Ayrabs and Iranians are not the sons of Martha.
But the point is, when the first news of the Plague hit, the entire country went into a spasm. Trust? Familial trust society. If you're not family, you're nobody. You'd better have a hard power control to get anything done.
Familial groups started shifting and contacts started dropping off the screen. Getting anything done quickly became flat impossible. Except getting shot at and bombed which continued right up to the point of Plague hitting Iran in earnest and then just got more random.
Meantime, things were going to hell in a handbasket back home and we were stuck in the ass end of nowhere attempting "reconstruction duties" while the world was deconstructing around us.
March 5th I got the e-mail I'd been dreading. It was from Bob Bates, Dad's senior manager and vice president of the corporation. Dad had contracted H5N1.
Mom died of ovarian cancer when I was ten. I didn't have any brothers or sisters. (Turns out Mom's uterus was pretty screwed up to start with.) Dad was all I had left.
Growing up with Dad had never been real easy. Don't get me wrong, if he backhanded me or gave me a spanking I deserved it. But while "negative conditioning" was high on his list, "positive conditioning" was less so. The flip side is, when he gave praise it was because you deserved it. That made the slightest hint that you'd sort of maybe not screwed up entirely worth gold. I learned a lot about leadership from my dad.
But Midwestern farmers, despite this little missive which is much bigger than I'd intended, don't talk a lot. They spend so much time in their own company, they just learn to absorb the silence. Slowly over the years they tend to become more and more like a Minnesota winter, cold, silent and powerful.
That left me wondering what to say to a man with whom I'd exchanged barely ten words in the same number of years and yet whom I loved beyond measure.
"Get well soon. I love you."?
Oh, GOD no.
"I need you in my life so you'd better pull through."?
If he did live he'd kick my ass! (And despite being in his fifties he could probably do it.)
"Dear Bob:
"Tell Dad that if he doesn't pull through he's a wuss."
Yep, those were the last words from me my dad ever got.
I'm morally certain he understood the love buried deep within them.
The rest of the e-mail from Bob, and it was long, was about the farming situation. Distribution was getting bad. They had laid in rye for the planting season but he wasn't sure when they could get it in the ground. Even rye needs a certain amount of soil temp to sprout and soil temperatures weren't even beginning to flicker upwards. By early March you usually saw some thawing and it just wasn't happening. He also wasn't sure about getting a herbicide and fertilizer delivery. They might have to do some "organic" stuff but that required hands. Which were not available.
They'd also gotten word that the big combines might not be available for harvest. They could till with the cultivators on the farms if they could get the bodies but those were scarce. They'd had to close one of the milk farms because they didn't have the four guys to run the milking machine.
Hell in a handbasket.
March 21st was the day I got word my father was gone. The Iranian New Year. Normally a time of high holiday in Iran with lots of celebrations going back before Persia tried to knock off Greece. Not much celebrating going on in 2019, though. The Plague was starting to spread and people were dying like flies.
Also the spring solstice. There wasn't much spring in the air in Fars province. It was a high plateau more or less surrounded by mountains, and the major farming area of Iran. It generally had the weather of Virginia in terms of temperatures.
This year it was more like Minnesota in the spring. A normal spring.
The funny thing was, I knew there was a "cooling trend" going on. The Army knew there was a cooling trend going on.
Couldn't tell it by the news. We were still getting CNN and between the reporting on the Plague they had occasional weather reports. I stopped counting the number of references to "global warming" I got after fifteen in two days. I just quit listening after the damned meteorologist said:
"We're having a cold and wet spring on top of everything else that's going on due to global warming affecting world-wide ocean currents."
Ocean currents.
Ocean currents have a lag that runs from five hundred to ten thousand years. Anything that ocean currents were doing, now, was because of something that happened a long time ago.
And there was no "global warming" anymore. Yeah, there had been a slow warming trend going back to a mini-iceage back in the Middle Ages. But we'd stopped warming. Given that it was Old Sol driving it, we might go back to warming soon. From the solar physicist's predictions, though, it wasn't going to be any time soon. Not the rest of 2019 for sure and probably not 2020.
We were cooling off. Fast. And people were still beating the drum of "global warming."
Here's how it really works. And it's more complicated than "CO2 makes the temperature rise! Reuse, reduce, recycle! SUV owners are global terrorists!"
But not a lot.
Cosmic rays are produced from big stars exploding a long way away. They're all over the place in any galaxy and Earth is constantly bombarded by them.
Cosmic rays hitting water droplets in the upper atmosphere form clouds. Those clouds cool the Earth.
Cosmic ray impact is controlled by solar winds. What are solar winds?
The sun is a big ball of fusing hydrogen that pumps out an enormous amount of power every second. It not only emits heat and light but particles that fly out headed for deep space. Solar wind. When there's a lot of solar wind, it "blows back" the cosmic rays so less get to Earth.
Less cosmic rays, less clouds. Things warm up. More cosmic rays, more clouds, things cool down.
Decreased solar activity equals decreased solar wind. Decreased solar wind equals more cosmic rays impacting the Earth. More cosmic rays impacting the Earth equals more clouds. More clouds equal cooler temperatures.
QE fucking D.
That can be reduced to: Less solar output equals cooler temperatures.
But not by direct effect.
This had been studied repeatedly, proven rigorously and was the reason for Earth's long-term heating and cooling trends. Or, hell, short term.
"But CO2 tracks with temperature!"
Sort of. CO2 increases lag behind temperature increases. CO2 increases in the atmosphere are a result of temperature increases not the cause of temperature increases. They track eight hundred years later. Something that changes eight hundred years later cannot be a cause. It's an effect.
Why? Boyle's Law. Go see "oceans as CO2 repositories." It's okay. I'll wait.