stopped. I can't retire and have to podcast the rest of my life. Turn this into my profession. Yeah, that's where I think I'm going. I want to talk about the podcasting life. You know, we were together, what, three and a half hours on three hours, 15 minutes on Friday. It's a fantastic time.
[00:02:04] Yeah. Those were two great episodes. If you didn't listen to them, you're missing out. Oh, God. Yeah, then we did like 45 minutes on Sunday. Yeah. And then tonight, my wife is going to think there's something going on between us. So. She's going to, your affair? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you better not schedule anything for Friday because it is Valentine's Day after all. Well, Sunday, I might be going hiking Sunday. Oh yeah? What are you going to hike? Bear Pen and Fly. My friend needs those for his winter.
[00:02:32] All Tom who's, I hear Bear Pen's Tom's favorite, favorite mountain. Yeah. Tom just had like an accident driving up from Jersey. Oh my God. I'm turning around. I can't screw this. Tom just ran into a Jersey barrier. I hope the dog wasn't with him. That would be really sad. Yeah. Yeah. So. Okay.
[00:02:53] So yeah, 159 tonight. Tonight we're going to be talking with Dr. Alexander Gates about climate change in the Catskills, climate change in America. And hold on, wait one second. Tad is going to crack open it. Are you going to do it right now? All right. So what I want, I want to know is if you can tell what it is from the crack. Listen, ready? It didn't record. You're right. You didn't read. You didn't shut off everything like you did last time.
[00:03:22] But seriously? Oh, I thought I had it all set down. Looks like you're going to have to chug that down and then do another one. Hmm. Is it a 1911? It is. It's a 1911. Ha! Yes! I got it just to like, like, sister you, right? We're twinning. I saw the color and then I... Yeah. It's not that good though. I might go get a beer. It's original though. I know it's original and it says from...
[00:03:51] Where is it? This is what caught my eye. In your legs, I think. Yeah. It says from tree to can. How the fuck do they do that? How do they make the apples when they turn them into cider on the tree? What is it with that? I mean, you see that? It's tree to can. Yeah, I see that in the last part. Do you believe that? And what gluten-free... Are these special apples that they're gluten-free? Aren't all apples gluten-free? Correct. This is just like chock full of false advertising.
[00:04:21] And where's the name 1911 come from? Correct. And is this... It's 1911 original as opposed to the fake version? Do they have like the fake 1911? I don't know. Listen, I had the cranberry one earlier and it was very good. Or the logan berry. Sorry, logan berry. I'm gonna say I'm gonna take another sip. I'm gonna see if my opinion changed in the last 30 seconds.
[00:04:51] Yeah, it's okay. Okay, I'll have to get you another one. So... Better than this? Better than the 1911 original? Original. They have some really good ones like a honey cider and a... The logan berry is more of a cranberry kind of Christmas time. So... Okay. I'll have to... We're gonna wait till Christmas then for the cranberry one. I guess so. So... Once we go offline, I'm gonna... I'm pulling out a stout and drinking a real man's drink. I'm gonna...
[00:05:21] Good for you. Rip it up, Ben. Do what you want. Drink a local stout. That's all I gotta say. I'm gonna drink my own drink. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. No doubt. All right. So we got a bunch of news going on. And... Let's start it off with a missing North Carolina hiker. 73-year-olds found dead in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Now, she was... Looked...
[00:05:50] This happened, let's see, on February 4th, Tuesday. So that was a week ago. Um... She was found dead over the weekend. Ann Haughton was found Sunday about a quarter mile off at Ennerly Creek Trail in the National Park Service. Uh... Cause of death was not immediately given. Uh... She had planned to hike the park, which straddles the north border of North Carolina and Tennessee, from January 8th to January 29th, according to officials.
[00:06:19] So, uh... This is a little bit... Uh... She was a little bit of a return on Saturday. She said she was reporting missing. And search and rescue volunteers located her vehicle at the Smokemont campground and began searching for the 73-year-old. Law enforcement said that search and rescue staff focused efforts along Bradley Fork and the area around. Local agencies assisted. And, uh... Volunteers that have been doing, uh...
[00:06:48] Park service for the last 20 years has been, uh... Assisting in this. And, uh... She said that this... Ann was a great person that has been volunteering in the park for over 30 years and was an enduring and belaborer. She was a beloved member of the Smoky Mountain community. She was dedicated to volunteer and advocate hiker who shared her passion for the park. Uh... Many great...
[00:07:15] Like local Smoky Mountain Volunteer National Park officers condolences to her favor. So... Unfortunately, Ann passed away in the Great Smoky Mountains. We don't know why yet. Tad, have you heard any updated information? No, I... I actually, uh... Before showtime tonight, I checked up on the story. Any... Uh... Further information?
[00:07:42] Nothing was available other than what you just reported. I thought it was interesting that they described what she was doing as a two-day hike. Now, does that mean she had camping gear and she was gonna spend the night, you know, in a tent or shelter, sleeping? Or was this some type of enduro thing where she was going some distance, starting maybe late, whatnot, but hiking through the night until the next day?
[00:08:09] I just found that to be an interesting nugget of information that's like screaming for more explanation. True. Two days. And then I saw... Yeah, then I saw in another article where her sister, Nancy Penny, said she died doing what she loved. And that's very, very comforting. Wow. And I say, really?
[00:08:38] I mean... I mean... She died. That's sad, you know? Yeah. I mean... It's not like she died of cancer or something like that, but it's like, you know, if somebody's dying, it's kind of nice to have the opportunity to, like, to say goodbye and, you know, see people that one last time, you know, but hear this woman who apparently was a remarkable woman. Well known in the Great Smoky Mountains area, set out to do a hike and she dies on this hike.
[00:09:07] I mean, how no... You don't know whether her death was full of pain and suffering, terror, you know, emotional trauma. You don't know anything about that. And I don't know. I mean, you don't know what happened to her. I don't find that very comforting. But I don't know Nancy and I don't know her sister. Just a couple oddities there.
[00:09:30] And you know, the Smokies are kind of like the Catskills, where we range in elevation going from a certain small area, you know, an elevation to a high elevation. You know, the Smokies go up to, I think it's like 6,500 feet is where Clingman's Dome is, one of the highest points on the East Coast. And you know, of course, I mean that's further south, but they can, I know they've had snow before.
[00:09:57] So, and then you of course have bears and stuff like that above that. So, I, you know, once again, you said further, I would like to know what happened. Like, did she suffer? Did she not suffer? Did she do, you know, what she loved? Did she pass away? Did she have a hypothermia? Did she have a hypothermia? Stuff like that. That's a big question mark. And it's been a week. Yeah.
[00:10:21] You know, I mean, maybe, you know, maybe she just had memory deficit problems and got lost, disorientated, confused. We've seen that before on the Appalachian trail further like north. I remember one lady who was like a queen in the Appalachian trail had, you know, memory deprivation or, you know, and had them walked off trail and just never been found for like, I forgot. It was like two years. Yeah.
[00:10:49] That's, and I'm, I'm not that much younger than these people. This could be me in a few years. Like 20 years. That's a big difference. Not 20 years, buddy. I'm only, I'm only 11 years behind this woman. So I could see, I could, I could see my daughter saying, and yeah, dad. Yeah. He, he died doing what he loved being chased by being chased by mountain lions. Stash found him after being chased by mountain lions and he shot him dead, but then got rid of the evidence.
[00:11:19] Although his head had been mauled off by a pack of wild mountain lions and the call between. Uh, Friday in the dink. Uh, Stash recognized him because Tad was found holding his microphone. Yeah. Holding that in 1911 up in the air. Cheers. Yeah. Didn't let the mountain lions get to it because it had that treat a can taste. Yeah.
[00:11:49] Yeah. Fresh and lacking in glutens. Yeah. Right. We like that. So Tad, uh, you know, I wanted to bring this up cause this was a local kind of, uh, event that happened. And a 50 year old three, 50 year old skier dies at Gore mountain. So he was the CEO of the call law group. Now you are more in tune with skiing and have you been up to core mountain? I have skied Gore mountain so many times.
[00:12:19] I won't admit it. It's a, it's a great ski place. It's like, uh, take a Bel Air, put it on steroids. Oh, wow. So, I mean, I've, I've seen the profile of Gore mountain and I know it's, it's, it's Adirondack kind of, it's an Adirondack aspect skiing area. So nice. Uh, I would say black diamonds and stuff like that and a bunch of here and there kind of stuff. But you know, this, uh, once again was a crazy tragedy that the New York state police was
[00:12:48] involved and, you know, with Tad, but you being a more of skier, I'd like to get your, uh, thoughts on this. What happened to them? I mean that, and you know, I, I go mountain. When did, do you know, has this happened? Does this happen often? Like, well, I mean, you know, people die every year from skiing. It could be a skier to skier contact collisions.
[00:13:12] Um, could be skier to immovable object like a lift tower or big maple tree. You know, uh, that's how Sonny Bono died. If you remember him, Sonny and Cher skiing at Aspen tree. Yeah. So those things happen. Um, but from the vague, vague details that were given. Very vague. Yeah. I would not be surprised.
[00:13:38] Um, because you know, they didn't describe any, uh, contact with an immovable object or other accident. It was just like, this guy was found on the slope dead. So what does that indicate? Heart attack, mass, massive stroke, aneurysm. Um, something like that, or could have been something completely stupid. Like what if on the chairlift, he was eating a snack that he was allergic to.
[00:14:06] He didn't realize that it had something in it that he was allergic to. And he just has an anaphylaxic reaction while he's skiing, you know, totally crazy, but yeah, it could be just some weird odd ball occurrence like that. And, you know, we could say it's very comforting that he died doing what he loved, but it kind of sucks. You know? Yeah, I know. That's awful. Let's just bleep this out. This is where we need the censorship. So yeah, it's awful.
[00:14:34] I mean, you know, people die all the time and you know, I guess on the one hand, it's nice if you die doing what you love, but on the other hand, it kind of sucks dying when you're 53, like this guy. Right. Now, uh, it said he was on the Sagamore trail. Have you been on that? Do you remember that? Do you recall that? I could pull that up and see if I remember. Please do because you know, once again, I am not a skier, so I'm, I'm, I'm not, I'm not noticed about Gore, but I'm very familiar with the terrain of Gore.
[00:15:04] It's, it's, it's an, I would say for an Adirondack mountain, it's very typical for an Adirondack ski center. You know, it has once again, some nice steep slopes, stuff like that. But, but you know, if someone else fouled them, then, you know, I would say that, you know, of course it, like you said, it had to be a heart attack or something.
[00:15:26] Not like that one guy that was, uh, left the, the scheme and then was found over in Sacramento. That was a great story. I remember covering that a while back. Here we go. Here we go. Pulling up the trail map. Let's see. Oh, it's God. Boy, this is a pretty low. Well, profile stuff like that. It seems all ski mountains have horrible maps.
[00:15:55] Unless you are face to face with the goddamn map on the top of the mountain. That's the way I see Platykill. I love Paddock, Platykill. You know, I haven't skied there, but I got to admit their stuff online sucks compared to when you're looking at it on top of the mountain when I'm at the peak. Yeah. That's kind of how you're orientated. I don't see Sagamore. I'm pretty sure that's what it said. Yeah. Oh, I see.
[00:16:23] It's a, uh, summit bridge Sagamore. It's a black diamond. So that's a, one of the, it's the steepest trail that you can get, right? No, they, they actually at the ski area, they have some double black diamonds, which is, you know, one, yeah, one notch above a black diamond. Um, but so yeah, the, the trail name is not, um, one that I'm familiar with, but I mean,
[00:16:49] you don't know that day he could have hit a patch of ice and, you know, lost his edge and went into a tree, went into some snowmaking equipment, um, a lift tower, a tree, you know, there's a bunch of things he, he might've hit. Or like I said, it just kind of seemed to me from the lack of other descriptions, this
[00:17:13] is a guy that had some mystery medical condition turned out to be terminal fatal. Yeah. And we haven't heard it. I haven't heard anything about it yet. So I mean, yeah, sometimes. So I, I went to the webpage for his business. He's a family law lawyer in the Albany area and there was no further information. Elon is cutting you off.
[00:17:41] Once again, Ted has experienced his technical difficulties. Elon is cutting you off, man. Yeah. He's actually in the corner of my office right now. Elon, get the fuck out of here, buddy. Okay. He ran for cover. He doesn't like it. Apparently he doesn't like it when you yell at him. So yeah, please. All right. Yeah. He jumped in his, he jumped in his car. So you said you were, you were saying that there hasn't been any information on his website.
[00:18:06] No, uh, there was no indication on his website that he was no longer alive. It was like, you know, business as usual on the webpage. Wow. Yeah. Unfortunate accident on Gore mountain up in the Adirondacks. So, you know, Ted, you brought this next, uh, last second, uh, incident happening. And I'm like, what the hell, where the hell is Mount Barney? Yeah. So I have to look at this. Did you find out where it is?
[00:18:36] Australia, mate. Yeah. Yeah. See, we, you know, we cover the news anywhere on the globe where it's newsworthy. We want to bring it to you. And Ted brought this amazing news piece to me and I was just like, what the hell? This is fantastic. Yeah. So, I mean, the Australia is a whole different area than, than, than us. So this guy was a teenager who survived on lollies, which I guess is lollipops out in Australia. Mm-hmm.
[00:19:02] Muesli bars, which I'm guessing is, uh, like granola bars. A granola bar. Granola bar, I guess. And Creek water, which is, which is the best water for us. After becoming lost for three days on the South Brisbane, says he has no plans for going hiking anytime soon. Let's get them on the show. Let's get them on the show. Oh, I get it. Nathaniel Green, 18, alerted authorities that he had become lost while trekking Mount Barney in the national park on Thursday morning in Australia.
[00:19:31] A search and rescue effort, which included SES volunteers, which I don't know what is. Uh, he was uninjured, but he was not navigating correctly. Thursday morning, he said he went up into the mountain for sunrise. Then my phone died and then ran out of water. This sounds like a typical case of an East Coast hiker. Yeah. It's, it sounds like teenagers, whether in the Northern hemisphere or the Southern hemisphere, they basically hike the same. What the heck?
[00:19:59] Except this guy has fricking unlimited amount of, uh, like weather, like nice weather. So he says lost alone and pretty cooked, whichever that means, whether high or, uh, cooked by the sun. Mr. Green continued to send them out and using a nearby Creek for drinking water. He built a makeshift shelter shelter. So he knows what the hell he's doing to make it through the freezing nights. I got to find out.
[00:20:26] Ted, while I'm talking about this, please look at what is freezing nights in Australia. Yeah. Well, you know, cause that's interesting. It's in the Southern hemisphere. So this is their, you know, summer season down there now. Correct. So, and he subsidized on a pack of lollies and a Musolee bar that he had packed for the journey. So after spotting rescue helicopters, so they fricking rescue him in helicopters in Australia
[00:20:53] overhead on Friday night and Saturday morning, he realized he needed to try to get as high as possible in hopes of being found. Now this is not high as, as you think it is, but, uh, that's where I called out someone and heard me this morning and called for a rescue for me. I didn't know who it was, but whoever it was saved my life. Probably. Yeah. I would say definitely because you are still alive now. Yeah. Wow. I thought America was dumb. Yeah.
[00:21:24] They're, you know, they apparently were watching South park down in Australia. He said, uh, wait a minute. Oh, all right. After the three, three door deal, the teenager said he would be going home to eat and sleep and shower. Probably. He equipped. Thank God. Emergency services was there because he was absolutely not experienced. Heiter has seen by the fact that he got stuck on the side of an easy mountain. Anyone who came up, look through me, anyone who went up the mountain, anyone who sort of helped.
[00:21:53] I really want to extend a thank you to them. He was probably going to give them a lollipop. Yeah. So maybe that's like a popular thing to give, to show your appreciation down there. So I don't know what the weather was like, uh, when it happened, but assuming that the weather hasn't changed all that much since last week here, uh, mountain forecast.com is
[00:22:18] saying that, uh, Mount Barney where he was, uh, has nighttime lows at the summit in the fifties. And you know, that can kind of be chilly cause that's with, you know, 10 to 15 mile an hour wind. So I could see where that, you know, he would find that chilly overnight, but he was below tree line. Yeah. So it would have been warmer maybe where he is, you know?
[00:22:46] Um, I mean, these are just rough estimates, but I just thought it was noteworthy because you know, you have a, uh, teenage hiker in the outback who seems to make the same mistakes that we find common with young hikers relying on a, relying on a cell phone is, as if it's like a Swiss army knife. Yeah.
[00:23:10] And then out here when we have temperatures in the summer that reached down in the forties and stuff on the summits and they're just like, Hey, come rescue me with a helicopter. And you know, so I guess we have the same problems that Australia has. So I mean, yeah. Yeah. So, Hey, look, at least he got home, took a warm shower, replenished his stock of lollies and, uh, I'm sure he's good to go.
[00:23:39] Although he says he's not going to go hiking again anytime soon. Yeah. I highly doubt that he'll be, that's type two fun. Yeah. Right. It's definitely, he's going to be back out there. Yeah. Well, what might've been, you know, I mean, look, we don't know much about his psychological makeup. It could have been relatively traumatizing for him to be out there like that. So we won't pick on him too much. I know he's probably, you know, in, in Australia, he's probably a frequent listener of the show. So I have to reach out to him. Yeah.
[00:24:08] So do you want to go over these, uh, recent events that, uh, come up? No, you're doing good. I'm gonna, I'm just going to make you do all the work tonight. I'm enjoying my 1911 treat to can premium small batch, hard cider. So, I mean, this is not that, that crazy that have happened. We haven't had much happen, which is surprisingly, uh, I, I think we'll, we'll get a difference
[00:24:36] of that with the snowstorm and stuff like that. The cold weather coming up in the Northern Adirondacks. Well, you know, we haven't had, like we did last year, last year, we had a lot of ankle fractures and the Catskills in the winter. And the reason we haven't had that this winter I'm speculating is because we haven't had the ice. Right. We haven't had the ice because it's been winter. You know, we haven't had like a, a thaw and then re freeze to form that ice.
[00:25:04] It's still relatively, you know, snowpack out there. Um, that could change. But I think that the fact that it's a real robust winter out there proves that all these people that are talking about climate change are just wrong. Okay. You wouldn't have a winter like this if there was global warming. I'm just saying. Say, man, you haven't said that.
[00:25:28] You can't disagree with me that the past 10 years of hiking that it has gotten weirder, weirder. Yeah. That it's been easier and easier to get, to get the four summits at 3,500 peaks. Yeah. I can't say the last, I don't remember any prior year bringing my snowshoes with me as much as I have this winter.
[00:25:52] I remember a snow storm that I had to break trail in goddamn like, I don't know, it was like 2017 and that was it. Everything else was spikes. Really? Since then it's been seven years since you had a break trail. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, you're like a prima donna. What do you show up like at 11, 1130? It's a wind of wind of high peak. You make sure people like, you make sure Jim Booten's gone out ahead of you, the bus trail for you.
[00:26:18] And then you show up in your Tesla, you get out, you have like a fancy hard cider takeoff while the rest of us are out there busting trail. At that time, I hate to say it. I had my Prius. Oh yeah. Yeah. Outrageous. Yeah. Even worse. No, I kind of broke some trail. Well, I won't say trail cause I wasn't on a trail, but I, I had the snowshoes on this weekend. Oh yeah. You broke some trail. Don't, don't say that shit.
[00:26:45] So, uh, this is the town of Minerva, Essex County. So we're talking about Adirondacks. Yep. February 8th, Raybrook dispatch received a report from Essex County down one about an unresponsive hiker on the Wolf Pond trail. Now, uh, forest ranger brand arrived at 11 45 AM. So 45 minutes later, awesome response time. Newcomb, uh, Newcomb fire department and Essex County EMS were already on the scene and offering
[00:27:15] medical assessment. Uh, they assisted in packaging the 67 year old from Schenectady and a litter Rangers, Brandon Perryman, along with New York state police troopers and assisted the other carryout subject with transfer the ambulance by 12 45 PM. So if you're on a short trail, you can make it out in under two hours. Yeah. That's pretty good. I would imagine that's absolutely fantastic. Yeah. And the fact that they reported this fellow is being unresponsive.
[00:27:44] Um, he's lucky that he was so easy to get to no other. Yeah. No other, uh, report other than that saying that the unresponsive and then transferred by ambulance. So of course that was three days ago. So, uh, awesome job by the Rangers. Of course we saw that. Of course in one 58, they were just, uh, Horne rusher was absolutely phenomenal. I love that episode. Yeah.
[00:28:13] If you haven't listened to it yet, actually park this episode, go back and listen to that one. We'll still be here when you're done listening to it, but it's, it's worthwhile. It was really good. Really fun. Those guys are awesome. And next time it'll be in person. I will make the truck out there. I will, I will sacrifice myself for what I love. There you go. There you go.
[00:28:38] So also toward town of North Hudson, Essex County, of course, Northern, uh, Adirondacks, uh, February 5th, 8 0 4 PM late in the night, four joined your Lewis and Martin responded when Ray to book just back, we see the call for two hikers off trail near the summit of grace peak. So at 12 AM with temperatures falling below zero easily, the Rangers located the 76 year
[00:29:05] old from Waterford and the 57 year old from Canada. Rangers escorted the subject back to the vehicles resources of queer clear at 12 45. AM. So once again, that shows that they contacted at 8 0 4. And then at 12 AM, which was nearly four hours later that they located them. So once again, Ted, we talked about this in the last episode.
[00:29:33] That's kind of disappointed that you wouldn't probably be able to survive an overnight in the Catskills. If you were stranded in the winter, I think, I think no, in the winter, I, I think I would, it's, I would not in Mount Washington with what I carry in the Catskills. True. I, I, I, and, in the condition, those folks were rescued off of Mount Washington last week.
[00:30:02] I, I probably, I don't know how long it takes you to die from hypothermia, but I would be on that road to death. Wow. You know, doing what, doing what I love on the one hand. But. God damn. I, yeah. But in 60 mile an hour winds with snow up to your chest, you know, even though I, I carry, you know, some puffy layers and hard shells and, you know, this, that, the other thing, I think when you go up to those areas and you're going to experience those conditions, you really
[00:30:32] need to, you know, pack another, I'm going to say probably another 10 liters of gear. Right. Well done. Yeah. To, to be able to spend the night. So, and that's just part of being prepared because you, you know, I think the, the, the whites are more accessible to than the Adirondacks. Um, but in either place, but in either place, like you look at those, those two women, I, for what was it like six, seven hours before anybody got to them.
[00:31:01] That's a long time when it's, you know, 40, 50, 60 degrees. Yeah. Okay. That's any exposed flesh is, you know, frost. And that's by like, they, they went up by a road. Yeah. They went up by a snow cat top there. So just imagine the Adirondacks where you're once again, like this Alan mountain, the rescue that we talked about in the last episode, just you're, you're, you're absolutely F of,
[00:31:29] you know, it's just, it scares me. And then, you know, you Ted, we've been in these areas, you know, you have, you have, you know, a certain part of these calls in the Catskills that get the wind that just get nonstop wind. And I always think of a Panther and giant ledge where there's just, it's, it's never, I've never experienced that time of where there's no wind in there. When I was, when I went through there, um, two hikes ago, I was thinking of you and your
[00:31:58] assessment of how windy it is going through there. And it, uh, resonated with me. It validated that because yeah, it was, it was, you know, very windy and, uh, you know, wintry going through there with the, you know, the associated drifting that goes with that. And if there had been more snow, those slow snow drifts would have been that much bigger and slowed you down that much more to get throat through there.
[00:32:23] But in my experience, windy areas like that aren't so bad because the fresh snow tends to blow off of them. The worst places to be are like in the, the bowls where the snow is just going to pile up and pack in. And I was actually experiencing that not only, uh, my bushwhack up giant ledge, but then this, this last weekend where you, when you're going up slope or even down slope, and then you just
[00:32:51] hit those spots where the snow is piled up like four or five feet. Cause it's, you know, it's just literally just piled right up against a rock outcropping that you won't see. Cause the snow just naturally grades uphill over the rock outcropping. But as you come to the route rock outcropping, you just keep going, you know, deeper and deeper cause the snow is higher and higher. True. Yeah. And then, and then requires a little bit more effort and stuff.
[00:33:20] And then you burn calories and, and it's just back and forth. But you know, I, I experienced those parts when I, when I said the coals and stuff like that with the wind and the batter of the wind. And you kind of stop because you know, you, you know, and you're in a coal, you're like, Hey, let's get something to eat. And then all of a sudden you're exposed, you're cold. And then you go like, we got to move. And that X, that kind of makes me feel like you're, I wouldn't say above tree line like,
[00:33:48] like before, but that's the experience you get in the Catskills that will expose you to those extreme temperatures. Yeah. So the moral of that story is don't stop where it's windy. Right. Yeah. Right. You got to, you got to plan your stops. So you're, you're not, you know, exposed in the wind, especially you see people when they stop to eat, the first thing they do, they take their pack off and then they take off their gloves to start going through their pack because they need that dexterity.
[00:34:15] And then their hands start to get cold, but they still haven't finished doing what they're doing. You know? So they get the, this out, that out, they're opening this, they're opening that. And then they start eating with their gloves off and you can literally watch their hands go from just a natural flesh color to red. And then they start to turn like pale blue and then their fingers don't move anymore. And then they need a hand warmer or two or just a cleaver to drop, chop off the frostbitten
[00:34:43] areas right there at the mountain top. So a little exaggeration there at the end folks for, you know, the drama, the drama, but yeah, you know, one of the things is in the winter is you just got to plan ahead for when you're going to fuel up and have your fuel handy and easy to get to. And so you don't have to take your gloves off and get your hands cold. Yeah. Correct. Correct. And you know, we always, we always want to refuel and stuff at that low point, but sometimes that low point is not the right place.
[00:35:12] And you want to get on that side that doesn't have the, the wind and doesn't have the, the wind chill that you will experience that will want to make you cold and stuff like that. So once again, like Lockwood gap, that's, I've always found that area, Lockwood gap. You know, the, the, the gap between giant legend and Platico or not Platico Panther is just always a wind tunnel. Yeah. And it's phenomenal though. I love it.
[00:35:42] I seriously will sit there and I'll be like sitting in the wind. It'll be like, like, what's her name on the Titanic? I'll be like, Oh, I don't know. I don't know what was in your hard cider, but I'm just not feeling that. I feel that. Ah, you get like the double. I just, you know, mine's a 5.5. I will talk to you about that. A B V. I don't know what, which, which year is like a 15.5. 25.5. Oh, okay. It comes with a little, it comes with a side of whiskey.
[00:36:12] Yeah. Yeah. So thank you to the monthly supporters, Chris Garby and Jeff Jott, Desert City Radio, Mike E. S., John Comiskey. Thank you for summit speakers, Betsy A., Denise Weiss, Tom H., Vanessa, and Derek. Thank you guys so much for supporting the show. Love you guys. Once again, Tab, we're coming close to a big donation towards the Catskills.
[00:36:35] I reached out to Jeff from the DEC to see if that we could maybe possibly make a big donation towards the, like the trailheads, the signs of the Catskills, because I know a lot of these places are deteriorated and he pointed me in the direction somewhat of that we could get maybe these, this donation in towards the, the trail, like the, the intersections and stuff like that, the signs for the Catskills. Stop.
[00:37:05] Stop. It's tough. What about the kiosk at Panther? At Panther? Ah, unless they put a sign that says supported by inside the line of Catskills. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Like they do on the road, you know, we're adopting a roadway. We're adopting that kiosk. Damn it. Adopt a trailway. Hmm. Yeah. We should do that. We should just start the program. Just do it on our own. This is greedy. I like it. Yeah. We're doing it. Okay. So this Saturday at 7 a.m.
[00:37:35] Meet us at the Panther trailhead by the kiosk. Bring your power tools. Yeah. If you don't have a Makita 18 volt, don't come. If you don't have what Matt Smith has to take down the Huckleberry trail, don't come. So once again, big thank you to the sponsors of the show. We have outdoor Chronicles photography. So capture your love story against breathtaking backdrops with outdoor Chronicles photography. Molly specializes in adventure.
[00:38:04] All open and adventure couple photography. And she'll immortalize your moments. And it's the stunning landscape of the Catskills Adirondacks of White Mountains. She'll craft time with images that reflect unique bond and nature's grandeur. Embark on an unforgettable photographic journey with outdoor Chronicles photography. Don't hesitate to get a hold of Molly on all platforms. Also, discover the wilderness with Trailbound Project. Our expert-led hiking and backpacking education program offered unparalleled outdoor experiences.
[00:38:34] Whether you're a beginner or seasoned adventurer, join us to learn essential skills, explore stunning trails, and connect with nature. Start with your journey today with Trailbound Project and unlock the great wonders of the great outdoors. So, Hard Siders mentions. Who's Outdoors is the new mention, I would say, that we're going with.
[00:39:01] So, Tom Who's and Jeff Jotz went to Hawcutt and Balsam Lake Mountain, correct? Yeah, looks like they had a good time. They tagged the show and so they get a shout out just like they shouted out us. Don't forget to give us a shout out. Tag us in your Instagram postings.
[00:39:24] And don't forget that the chronogram nominations are still ongoing through the 15th. You can vote once a day per email account. So, vote for the show. Best regional podcast. You'll find us under arts and entertainment, kind of at the bottom of the column. They'll have regional podcasts. And there you'll see your buddies inside the line. Catskill Mountain Podcast. Yeah.
[00:39:51] So, Tom and Jeff should be voting for these guys daily to support us. Jeff had a great time with Orla, which looks to be a fantastic time going up Balsam Lake and Hawcutt. Which is, I would say, never a bad time. So, I mean, going up Balsam Lake is always a good time. Even if you don't have a view. So, yeah.
[00:40:17] Yeah, I think that's a good all-purpose hike. If you live in the Hudson Valley or down in the New York metro area, it's kind of a jaunt to get over there. But it is worthwhile. And it's a great place to take somebody for their first taste of Catskill hiking because you get them up in the fire tower. And they get a view of something, you know? Right. And if it's a bad winter day, then they get a taste of the weather above the tree line going up there. So, yeah.
[00:40:48] And, you know, once again, Tom is on his way for his Winter 35. I'm pretty sure. Jeff, I don't know what you're going out for yet. But, you know, I'm glad that you're out there with Tom kicking ass and taking names. I've got to say. Ted, you already mentioned about the best regional podcasts. So, hopefully we get in the top list.
[00:41:09] I'm hopeful that we can take out these Hudson Valley podcasts that seem to have talking about wine and food and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, we're just kind of creeping right in there and we're going to steal their thunder. Correct. As we should. Yeah. I agree. I agree. So, you said you have a 1911 tonight? Yeah. I've got a 1911 original premium small batch hard cider.
[00:41:38] Treat a can. Gluten free. Tastes rather ordinary to me. I mean, there's. Yeah. Gluten free. Yeah. I mean, it may be because it has no glutens. That's why it's lacking in flavor. I don't know. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. So, these were going to have to see how long that the reigning three of this four pack. Last out there, but. Oh, wow. So, I had a 1911 as well. Logan Barry.
[00:42:08] The original? The Logan Barry? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Once again, I can't read what the stuff says. He said. 16. Is yours treat a can? Yes. It says treat a can on the bottom. Yeah. I wonder where they grow the Logan berries then on the tree or in the can. I don't know. I don't know, but it's good stuff. So, mine's 5.5. What's yours? ABC or ABV? What do you got going there? I don't know.
[00:42:39] Where does it show it? 6.9. Ooh. Okay. Yeah. That's why I'm into it more. Yeah. I'm totally not into this podcast tonight. Yes. Correct. I'm sorry, folks, if I'm kind of the bummer, if I'm killing the vibe with my 5.5. All right. So, previous hikes. What do you want to go over with? Did I talk about Bramley mountain last time? Yes, you did.
[00:43:07] But, I mean, it could be, you know, could have been you've hiked it two weekends in a row or two hikes in a row. I'm not going to lie. It's your go-to. It's like your backyard. It is. So, unfortunately, I didn't make it out this week. So. Shame. I know. It was that time of when we didn't know the prediction of the storm. So, like, you kind of wonder what the areas would be plowed or not.
[00:43:35] You know, I've been to, to be honest, I've been to over the Sprucedon, Hunter Mountain, where it's never been plowed before, which is insane to be the one of the most popular trailheads in the area. And it's not been plowed, but I understand because it's the most out of way. But, you know, I, I stayed at home and I, I enjoyed, I guess, enjoyed the, the, the weekend. Did you watch the game? Did you watch the Super Bowl?
[00:44:05] The crushing? Yeah. Yeah. The, as Alex would say, the co-blobbering. Yeah. It's pretty good, man. Talk about the blitz. Wow. I know we're out there. I, that their defense was absolutely on point. Yeah. Way to win, way to win the Super Bowl. Yeah. Just freaking screw that. But yeah, I'll get out this weekend, this Sunday. I'm looking forward to going out. Hopefully, would did I, I'm not saying hopefully we're going to freaking do it anyway. A bear put and fly.
[00:44:33] My friend Mark Sudick is going to cross them more off of his, his list. So if you want to join, join. Join. Yeah. Um, those are great mountains for winter hiking. Especially the top of the tree line up there in Bear Pen. It's nice. How about you, Ted? What were you up to this weekend? You had some breaking trail to do, eh? Yeah.
[00:44:55] So I headed over to McKinley Hollow and I hiked up to Eagle via an old bark road that goes through this, one of these, uh, glorious but thinning hemlock groves.
[00:45:11] And I have to say, man, the, the snow, the character and quality of the snow, it had this reasonably thick, crusty top coat, um, that wasn't thick enough to keep you from punching through it. So you would punch through it to the snow that was underneath, but the snow that was underneath had consolidated a lot into what I call sugar.
[00:45:36] And so it's like, it was like hiking if, or snowshoeing, if you can imagine in a bowl of sugar where every time you put your foot down going uphill, it just tended to slide downhill. Cause the snow wouldn't kink in together like it does when it's a flatter, more angular, uh, flake of snow.
[00:45:58] So it was a rather strenuous hike up that ridge, especially once you get off that, uh, bark road and try to make your way up to that ridge that leads to Eagle. But eventually I did make it. It was, you know, it was really nice because there were no tracks to follow. So you were truly, you know, scouting your own route. And I got to, yeah, yes, definitely. How old are you again?
[00:46:22] Uh, I'm 23 because I'm drinking my, uh, 1911 original hard cider. But when I got to the canister, um, on Eagle, along came Tom and Lisa who turn out lip down the road from me. They're avid Catskill hikers are working on their four seasons. We chatted for quite a while. And I, um, even though they seem to have relatively prosperous careers and that they were in their thirties,
[00:46:51] I tried to convince them to quit their job, sell everything and just go traveling. Right. Which is the best advice I can give people their age. What you've been doing to me for the past year and a half. Yeah. If you don't have, you don't have children, you just, just unplug and move around. So after, after, uh, trying to be their life coach for about 25 minutes or so, I set off and made my way on trail over to Balsam. I left the shoes on and I made really, really good time.
[00:47:21] Saw a lot of people out there. Sometimes just because you're by yourself and you can focus on a variety of things. I was keeping track of how many people I passed on the trail. I lost count in the mid twenties. Um, I did run into this older couple, couple foursome on Balsam. I had some fun with them. They were really jolly.
[00:47:44] And, uh, they were quite impressed that after we got done chatting at the, the summit, the marvelous summit with this, the natural stone monument on the summit of Balsam. Um, I, uh, I set out kind of, I'm not going to say due north. I think the bearing is like one 10, one 20 off of that, uh, summit, but, uh, that I was not taking the trail down. And so it was the same thing.
[00:48:13] Um, as I did going up Eagle, I just went down that Ridge and, uh, it was fun, man. The snow again was crusty. There wasn't as much drifting or is it, the snow didn't seem to be as deep coming off of Balsam as I encountered going up Eagle. And I, you know, I attribute that maybe to the wind, uh, but nonetheless, I made it back down to the parking lot, hopped in the Jeep, swung by the grocery in Phoenicia. You know where that is?
[00:48:43] Stosh, have you been in there yet? No. Uh, are you talking about the beer center? That's what I call it. It's the general store in downtown Phoenicia. I call it the secret beer center. Yeah. They've got in the back in the back. It's like, it has the entrance to their beer cave is like the most nondescript, you know, it's almost like you need a secret handshake or code or gesture to, to get back there.
[00:49:09] There's you, you, you do know that it's the beer cave because there's like this sign that says no backpacks and no duffel bags or something like that. You go in there and then I have kind of like this moment where I'm thinking, cause you're literally in the beer cooler and nobody knows you're in there. It seems. So it's like, what if all of a sudden the lights went out and you try to open the door and you can't because they just shut down and the doors locked now. So I wonder, I wonder if my garment, if you need to bring your garment in when you go in.
[00:49:39] So that's where I saw this 1911. I thought, gee, it would be fun to pick up this, uh, 1911 original premium small batch hard cider with the 5.5% alcohol content and crack it open on the show as I did tonight. But again, man, I don't know what your enthusiasm is for hard cider. That's the wrong hard cider, man. It is. But this is the original. How could they have survived so long with the original that's so unoriginal?
[00:50:09] It's just like, eh, mediocre, mediocre cider. To be honest, I've never tried their original. No? I'll have to send you like an Austruck or something like that. Yeah. Well, that's what, that's what I'll try next when I, you know, trudge my way through these other three cans somehow. Send them to me. I'll take it. I'll take it. You will? All right. Well, we'll have to hook up for a hike and then I'll, I'll give you my, my, my three pack of originals.
[00:50:39] So, all right. That's my hike report. That's my trashing the hard cider. I got nothing. You got any, uh, what? Catskill news, uh, weather forecast. I got, you know, once again, uh, the Catskills areas is making up their calendars as we speak and stuff like that. So if you're ready to volunteer, uh, 3500 club is doing with their stuff. Uh, Catskill trail clue, Catskill mountains club, visitors center, Jolly Rovers trail crew,
[00:51:07] uh, Bramley mountain, uh, any place that you can volunteer will be substantial. And if you do volunteer tag us because, uh, you know, that is a great thing that I'm promoting for this podcast is, is volunteering for the Catskills is substantial to not just the Catskills, but anywhere, anywhere in, in hiking community is, is a great deal that we want to celebrate.
[00:51:34] Uh, and we'll, we'll, we'll do that here on the podcast. So, so this is where I'm going to suggest that we will come up with another segment. We'll come up with another tag, uh, for folks to use. And then we'll, we'll give them a shout out on the show. So those listeners who have volunteered in some meaningful way in the Catskills. And, uh, are we doing, we're going to do that trailhead Stewart thing this summer? I would die. I mean, we did it last year.
[00:52:03] Why not? So, all right, let's do that. Maybe we'll turn it into a cookout with our fans. We'll have like a fan. We'll have a fan appreciation cookout where we'll make, you know, we'll just have to leave no trace. That's the only thing you have to do. So you can bring a fricking grill in the back of your car. I mean, your back of your Jeep, which you could fit it and people would love hot dogs, but it just, it just sucks that last time we had there, we had a beautiful day and we only had like 20 visitors.
[00:52:33] I think we still did good. I think the cookies really did really good. But once again, if you need stickers, let me know. So, uh, Deb, we're going to base the weather forecast. This weekend on your summit to Balsam mountain. Okay. So have you looked for this weekend? I think it's my, I think it's mild this weekend. That's my recollection. We're supposed to get some snow. Yeah.
[00:53:00] I think we're supposed to get snow later in the day, Saturday, Sunday. So Saturday, Friday looks pretty decent. Some clouds cloudy, uh, a high of 18 degrees and a low of with the windshield negative 15. So once again, I've never found these, uh, mountain weather forecast to be 100% accurate, but I still base my preparedness on that just in case, just fricking in case.
[00:53:28] Uh, so Saturday we're coming in with moderate snow to light snow, a total of accumulation throughout the day of maybe five to six inches, a high of 34 later on in the day, but a low of negative eight with the windshield. So once again, bring all that you can, who cares if you have to bring snow shoes, it's an extra two pounds. Yeah. That's part of the fun of hiking in the winter is exactly carrying that REI store around on your back. Right.
[00:53:58] And then Sunday, it looks like, uh, light snow to moderate snow, uh, with accumulations around five inches as well, but, uh, high of 34 low, uh, going down at the middle of the night to negative 22. My kind of shit. Nice. Yeah. So the, once again, New York state balances, uh, it doesn't balance it's fucking fluctuates up and down, carry anything and everything, whatever.
[00:54:25] Uh, it's just been, have fun, be prepared and have fun. Yeah. Be prepared. You know what? If you carry those extra snowshoes or the spikes, you know, I see a lot of questions of that. What should I bring this weekend? Just bring everything. And then that next hike you have in the summer, you'll just feel like you're fricking going all out light packing and stuff like that. You're a light backpacker because you don't have the snowshoes or the spikes. Like, and I bring, you know, Ted, we talked about this on, on the last episode.
[00:54:55] I bring fricking anything and everything to save your life or some other person's life. You know, you never know. You never know. Do you have, do you carry defibrillators with you? I have to in the, uh, the, the, my, uh, my emergency pack. Really? You have defibrillators with you? Uh, so if I, so if I, so if I, yeah. So if I, if I flat lined on the top of plateau, uh, CPR 100%. Okay.
[00:55:22] Just learned that actually just got my CPR certificate with, uh, the Catskill Mountain search and rescue team, uh, last week. So this hard cider tastes better when it gets warmer. Do you drink it chilled? I do. Yeah. Now this is, as it's been sitting out, the flavor comes alive. Nice. Nice. As it comes up to room temperature. In that respect, it's kind of like a stout beer. Oh. Yeah. I guess, you know what?
[00:55:49] Maybe, uh, we'll have to have an in-person thing and we'll just get hard ciders galore down at your place. Yeah. What I'm, what I'm, what I'm hearing is I just don't know how to drink cider. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. That could be the problem. Oh, well, I'm going to have to read, I'm going to have to watch a YouTube video on how to drink cider 101. Is there a cider podcast? Is there like a, a cider podcast? Oh, what was that? Uh, that podcast, that guy's, uh, what's his name?
[00:56:18] Uh, uh, the beers, the beer guy, the beers in New York guys that we did for Vandra and, uh, yeah, I wasn't on for that, but I, uh, yeah, I think it's inside the can. Inside cider. Hard cider podcast. Inside the can. Phil Bondra is going to steal this. Oh man. Good for them. We're trademarking it. Yeah.
[00:56:43] So let's, uh, do with our last set of awesome sponsors and then we'll get on to the guest tonight. That's awesome. Let's do it. Awesome. So discover Camp Catskill in Tannersville. Your ultimate hiking store. Find comp quality gear, apparel and accessories for all your outdoor adventures. Our expert staff that you hear and help every hiker from beginner to seasoned pros. We also carry a variety of unique Catskill souvenirs and gifts.
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[00:58:08] Experience camaraderie, adventure and healing at no cost. Take your next step with another summit and ascend to new heights of resilience and joy. Apply today at another summit.org. All right. So let's get on to the guest of the night. Let's go. So tonight, Dr. Gates is here to talk with us about his book, Reclaiming Our Planet. It talks about climate change.
[00:58:34] And once again, if everybody's been out hiking in the Catskills anywhere, anywhere in the United States and the world, we'll know that climate change is happening. And, you know, we can't really pinpoint it on one thing or another, but, you know, Dr. Gates can be here to talk to us about climate change tonight and what's it doing in the Catskills? What can it be doing? What can we do to resolve that? All if, and, or, buts, hopefully. And we're here to have a good time. Right, Dr. Gates?
[00:59:04] Absolutely. Absolutely. So how about you give a little background about yourself? Say hi first and then give a little background about yourself. Hi. Hello, everybody. Thanks for having me. And background. So I grew up in Rockland County. I went to Spring Valley High School. So if any of you people are from that area, that's where I went. And when I was a teenager, I used to hike around in Harriman State Park. So not quite the Catskills, but up in that direction.
[00:59:34] And I decided, you know, I got to, I like doing it. So I used to go as much as I could. And so I said, you know, I got to find me a job where I can walk around the woods and get paid for it. And so I went into geology. So I done a heck of a lot of walking around the woods and being paid for it from Maine to Georgia, Colorado, all kinds of places. So that's mostly what I started. I'm a geologist. As I said, I studied faults.
[01:00:04] And I actually worked. I worked for the New York State Geological Survey. And my area was the western Hudson Highlands. So, you know, not quite the Catskills again, but down in the Hudson River Valley, all the way up to about, I don't know, Newburgh area. And then all the way down to the state line. So I mapped a lot in that area.
[01:00:31] And most of the time, though, I've been a professor at Rutgers University in Newark. And I've been there for 38 years. Oh, my God. Wow. Yeah, thank you. So I've been, I have, you know, did the research and wrote paper, you know, professional papers. And more recently, I started writing textbooks. So I've written a bunch of textbooks.
[01:00:57] And then I said, you know, I want to try to write a book for the general public to see if I can have any influence there. So that's my new book. My Reclaiming Our Planet is my first try at a book for the general public. Excellent. Amazing. So 38 years at Rutgers University. Wow. That is, congratulations. And you're, so what was your study there that you've basically been teaching out there?
[01:01:25] Well, I mean, right now I'm just teaching, I wrote a textbook on called Polluted Earth. So right now I'm teaching an environmental geology class. But most of the time I studied faults, which is part of what's called structural geology. So as I said, anytime there's earthquakes, you'll see me on the news. Nice. I was on the one in last April. They had me on BBC Worldwide. That's the first time I was ever on a worldwide news.
[01:01:54] Normally it's this local stuff. That's the one that happened down in New Jersey, right? Yeah. Yeah. That was a big one. So you're like an internationally famous guest. Right. And now, so from now, from the BBC news, now you've climbed the pinnacle of newsworthy information. And here you are on Inside the Line. Yeah, you hit peak now. That's it? Yeah. I can retire. It only goes down here from now, Dr. Gates.
[01:02:23] So you said you were with the USGS. Ted, did we have is we've had people from the USGS. I'm pretty sure Carl Backus that I've had on here. And who was the other one that we had on here recently that was from the USGS? Was that? Titus was Titus is not from USGS. He's a geological professor. Oh, man.
[01:02:49] He was talking about the fossil forest down in the Catskills. He was just recently on. I'm so bad. I'm sorry. Oh, Charles with the museum. For Stratton. Yes. He's at the New York State Geological Survey. I worked with Chuck when I was, I worked at, as I said, I was at the New York State Geological Survey and I worked with Chuck. I've known him for how many years? It's 1990. 1990. Wow. Nice. Yeah. We just had him recently on. He was a fantastic guest.
[01:03:18] So Dr. Gates, I'm going to ask you a trick question. Okay. What's Chuck versus Stratton's favorite animal? That I don't know. He's never told me that. It's a porcupine. That is. All right. I don't know why. That's the porcupines. They're like the sloths of North America. Yeah. They just sit there and destroy everything. So, so let's chat about Reclaiming Our Planet, your new book. Now you're an author.
[01:03:47] So we're going to, is it Dr. Gates, author Gates? Like, it's all over the place. Yeah. You know, whatever you want to call me. I mean, at school, they'll call me Dr. Gates or Professor Gates. But you know, when I'm outside of the university, you don't have to call me that anymore. So, so what inspired you to go with making a book called Reclaiming Our Planet? Well, I have an agent and she said, for your first book, you got to do something that's,
[01:04:16] you know, that's topical and everybody will like to hear about. And I said, well, geez, I don't know that much about topical stuff. I could write about, you know, climate change. And she says, great, write about climate change. I wasn't real excited about it, but you know, it's, you know, it's topical. So people would want to hear about it. So I'm getting some publicity out of it. It's just, it's so controversial.
[01:04:42] I wind up with a lot of people not liking what I say. So that's where I had my second thoughts about it. So Doc, speaking of topical and controversial, why don't we start off our discussion tonight with getting some of the lingo straight? Because sometimes that fuels the debate or settles the debate.
[01:05:08] But I hear commonly people refer to climate change and global warming. Is that one in the same thing? Are they different things? If they're different, how are they different? Well, I mean, climate change refers to any changing climate, whether it's cooling or warming or shifting of belts or things like that. Whereas, you know, global warming means the whole, you know, just warming and the whole planet is warming.
[01:05:34] So in this case, what we're doing now, we are dealing mostly with global warming, but they wanted to kind of give it that more general term of climate change. So that's basically real. And for us, that's the same thing. You know, so in your book, what is the topic focus with reclaiming our planet from what? What is it we're reclaiming? There should be reclaiming the planet from.
[01:06:04] Well, you know, the climate change. I mean, I mean, the book basically it's it's you know, it looks at what's happening so far, because right now, as you know, when you go on the Internet and whatever you want to find, you'll find. So it makes people kind of just go in the directions of whatever, you know, somebody tells them or what they want to believe in the first place.
[01:06:30] So first thing I wanted to do is to get all of the, you know, the scientific data out there so people can make their own decisions on whether they believe in climate change or not. And so the first thing was to kind of get to go through all of the all of the things that are happening and how that we know it's climate. I mean, we know that it's CO2 that's that we're generating too much of. We know it's from fossil fuels.
[01:06:59] I mean, carbon dioxide is a little bit of a trouble spot because we exhale it, you know, and so all other animals. So it's naturally occurring, but it's also not naturally occurring. And so you can't. So people say, well, how do you know it's just not coming from, you know, more people breathing or things like that? But we actually can tell the difference between carbon dioxide that comes from fossil fuels and carbon dioxide that comes from inhaling and exhaling.
[01:07:27] And so we know that the amount of, you know, I can in the book, it shows you can tell that it's we figured out a way to do this many years ago. And we can show that it's increase in carbon dioxide is coming from fossil fuel burning. That's it is no question. And then to go through that, all of the things that have been changing over the past, you know, how many years?
[01:07:53] And basically people kind of want to talk about wanting to bring this back to, you know, 1900. But the reality is that things were going OK until about late 70s, early 80s, as far as climate change goes. And so it's about, you know, maybe a little over a 40 year problem right now that we are dealing with that if we can, you know, stop it or even reverse it back for those 40 years, everything will be great.
[01:08:20] And so what I did in this book was, you know, because that sounds everybody says, oh, my gosh, you can't do it. We're all doomed. You know, there's a lot of doomsday people on this. There's a lot of people who say we can only slow it down. We can't stop it. And I want to have to say to them is that's not true. It's just not true. And we have had many very nasty pollutants that we've had to deal with over the years. And we defeated them.
[01:08:49] We did the right thing and we defeated it. And we have and we overcome some great things. And the Earth is a much better place for it. So all we have to do is learn. And that's the second part of it. You know, in my in the subtitle on this is how environmental history can help solve the climate crisis. And that's to look back at what we've already done and what we managed to do and just use those principles. And we can do the same now.
[01:09:19] Yeah, I agree. And, you know, you can't you can't say that Ted and I have been hiking. Ted's been, you know, hiking for, I don't know, 15, 20 years, stuff like that. But I've been hiking in the Catskills for the past, oh, God, 10 years, 10, 11 years. And I can't say, you know, that that stuff has changed. I remember snowstorms used to be massive snowstorms and they would stay like that for the whole winter. That we would have a constant, constant winter.
[01:09:46] And this is it's kind of like what's happening, you know, this day, like right now, today. You know, we've had a constant winter going on for the first time in like 10 years. And you've got to always like think of that. You're like, damn, well, last year there was full of ice. It was just ice. It was no we got a major dump here and then it melted off in in a matter of two days. And then we had 60, 70 degree days. I remember hiking on one day in January, like three years ago, and it was 75 degrees in January.
[01:10:16] I cannot bring back some time in my childhood when I went out in January in shorts and a T-shirt and worried about ticks when I played in January. And then that ended. Holy shit. I totally forgot to talk about ticks, like the tick population. Why is that changing? But, you know, how with with your book and your knowledge about this, how is this climate change affecting the Catskills specifically? Because this is where Catskills podcast.
[01:10:45] We might as well keep it on the Catskills. Right. OK. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, obviously climate change changes things all over the place. But in the Catskills per se, I mean, the problem is, is it is the with the temperature going up, things tend to dry out much faster. So, you know, you get whereas before, if it didn't rain for a month, you know, things might be able to get through it. Now it doesn't rain for a month. It's much hotter.
[01:11:14] And and we wind up with with serious issues for, you know, for forest fires. And of course, we've heard lots of stories now, you know, even recently about forest fires out west. We had, you know, a major drought down here, at least in New Jersey. I think it went up in New York as well under the Catskills this past year.
[01:11:37] And the problem is, you know, you can't tie every single little thing to a to saying, well, this is climate change per se, because you get droughts now and then. But the problem is, is they're continuous. That dryness is going to continue to to get worse. And we're going to wind up with with dry conditions in areas that we, you know, you have to be very careful because, you know, we don't want fire.
[01:12:04] We don't want to have what happened in Los Angeles happening out up here in the Catskills. So the first thing I would say is that the dryness from the from the temperature is is one problem. And then to go along with that, we just don't know about the the you know, these these changes change the you know, the rain patterns, the weather patterns. And so you may get you might all of a sudden start getting less rain that goes along with with that.
[01:12:33] And so not only do you wind up with dryness on the surface, you'll wind up with, you know, the water table dropping. And so wells that used to be able to, you know, produce water might not produce water anymore. And of course, the Catskills has a big responsibility of making sure that it keeps reservoirs going for the whole of New York City.
[01:12:56] So, I mean, those are mostly the the problems that we can see from there is the temperature and rain and rainfall are going to be the two biggest things that the Catskills have. However, there's other things as well. I mean, we had in, you know, not quite the Catskills, but some of the lakes down there, maybe you've had them, too. But we wound up with blue green algae, which is really a back, you know, a bacteria in the lakes.
[01:13:23] I had to shut down a lot of our, you know, recreational lakes from northern New Jersey into southern New York a couple of years ago, because all of a sudden you get these algal blooms. And then, as I said, they're not real algae. They're blue green algae, which is cyanobacteria. So that puts out poisons. And that that comes from the the heating, right? The temperatures of the lakes are too warm. The river, stuff like that. That's right. Exactly.
[01:13:50] And so we had those all the way, you know, a Greenwood Lake, which is a decent sized lake down there. And that's actually Catskill Rocks, but it's not in the Catskills proper. But that, you know, you couldn't go in it. So that kind of stuff, which is normally kind of kept farther south, things are creeping north that we used to not have to worry about before.
[01:14:12] And so, you know, equine encephalitis, some of these other, you know, diseases that are showing up in the northeast that we didn't have to worry about before. So those are some of the things that you have problems with. And in addition, the water in the oceans is heating up. So, you know, it gets warmer. The surface temperature of the water gets worse every year.
[01:14:38] And so the thing is, is we usually once you get past that north coming north, you get past the Gulf Stream, you know, and that's about North Carolina. The water gets much colder and most hurricanes that come up just fall apart once they hit, once they cross that line. But now the surface temperature of the water out there is getting warmer and warmer.
[01:14:59] And if it crosses that magic number of 79 degrees, you can, the hurricanes, when they come up the coast, can keep staying big and coming up. And if you get those into the Catskills, you can wind up with some nasty floods. Man, we've had some nasty floods in recent times up in that area. Tad, there you go. Yeah. Well, floods in the Catskills, we sure have had some doozies in the past 20 years.
[01:15:28] And I read somewhere recently, and maybe you can validate this for me, doctor, but they project that in the next, well, by the year 2050, the projection is there'll be 5 to 10% more annual rainfall in the Catskills. Is that correct? Is that from, just from big storms coming up the coast? Yeah, I can believe.
[01:15:56] Yeah, from like tropical depressions, tropical storms, stuff like that. Right. That normally would lose all their punch by the time they got up here. Now, for sure, we're getting more hurricanes than we did in the past. So the number, it's constantly uphill. And we get some years that are just phenomenal. We get, you know, huge numbers of hurricanes. You know, they run out of letters. So they have to start over again on the alphabet, you know, with the names for the storms, we get so many.
[01:16:23] And as I said, those storms are making up much farther north than they used to. So now, this whole area, including, you know, the New York metropolitan area, but including the Catskills, can get hit by big storms. And, you know, those, that can be real deadly.
[01:16:42] So some of the questions we have tonight, one of them that I think would be very interesting to our listeners who are predominantly a Catskills-centric base, is if you are aware and can point out for us any existing changes caused by climate change that somebody hiking in the Catskills can see with their own eyes.
[01:17:12] Well, I mean, as I said, the easiest thing we can see is, you know, sometimes you have, depending where you are, they tell you about fire danger. And, you know, normally you can get them a little bit. But what you can get is much more of those days where you're going to wind up having to worry about danger, you know, fires.
[01:17:36] So, I mean, I've seen the signs, you know, I haven't been up hiking per se in the Catskills for a while, but they used to have those signs that tell you if it's a high day or a low day. So that, for number one, you're going to wind up with more high days of, you know, of danger for forest fires than you would in the past. You know, again, some of the, you know, now I don't know about, I mean, I've noticed that ticks have moved north over the years.
[01:18:06] I mean, when I was a kid, we didn't have ticks up here. They were only in the south. So whether that, I mean, there are other, you know, insects and animals that are moving northward that you might run into. Certainly, some vegetation has been moving northward. You know, you can get, you know, bamboo growing now in stands up this far north, which you never could in the past.
[01:18:31] Is that also like the, what is that, the cherry, the cherry tree? Is that due to the climate change as well? What is that, the stuff that grows along the riverbanks? Sure. I'm sorry. All along the riverbanks up here, they have them. The Japanese knotweed? Japanese knotweed. Is that awesome? Would you say that? For 200 bucks. Yeah, right.
[01:19:00] Those are all invasives, you know. Invasive? They're invasive species, but, you know, and a lot of things that came over as invasive species were mostly in the south, but a lot of them are moving northward. So, you know, Japanese knotweed was, you know, we had that down in Rockland County for a while, but, you know, as it moves up northward, then you start getting it more of it in, you know, up in the Catskill region.
[01:19:27] So, doctor, is it the case that, other than significant storm events, the changes that we're seeing now are somewhat subtle and gradual? Yes, that's the problem with climate change. Because, you know, as I said, things, you know, the weather changes from year to year.
[01:19:51] And, you know, you can have droughts, you can have wet, you know, big storms and things like that. And it's not, you can't say, oh, wow, look at this big change. It's not something that you can see so easily. It's subtle changes that slowly build up. And so people then kind of don't say, well, you don't see it from year to year. They'll say, oh, it's not happening.
[01:20:15] And that's why we can get so many deniers, because it's their subtle changes that are just going to slowly accumulate over time. So you can see. So, for example, if you go down to New Jersey, right, we had in over the past 20 years, we now have twice as many days in the 90s as we did 20 years ago.
[01:20:38] OK, and so therefore, if you go up into the Catskills and look, I'd be willing to bet the increase in temperature is the same up there that you're winding up going to wind up with twice as many 90 degree days as you had 20 years ago. So, you know, 20 years. Well, do you really remember that? Well, 20 years ago, was it, you know, was it 590 or 10? You know, it's not that many. You can't see it. But it is happening. It's twice as many 90 degree days.
[01:21:08] So what I've read about this is you need to distinguish weather events from climate patterns. And so this winter, we're having a particularly wintry winter with a lot of snow cover, a lot of what we would now call unusually cold days, but maybe 50 years ago were typical winter days.
[01:21:31] But this is just one winter out of the last 20, 30, 40 winters that seems particularly snowy and particularly cold. But the trend has been for warmer winters and shorter winters. Is that fair to say? Yes. Yeah. We've been having much and less snowfall. There's no snowpack. Snowpack tends to be very small prior to this year.
[01:21:53] And this year, they don't even, you know, this year, the idea is that the warming in the poles has disrupted the jet stream. And so now the jet stream, rather than going, you know, straight across the country up high, is making these dips down below. And so really, the cold weather this year is from global warming up in the Arctic. The temperatures are way above normal.
[01:22:20] They're 10 to 15 degrees higher than they were than usual. And it's causing this eruption of this jet stream and driving the cold temperatures to the south. I used to live in New Orleans, you know, and this year they had 10 inches of snow in New Orleans. You never get 10 inches of snow in New Orleans. So, yeah, that was definitely a crazy event scene. Yeah. My friends down in Texas and North Carolina enjoying the snow for the first time in their life.
[01:22:50] And, you know, my family from over California traveling to North Carolina and just, like, being like, oh, my God, this is unreal. And, you know, I can remember a while ago when I lived out in Arizona and I traveled up north to, like, Sedona and Scottsdale and stuff and seeing people driving up from Phoenix and just going up to this little crest that had never seen snow before. And they said they got, like, two to three inches and they acted like it was, like, crazy.
[01:23:19] And this was back in the 2000s. And now, you know, my friends from Sedona and Scottsdale are now, like, reporting snow very commonly. And so it's just been, you know, you always are on either side. And that's what, you know, we can influence them to say, you know, this has been an unusual time for the past 10 years, 15 years and stuff.
[01:23:47] So, I mean, we have to have back and forth. Of course, you always got to have that influence. And so, like, let me just ask this. So, if you could go back in time to witness one of the major environmental victories that we talk about that you can say in your book, which one would it be? Well, let's see. If you want me to get one that directly, I have a couple that directly affect people in the Catskill.
[01:24:16] So, I should probably go for them first. Perfection. Yes. Okay. So, the first one is that there was this pesticide called DDT that was invented back. It was a long time ago, but they didn't realize it was a good pesticide until the late 30s. And they used it in the war. And they came out and they used to spray it everywhere. They would spray it all over, you know, fields. And they would mist streets.
[01:24:42] Kids would be running behind trucks spraying the stuff so they'd get the mist all over. Over them. That's what they would do because everyone thought it was safe. And not only did women wound up with so much in their systems that they couldn't. They were, you know, people were advised not to nurse their babies in the 60s because you could give them a toxic dose in, you know, mother's breast milk. It was that bad.
[01:25:10] The worst, the part that affects people in the Catskills though was that the DDT would get into, it would, what's called, it was biomagnify and bioaccumulate. So, it would get up into the predators and the predatory birds on the apex predators in the food chain. And it would substitute for calcium in their eggs.
[01:25:34] And it made the eggs so soft, the shells so thin that when the mother sat on them to brood, they would crack the eggs and they would wind up with no, you know, no hatchlings at all. And so, by the late 60s, 67, we were down to 419, you know, mating pairs of bald eagles in the United States. Right?
[01:26:03] Yeah, I remember we had this, just to let you know, we had this talk in episode 61 of Pete and I. So, keep on going. Yeah, 61 in the whole United States. Right. And so, then they banned, you know, that was one of the things that Rachel Carson identified. That was her big thing was DDT. And they banned DDT in 1972. And since then, they, you know, it's completely wiped.
[01:26:31] You know, obviously mothers are, you know, encouraged to nurse their babies now. It's out of everything that we have. And we now have, well, this is three years ago. We had 320,000 bald eagles in the continental United States. So, ah, it's quite the, that much of an increase was quite the story. You know, it went up like 50, 60 times what it was or more than that, I guess. Yeah.
[01:27:00] And so, that wasn't just that. It was peregrine falcons were completely wiped out from the whole eastern half of the United States. They only had a very small amount out west, but no peregrine falcons here at all. They had, they almost wiped out the brown pelican by the time Louisiana declared it as their state bird. There weren't any in Louisiana. And so, they had, they were, most of these birds were almost gone. And now. And now. And now. DDT?
[01:27:30] Well, because of DDT. So, brown pelicans is more brown pelicans now than there were when, you know, people first come, you know, colonized this, the country. There's, the peregrine falcons are completely recovered. Everything completely recovered based on just banning this DDT, getting it out. And it was a lot of work to do it, but we did it and we did the right thing. And it's completely gone. It's completely taken care of. So, that's one.
[01:27:59] Now, you want another one that's a little north of you guys, but it impacted you too, is that in the Midwest, you know, they generated most of their electricity using coal. And when they, and they didn't have any scrubbers in the chimney, so those, so if anything came out of those, those chimneys would go up into the atmosphere.
[01:28:20] And so, all of the, of the, well, at least most of the, of the natural lakes in the Adirondacks were dead. Okay. And most of the lakes in, in Catskills as well because of acid rain fallout. And so, we had so much SO2, you know, sulfur dioxide coming out, being rained out of the atmosphere.
[01:28:46] It would get into our, into our waters, into our lakes and just, and, and would make them acidic, wipe out all the fish. They were completely dead. And all the way down to there, it would, it was, it was destroying our vegetation. They were all, you know, you know, having a difficult time growing and the leaves would get burned from the, from the fallout. And that was through the Catskills as well.
[01:29:13] We're talking about back in the, in the seventies. And they decided to address the issue of, of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere. You know, they banned it. The EPA took a swing at it and it has fallen by 94% since 1980. And the air now in, across the United States is the same, as terms of acid rain is the same as it was in 1890.
[01:29:43] So, we've actually completely removed all of the problems that we, that, that we had happening, you know, during the, all the way up into the seventies. Completely removed both of those things. Now, was this in a, in a big part due to, you said the 1890s. So, after that, we started getting the trains into here. So, now I'm guessing that has to do a big part with trains just burning all that fuel up in the air.
[01:30:09] Well, it's mostly, I mean, most of it, it got built up, but it was in the Midwest. They, all of their power plants used to be coal fired. And so, the coal dust and the coal exhaust wasn't being filtered at all. And it would just float all the way up to the, you know, to this area and rain out the sulfur out of the, out of the coal fumes. And they had other things too, like mercury.
[01:30:37] We used to have mercury problems coming out of the air in the Catskills back in the, you know, in the seventies and eighties. And it's all gone. There's no mercury problem anymore. It's not coming out of the air. And there's no sulfur and even nitrate, nitrate, you know, nitrogen oxides that used to come out of the air too. We don't even have those problems anymore. They're down 70%. Right. So, so doc, so doc, we need to talk now. Okay. Yep.
[01:31:07] Yep. You, you heard, I heard you say they, they decided in 1980. Is that about right? You said they decided they put scrubbers in the smokestacks. They got rid of the sulfur dioxide. They cleaned up the air by 94%. Did I hear all that right? Yes. Now, are you aware what February 10th was just a day ago? No.
[01:31:34] It was the deadline for the new and improved climate plans to be submitted by countries who are committed to the Paris agreement. Why are you smiling? You know what I'm talking about now? Yeah, go ahead. Keep going. So, uh, the plans known as nationally determined contributions outline emission targets through the year 2030, which is stosh. How many years away is 2030? Five. Yeah.
[01:32:00] I guess so five years away and explain how countries plan to reach those targets. Everyone has known about these looming deadlines for years. Yeah. Just 10 of the 195 member countries of the Paris agreement submitted their national nationally determined contributions.
[01:32:21] Countries missing the deadlines represent 83% of global emissions and nearly 80% of the world's economy. So, doctor, you're smiling. I think you know what the question is. Keep going.
[01:32:35] If 83% of the global emitters of carbon dioxide warming gases aren't on board with shutting down these emissions, what the F are we going to do? I was going to say, are we F'd? Yeah. Yeah.
[01:33:01] I mean, you, you talk about what we did with DDT, what we did with mercury in your book. You talk about lead paint, you know, and they, meaning the government has got to be behind these changes. Uh, they did it before, but it doesn't sound like anybody is doing it now. Why is that? Well, uh, you know, I made all of those nice stories and said, Oh, look at all these stuff happen, but it wasn't without work. Yeah.
[01:33:31] So, I mean, you know, as I said, DDT was Rachel Carson was, uh, you know, the champion that started this up and people got furious during the, the 1960s and protested. And, uh, you know, the first earth day was in 1970 and it was organized by two graduate students, mind you, and 20 million people attended. 20 million. 20 million. Wow. At the time that was 10% of the country.
[01:34:00] And, you know, if that many people attended, there was equal a number of people who were, who would have attended. And so, you know, we scared the daylights out of the, uh, out of the politicians, uh, because people raised their fist up and said, we're not going to take it anymore. And that's how it changed. It was not, nobody changed anything because they, because they felt like it. They fought those people tooth and nail, but they personally attacked them.
[01:34:30] They threatened them, but we had some people who were willing to stick their neck out and do some work on it. Yeah. Well, and I think just as before it cost a lot of money to put these scrubbers in, to clean up these coal plants, to clean up the environment. Certainly these big corporations who had huge lobbying power were not on board with that. And it took a monstrous public outcry.
[01:34:56] And it's somewhat reminds me of a place North of where I grew up was this place. They called the love canal. Remember the love canal, right? Yeah. It's in my book. Yeah. So yeah. Right. The love canal notorious. This is going beyond what I want to, this is all right. Yeah. But so, but we did it before, but yeah, well, the love canal was where hook, where the hooker chemical company buried all sorts of toxic waste.
[01:35:25] And when the hooker chemical company was done burying all this toxic waste from their chemical plant, they, the government came in and what did they do? What did they do with this landfill created by the hooker chemical company stashed? Do you know what the government did with that land, that area? Did they, did they entomb it? So the chemicals went and spread.
[01:35:52] Did they convert it into a shopping mall or did they turn it into a public school? Oh, Jesus Christ. Please. None of the above. The whole town. It wasn't just a public school. Yeah. The, the, the, the school was in the center, the hub of it and the houses were around it. And after rainstorms, kids would play outside with this oozing orange, you know, waste, you know, oozing up to the surface.
[01:36:22] So, and that's how we got the teenage mutant Ninja Turtles kid. Yeah. So, so doc, what, what I want to know when I know a Tom who's driving in his car upstate to go hiking wants to know what is the answer to this question? If 83% of the global emitters didn't turn in their plan this time, when is it that we
[01:36:46] actually reach this point of no return where climate change is now acquired so much momentum that there's been such a shift in the trajectory that reversing the course of climate change is going to take more than the, the global human willpower that you can muster up against it. When, when do we reach that point of no return? Dr. Doomsday.
[01:37:14] Well, to tell you the truth, we don't know. That's the problem. Now, what is it? Five years, 10 years, 50 years from now. It's more like how much CO2 and how much temperature, you know, before things start to disrupt enough that we're going to screw things around. And I don't know if we'll get to, if we're talking about to the point of what the, you know, no return is, what it's going to be is that we're going to shift around the weather
[01:37:41] pattern so much that we're going to wind up not being able to produce enough food for the people on the planet. And then we're going to wind up with these big wars. And then that's pretty much where things are going to fall apart. It's going to be more like we can't, the resources start not being, you know, well, if we can't produce enough food for all these huge number of people we got, then we're going to have big problems. And that's kind of where the turning point really for us is.
[01:38:11] As far as for the whole planet goes, there was a time, and it's in the book as well, on the, at the end of the Permian period, about 250 million years ago, we had a case of natural, you know, climate change and global warming from volcanoes. And it wiped out 96% of all life in the oceans, and 75% of all life on land.
[01:38:36] So we were dead, we almost wiped all life off the planet, because, and we, and the, and the change in temperature was a heck of a lot slower than we're going now. So that's the scary part. 250 million years ago. Yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's, I would say it's, it's tough. It wouldn't be, it's tough for up to, to adapt because of the, you know, human species are so stubborn and stuff like that.
[01:39:03] But what about the, uh, like the plants and stuff like that, the animals, can the plants adapt to this to still create a much, like as much oxygen as we've had before and stuff? Can they adapt to not say reverse what's happened, but kind of balance what happened while we also balance what happened as well? So we can kind of like have a mutual thing.
[01:39:28] Well, I mean, you know, plants will grow, are growing better than they did before because higher CO2 contents means the plants are going to grow. Now, the problem is we're cutting down forests faster than you can grow them. You know, the Amazon rainforest is being just torn apart. And so if we keep removing, I mean, we use, cut down 27,000 trees a day to make toilet paper for the people in the United States, you know?
[01:39:56] So, I mean, we're knocking down trees faster than they can grow. And we really don't have a plan yet for how we're going to replace the oxygen. Now, there is one thing in the book that you can do that nobody is doing now, which we should, is they have, you know, there's enough technology to do this. And we already have engines that will run on biofuels, 100% biofuels. But you can make biofuels out of algae.
[01:40:24] And algae, you can, you know, it grows. It's the fastest growing plant in the world. And you can harvest it every two weeks. And for every ounce of this algae you would produce, you take out 1.3 to 1.8 ounces of CO2 out of the atmosphere. So if we started using biofuel, algal biofuels, instead of, you know, some of the biofuels
[01:40:52] we now are horrible for the environment. If we started using algal biofuels and we could be, we could be having these, you know, biofuel plants any place we want. They've got them all over the world already. We just don't use those in the cars. We could actually reverse the CO2 amount in the atmosphere. So it's possible. We're just not, we're just not doing it right now. Yeah. It's tough to get, of course, everybody on board with this, with changes and stuff like
[01:41:22] that. Of course, money is the biggest problem that we got going on. And, you know, it's, it's once again, I mean, it was, you know, I had second thoughts about getting you on Dr. Gates because, you know, it's, it's just such a, I hate to say a clusterfuck with everybody going which way. And now, you know, everybody's so politically divided, but you got to admit like within the
[01:41:48] past 10, 15 years, Ted, you know, I'm not saying that you're, you and you and Alec, Dr. Gates are older than me, but stuff is different. Like, I cannot say that, you know, when I was a kid, I was, I was, I was enjoying winter, you know, stuff like that. But now I'm just like, this is just so odd that we have, uh, that we have just stuff like it's just rain and, and, and a snow storm here and there and then melt. And then it's just nice weather.
[01:42:18] And like so many different times of when you're just like, man, this is nice weather. And I'm just like, this is fucking winter. We shouldn't have this weather. Are you kidding me? Like, how do you, how do you, how do you go with that? Uh, Dr. Gates, how do you like basically say like someone's just like, you know, nothing's happening. Like, screw you. You're wrong. How do you like fight against that somewhat? Well, yeah. What's, what's the response to the climate denier? Give it, give us. I just keep on hiking. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:42:48] What's your, what's your go-to line or, uh, response to somebody who just tells you that, uh, global warming is a crock of shit. It's, you know, I mean, it's obviously the problem is we can't convince everybody, you know, and I mean, my biggest problem right now, and I'll tell you one of the biggest problems we have right now is the internet because, you know, there's some, I mean, people are flooding it.
[01:43:16] Before in the old days, you had that things with newspapers and stuff. Now they could just flood garbage on the internet. It's complete lies. And people will, you know, don't under, don't know how to tell the difference between the truth and the lie on the internet anymore. Cause it's just, it's so flooded and it's looks real. And our elected officials are telling us things that aren't true. And so you wind up with this stuff going on and that's the hardest part.
[01:43:41] I mean, me, I say to people, you know, don't give up on this. You know, those are the ones who are already who believe it. I say, look, we got to do something about this. And the biggest, right. You want to know the biggest problem is that in night from 1974, which is not long ago. I remember 74, you know, and, um, from then till now, we've doubled the population of
[01:44:06] the planet and we 4 billion people more in the past 50 years, which is, you know, phenomenal growth. And so if you look at that increase in CO2, it tracks right along with the population. And so the problem is, is that people grow up if, you know, their parents or maybe me still being around, we, we had certain practices and habits and things like that.
[01:44:33] And we just keep doing them without thinking, but things are different, you know, because we've got so many more people. We have to do things differently now. And that's the hardest thing to get people to understand. It's not so much that, oh, everybody's being, you know, horrible and burning a lot of fossil fuels and making fires everywhere and doing things much worse than they did back 50 years ago. It's not the case.
[01:44:59] It's that there's so many more people that now we've the, the amount of output of, of this, uh, of, you know, CO2 and other greenhouse gases is tremendous. Crazy. So I, I don't know what, uh, Stosh wants to do next, but maybe while he's pondering that, I want to jump back up to where you told us that, uh, scientists have determined scientifically
[01:45:28] that the increase in CO2 emissions is from fossil fuels and not CO2 emissions from other sources. How are they able to make that determination? Okay. So that was discovered in 1952. Wow. And at that point, the guy who made it was called Hans Seuss and he, he named it the industrial effect. And basically the idea is this, you know, you know, when you have to date old, you know,
[01:45:58] things that are, uh, um, you know, that humans made or things like that to use what, what's the dating called? Carbon dating. Right. Carbon 14 dating and carbon 14 is made in the atmosphere from sunlight hitting nitrogen and it becomes carbon 14. And so anything that we exhale CO2 has carbon 14 in it.
[01:46:23] But if you bury it underground for a long time, all the carbon 14 decays away and you wind up with only carbon 13. So what they do is they look at the ratio of carbon 14 to 13 and it perfectly tracks the increase in CO2. It's all carbon 13. There's no carbon 14 in it. So we can, if you look at a, you get online and look at, you know, carbon ratios on how
[01:46:52] they track carbon, you can see it perfectly thought, uh, is that way. And that system, then you can take a sample of air any place on the planet, as long as it's not right in a smokestack and you could determine how much extra, you know, carbon has been dumped into the atmosphere from, uh, from, you know, from fossil fuels at any time. And that's because the fossil fuels originated from deep in the earth.
[01:47:21] Well, it's the problem is to say, when they were first started, they were plants and animals on the surface, but they got buried. And, you know, the carbon 14 disappears after about 28,000 years. And most of the oil and gas is 10 to 50 million years old, you know, in that range. So all the carbon 14 is gone out of it. And so therefore that ratio, they, they compare it to wood from 1890 is the, is the benchmark.
[01:47:49] And so you can see this just, it's just falling about. Amazing. So now, one of the things I want to, I want to kind of cover and say is like, what's, well, I don't know why people have a big problem with making the earth a better place, you know, to make it like cleaner and stuff like that. Like what's, I mean, I know a lot of money has to be involved with it and stuff like that,
[01:48:17] but simple things that you can do at home to like make the world, like composting, recycling, stuff like that. Like Tad's a big recycler, right? I try to be, I could always do better. And we always clean up after each other, leave no trace, stuff like that. You know, can Tad, I remember you talking in a previous episode of using a new snack that has a certain, the wrapper is, is biodegradable, correct? Yes. I'm still on that.
[01:48:46] I'm still on the hunt for the perfect troll food. So why, why the hell not? Can't we like do that kind of stuff gradually everybody and influence other people to make this world a better place for the next generation? I don't have kids just to let you know. So I can't say that I'm going to make this place better for my, my kids down the road. I'm actually making this place better for Tad's kids or for, you know, any other kids that I just want to be that kind of person. Or your nephew.
[01:49:15] My nephews, right? Like, there you go. Yeah. Like, it's just, you know, why not try to make it a better place? We have the science. We have the, the backup to at least go in the forward projections to make this kind of like a better place to make the world last longer and stuff and not have to go to fricking a desert up in Mars, you know, 3 billion miles away. So. So why is it? You want to know? It's three words.
[01:49:45] Greed is good. It's greed. You know? I mean, I don't want to make that political, but I agree with you. I mean, let's put it this way. You know, I've seen that everybody wants to buy EVs. You know, they want to have, you know, everybody goes to EVs now. That's the new thing. They're going to make everybody buy an EV. So right now, you can buy that in China makes an EV that would be perfectly good to use on our roads.
[01:50:14] And it costs $25,000 maximum to get one of those. Because EVs, like in the United States last year, EVs, the average cost was $55,000, right? So you had to have some money to buy an EV. But you can buy them for $25,000 in China. Perfectly good. They could run on our roads. What do you think the tariff on it is? Take a guess. I have no clue. 100%. 102%. Yikes. And that was under Biden.
[01:50:44] So you tell me right there, is it to fix the atmosphere to get an EV? Or is it to make money? Yeah. Well, it's also to protect the American auto worker, the stockholders of Ford Motor Co., GMC, you know, et cetera. There's a lot of protectionism there.
[01:51:05] But the mindset needs to be that we need to transition our combustion-powered vehicles over to EVs. And certainly, we have the intelligence and the technology to make that transition. As we did with getting rid of all the sulfur and the emissions from the coal power plants, as we did with mercury, as we did with DDT.
[01:51:33] There just needs to be enough people on board that want to keep the world the place that we grew up loving, as opposed to what kind of sounds like a freak environment with warmer, hotter summers, wetter winters, bugs everywhere, invasive species. Everywhere. Yeah. You know, it's like, you know, in a few years, who's going to want to go hiking?
[01:52:00] I'm going to want to sit home and play video games against Stosh, you know, a video podcast. We'll see who can be the fastest known time on the devil's path on PlayStation. You know it'll be me, but that's, you know. I mean, you know, and Tad, you know, I drive an EV, but I don't think it's like 100% there. Once again, what are we going to do with the batteries when, of course, they die down? We're going to recycle them for renewable energy, but some sort of way we're screwed over with that.
[01:52:29] The same things with, you know, the engines in cars, that's all metal. Like, what the hell are we going to do? I wouldn't say we're screwed either way, but it's sort of in the right direction. We have the hydrogen complex as well that's over in California, but I'm pretty sure, you know, I've done the research on that. You know, it only lasts, oh, so many miles. It takes, like, so long to fuel up.
[01:52:58] You know, the technology is not there, and that's, it's just, we need solid backbones to all this stuff for people to be on board. And I don't mind, you know what? I've traveled 80,000 miles in my EV, my car, and I don't mind fueling up for 30 minutes. Like, what the hell? I go in, I go to the bathroom, I get something to eat, I come back out, it's done.
[01:53:24] You know, I can say that I go to the bathroom for 30 minutes, but, you know, I have a good time. I mean, I take my time. All right, Stash, all right, come on now. We already talked, Ted, we already talked about it. I know we have an explicit rating, but there's limits to even explicit ratings, buddy, okay? I'm going to have to find another podcast. Dr. Gates, you and I were hooking up doing a podcast. I'm getting away from this guy, Stash. Right, right. His 30-minute bathroom break. I didn't know it was that kind of a podcast. The only guy, he's the only guy that bought an EV so he could take a 30-minute bathroom break.
[01:53:54] Exactly. Yeah. Oh, my God. Ted, you found the secret. Oh, God. Jesus. All right, well, that's tonight's show, folks. I have to sign off here. My God. Oh, so. So. But, you know, even then, you know, using the algal biofuels, they can still use internal combustion engine cars and actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere if we started using that instead.
[01:54:23] So EVs aren't the only. The thing is, as you go on through this book, is that there are many ways to do this, and we're deciding that we're only going to do these couple of things that will never fix the problem. Whereas there's a bunch of other things. Geothermal energy is phenomenal, and we don't put any money into it, and yet it would solve half of our problems if we just went to geothermal. And there's other things as well that you could use.
[01:54:50] You've got to do what you have in the spot that you have it. That's what I think. So maybe this is the point where I ask you, are you aware of what Minnesota did in 2023? No. No. They put a law in the books that the state has transitioned to 100% clean energy by the year 2040.
[01:55:13] So all the electricity used by the folks in Minnesota has to come from carbon-free sources in the next 15 years.
[01:55:23] And so my question to you is, if the other 49 states passed a similar law with a similar deadline, 2040, what impact do you think that would have on the trend, the global warming or the climate change trend that we're so concerned about?
[01:56:14] I think it would help a lot. How much energy we're now saving in the United States because of everybody doing that? Four and a half percent of it. So 95 and a half percent of our energy still doesn't come from renewable sources. So we're not taking this seriously. This is just almost like a boutique-y thing where some people do this to be cool or whatever.
[01:56:43] It's not being done seriously. And if we did it seriously, you know, and other countries started to follow suit and we stopped making things that helped them do the stuff that damages the environment, we could fix this in, you know, 40 years. I said 40 years. We could have it right back down to what it was in 1980 and we'd be fine. Yeah.
[01:57:09] And, you know, with what you say, like the dryness and stuff like that, the floods would have a less impact, of course, on the Catskills because everything's dry. Everything wipes away quickly. You know, we've seen that in the past. And, you know, with the dryness, of course, the reservoirs, New York City would be okay. Stuff like that. So, I mean, it's little changes here and there and that, you know, kind of like steps in the way of influence of other people.
[01:57:38] Like, you know, to be honest, Dr. Gates, I didn't buy an EV because I wanted to save the world. I bought an EV because it was fast as freaking heck. It was a cool-looking car. But, you know, I kind of step into that side of, you know, EV is grateful. So, maybe next I should get some solar panels to maybe benefit from that and stuff like that.
[01:58:02] So, I mean, like, you know, maybe, you know, influence other people to do better things, to better the world for the later on of our generation. To make the world a better place. Why not, you know? You know, Tad and I are here on doing this podcast to make people love the Catskills more, to make people influence come to Catskills, Hudson Valley a little bit more.
[01:58:28] And we're not here to tell you to stay the hell away from the Catskills or the Hudson Valley. You know, we're here to make this. It's a better place, you know, to show this a better area and stuff like that. So, you know, with your book coming out, it's already outside. We can get this. Where can we get it on? Anywhere? Yeah, you can get it on Amazon. You know, it depends.
[01:58:55] It's unfortunate they only make a hard copy, but you can get an e-book for $18 on Amazon. Or you can buy the hard copy of the book either on Amazon or directly from the publisher, which is Roman and Littlefield. Okay. And, you know, or get your library to buy it. You know, and so it's out. So how can we get you to sign that, though? I'm happy to sign it.
[01:59:23] You got some kind of setup? I'll come up and I'll sign it. All right. All right. So we have to think of something. Yeah, we'll send. We have this big, big bus we bought from the city of New York. You'll see it coming. It's spewing the smoke out the back. We'll send our bus down to Rockland County to pick you up, bring you up to the Catskills. And it runs only on U.S. Grand Slam.
[01:59:49] No, it's just pure diesel fuel. You know, it's a relic. I think it's a mixture of diesel and mercury that it runs on. If you'd put me up at that nice hotel up there near New Paltz and up in the Chihuahuan. The Mohonk. Yeah, the Mohonk mountain. Nobody can afford that. I'll come up there and I'll sign books and you put me up there for a couple of days. All right. I don't even think New York State can afford that.
[02:00:20] But geological survey, they're like, yeah, you can't go here. You have to go camp out on the side over there. That's right. So do you have any other kind of influences that you would like to share that kind of prompted you towards to make this book? That gave you the influence of writing this book? You know, as I said, I've always I mean, I'm kind of environmentally directed person as well. And I don't I don't want to see.
[02:00:49] I mean, I have kids, too, that I don't want to have them or, you know, assuming they ever have grandkids, you know, wind up. And we're you know, at the rate we're going about another 20 years, things are going to get really ugly. So I don't want to see that happen. And I would I, you know, I've been out in the woods most of my life and I would rather keep having the woods there.
[02:01:13] So I kind of was driven to to write this based on on that, just hoping that people would do it. And also, I mean, people tend I run the climate action program we have at Rutgers to try to get the whole university more, you know, climate friendly. And I saw all these people that were just saying, oh, my God, we're doomed.
[02:01:40] And so mostly I wrote this to be kind of positive and that, you know, that we've done that. We've had really bad things. We had a lot of people against us to get let out of the out of the I mean, that was a big fight to get let out. And the companies didn't want to change and DDT. They didn't want to change. And, you know, acid rain. They didn't want to change.
[02:02:03] And yet, you know, people got together and bound together and as a group and demanded change. And it happened. And so people, I think these days think that they don't have any power whatsoever. And so and they can't make changes, but they can. And so I wanted to write this book and including, you know, the you know, the the nasty things that were buried like Love Canal.
[02:02:28] And and to say, look, these, you know, I love Canal when the government didn't take handle it. Do you know what happened? And Love Canal? Yeah. You know what what really turned the corner was there was a lawsuit. I see. It was nothing. They should. They govern. You know, the Fed sent some people up and the and the residents took them hostage at gunpoint.
[02:02:55] Either you come up and fix this or we're going to send them back in pieces. So, you know, sometimes. So. So, doctor, are you are you advocating violence? I'm not advocating violence. I'm suggesting the solution to global climate change is a handgun. People like nobody shot anybody. Especially if they have a clock in their hand. Right. It was just a threat. But they did. You know, in other places, too, there's been many situations.
[02:03:24] I mean, we were in bad shape back in the 60s when it comes to the environment in six different directions. And because people took an interest and wrote to their elected officials and protested and did what it took. They fixed it. And it was fixed. And we fixed all of these things. And that's what the book is about. Look at all these things that were really bad.
[02:03:46] I mean, the level of lead in children's blood was two percent below outright poisoning. And it dropped by 97 percent from 1980 to now. It was basically there's no it's well below the threshold right now. And it was because people got mad and said, we're not going to put up with this anymore. So my I'm not saying people should go out and get guns and I'm not teaching revolution or any of that stuff.
[02:04:15] But people can open their mouths and say, we want this and write to their officials and attend protests. And people will and the elected officials will have to listen. They did it before. They'll do it again. And who knows?
[02:04:37] Explain, you know, what you think to your your fellow person that you're, you know, maybe hiking when walking with working with and you might influence them on a different perspective. So you never frickin know. And, you know, what? I don't I don't know. I don't know what to say. It's just it's one of those times of when it's just a big what the fuck kind of thing. Like we can't we can only try.
[02:05:05] We can only make this place a better a better place and hope that could be a better place. And Alex, you know, Dr. Dr. Gates, you know, you try to do that with your book. And I thank you. So that's that's good. I'm glad we had you on tonight. So that's great. Yeah, it was fun. Even though we went all over the frickin place. It was like bouncing like a ping pong table. Even though I have less less hope that will win the battle with global warming than I did at the beginning of the show. It was fun.
[02:05:34] At least we're going to have fun dancing on the deck of the Titanic goes down. Right. So last last question, Dr. Gates post hike bruising bites when you're out in the Catskills Hudson Valley. What's your place to go to to get something to eat to influence people to eat some good stuff? Well, see, I mean, I'm mostly down in in, you know, Rockland in Orange County is mostly where I go.
[02:06:00] So there's a there's a nice tavern on Route 17 in Slotesburg that I'll stop at that has a lot of different types of things to eat and and drink. I'll take out roads tavern. But as I said, that's not the Catskill. So I don't know if that's going to help. No, no. A lot of you know, a lot of our our listeners come from the tri-state area down in the more of the New York City area. So, yeah.
[02:06:27] And Slotesburg is right on the fringe of the Harriman State Park area. Right. So folks that are over hiking, exploring Harriman for the day can swing by the roads tavern in Slotesburg before they head home. I don't know where that is. Yeah, it's on 17. Yeah. To be honest, that's where we stopped when we picked up Dahlia, my dog from Jamaica. So it's a great place. All right.
[02:06:57] So thank you to the monthly supporters and the monthly sponsors for the show. Really appreciate you guys donating to the show and to the Catskills. Thank you to everyone who is still listening. Appreciate it. 159 episodes in. And we have Dr. Gates talking to us about climate change and about how we can influence others and people to steer in the right way. So I thank you very much. Buy his book, Reclaiming Our Planet. I'll have that in the links. Thanks.
[02:07:25] And, you know, Dr. Gates, thank you for joining us tonight. Take care of your time. And I hope you had a good time on our weird podcast. I did. Lots of fun. Excellent. So have a good night. And hopefully we'll get together in the future. That sounds great. Hiking. Yes, yes. Do you want to go? Do you want to hike or no? Absolutely. I love hiking. That's why I became a geologist. So I could go hike and get paid for it.
[02:07:53] So we'll get you, Carl, and Chuck Van Stratton on a freaking hike. Wow. This is going to be the most epic hike ever. I get to sell tickets. I want to see. And Danny Davis. Yeah. I want to see his trunk he found. I've never seen that big. He found that huge tree. The base of a tree up in the Catskill. A monstrous thing. Gilboa. Yeah. So I want to see that. He hasn't shown me that yet. Wow. That's a real.
[02:08:22] I wouldn't say dick move, but that's a dick move. Come on, Chuck. So have a good night. We'll talk to you later. Okay. Great. Hey, everyone. I just want to thank you for listening to the show. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe and throw down a smooth review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any podcast platform that you use.
[02:08:47] You can also check daily updates of the podcast, hikes, hiking news, and local news on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the official website of the show. Remember this. You got to just keep on living in the Catskills, man. L-I-V-I-N Wicked. Wicked. Wicked. Wicked.