Bubba's Amazon Adventure part III

Now I am to the part of the trip that I will never forget. We got on a boat in Santarem and took an 8 hour boat ride up the Amazon River to a town called Itatuba. As you can see, the boat was a little suspect. It did have lifejackets for everyone which gave me comfort until I thought about the possibility of having to use the lifejackets! We got on the boat at about 4 in the afternoon and pulled into our destination at a little after midnight. During the day it was kind of cool but really you could only see the water and occasionally we got close to one shore and got a look at the jungle but after the sun went down I took out my flashlight and just scanned the shoreline. Eyes were reflecting back at me from the trees, ground, and water and I tried to guess which animals were looking at me. Of course I thought they were all monkeys, jaguars, and crocodiles, but in reality they were probably just normal animals like a bird of paradise, bush baby, or anaconda.

The next morning we went on a single prop Cessna 200 miles into the heart of the jungle to look at a gold mine. Being the heaviest, I was put in the front seat with the pilot, this gave me the opportunity to see hundreds of miles in every direction. First the propaganda you have heard about the rain forest disapearing is as true as the one about the moon being an alien spaceship. I could see for hundreds of miles in every direction and there was nothing but jungle. The whole trip I was thinking of survivor man, I brought my trusty multitool pocketknife and I was devising my plan for which direction I would head when the plane went down. We landed on a dirt runway that I guessed could not have been more than 100 yards and was full of potholes. It was however uphill which I am sure helped us slow down before going into the jungle.


The camp at the mine was incredible, here we were hundreds of miles from civilization, if my wife was there she would say thousands of miles from a Costco, and they had these 500 sq foot tents with wood framing that had computers, the internet, and a kitchen that was more functional than the one in my house. The construction of these would impress the best general contractors America has to offer. They grabbed a chainsaw and if they needed a 6x6 board 10 feet long they cut it and it looked like it was produced in a factory and delivered.


As we walked around looking at the mine site, we had to watch our step as the local Brazilian miners have been working this spot for years. What they would do is dig a hole about 3 foot by 3 foot that would go down sometimes 300 feet. There was a log with a rope coiled around it to lower the miners down and pull up the ore. Once the ore was brought up, they would pan it and once again showed us the gold they found, amazing!


After watching fish in a pond try to eat birds flying close to the water I was upset I didn’t bring a fishing rod but we had to go as the pilot was not certified to fly at night. I thought about it and was glad I was not told this until after I was already there so I couldn’t chicken out. We were asked to lean forward on takeoff as the runway was downhill with a pond and steep hill on the other side of the pond that we cleared by about 4 inches. I want to go back and spend a couple days camping, fishing and exploring but the one day I did have was unforgettable.

Manmade Global Warming?

Are you as sick of paying more than $4.00 a gallon for gasoline as I am? It could be worse, my Dad drives a diesel truck and that cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $4.90 a gallon. What can we as individuals do about it? The answer is simple, it is a philosophy change and no I am not talking about not using air conditioning and buying expensive hybrids, what we can do to fix things is to stop believing the propaganda being thrown at us about manmade global warming.

I know, I can hear you now saying, but there is global warming, all the scientist and smart people say there is, and besides what does it have to do with the price of gas? First we need to connect the dots, the price of gas goes up when the price of oil goes up. The price of oil goes up when smart businessmen think it will cost more for oil next year than it does this year, these are called futures and if your business depends on oil it makes sense to pre buy the oil you will use next year now, therefore guaranteeing a price. So why do these smart businessmen believe oil will cost more next year than this year? Again it is pretty simple, we as a world are using more oil each year than we are finding. So we have two options, use less or find more. While using less sounds great and makes us all feel good it is not realistic, China, India, and Brazil just to mention a few are countries that’s oil consumption will increase more than any savings you and I could accomplish. So the other option is to find more which brings us back to global warming.

Let me correct myself, it is not really find more, you see we already know where more oil is, a lot more. There are billions of barrels in Anwar and off the shores of our coasts but we are not allowed to pump that oil in short because we believe in manmade global warming. Why do I keep saying manmade global warming instead of just global warming? Al Gore told us that our CO2 emissions are what is causing global warming. You see throughout history our planet has naturally warmed and cooled in cycles that are God made and not manmade. Proof of these natural cycles are the ice age and the dust bowl. But Al Gore and the propaganda pumped into our TV’s, movies, and schools say that we are to blame for the 0.8 degree temperature increase in the last 100 years.

There are many scientists who do not believe in manmade global warming. In fact there was just a major conference in New York City of thousands of scientists who do not believe in manmade global warming. Some of the best and brightest, PHD’s and weather industry leaders were in attendance and in agreement. NASA recently had to admit that its numbers were wrong and 1997 was not the hottest in the last 100 years like it had previously reported and 1934 was. In fact 6 of the hottest 10 years in the last 100 were in the 1930’s, an era called the dust bowl because so much ground vegetation died that when the wind blew in the Midwest there was large amounts of dust kicked up. In fact many of these scientists that attended this conference made the case for global cooling of more than 1 degree in the past 10 years. They said that the ocean temperatures, the main factor in global temperatures was colder now than at any time in the past 100 years.

The hardest thing for most people to understand is the “evidence” we have for global warming. You see, manmade global warming proponents have made it so any weather event is “proof” of global warming. If it is a hot summer, that is global warming, if it is a cold winter, that is global warming. A drought or a flood, lots of hurricanes or tornados or none, less ice in the Arctic or more ice in the Antarctic pretty much anything that happens is “proof” of manmade global warming.

Al Gore said in his movie that he would like to see gas at $5.00 a gallon because it would force us to conserve and cut back. The political policies of most of our politicians are artificially increasing the price of oil by not letting us pump the oil we already have found. I for one do not believe in manmade global warming and if you would like to see gas at a reasonable price again, you may want to study out the facts and see if you really believe in manmade global warming yourself. If you come to the same conclusion I did, together we can fix the price of oil by voting out all the politicians who are stopping the production of oil in the name of manmade global warming and are causing the higher gas prices.