Back where it all started

The last time we came to Seattle we wanted to stay at Elliott Bay but they were too proud of their moorage.  This time we almost didn’t call them.  I had a deal pretty well made with a very nice lady at Shilshole but when we learned that George (Gray Hawk’s previous owner) had left the marina Marilyn called Elliott Bay to see what they had to offer.  Turns out they have a really good monthly rate – I think a lot of the marinas down here are hurting – there’s certainly a lot of empty slips around us.

We’re back on B-dock, about 2 slips away from where it all started 3 years ago.  We’re facing the other way this time – we must have been in an even numbered slip – this time we’re in B-31. Unlike the first time I put Gray Hawk in a slip here, there was very little drama when I put her in this slip yesterday.

There was however quite a bit of drama on the bus when I rode it to the Seattle Boat Show today.  Marilyn had some finishing up to do with the document editors on her project so I said I’d go to the show alone today and go back with her tomorrow.  That worked out well because I did more walking than I needed to do today.  We’ll be able to go more or less directly to where we need to go tomorrow.  Evidently riding public transit in Seattle is not as socially acceptable as it is in some cities.  I certainly encountered a different social strata than I am used to interacting with.

I sat in the front section of the bus, foolishly trusting that the driver would do as he said he would and tell me when I should get off.  He never did so I could just as well have sat in the back but I would have missed most of the floor show if I had done that.  First a couple of guys about my age got on – they were probably only in their late forties but they had lived considerably harder than I have.  Both of them used canes and one of them had his foot wrapped up in a big crude bandage.  He was loudly protesting how “those doctors should have more compassion” and “you’d think they’d give a guy some pain killers” and “my foot is such a mess it makes me puke to look at it.”  A few stops later another guy got on dragging a 2 wheel cart with a huge tower computer (as well as most of his other worldly possessions) on it.  The computer was old enough to have a 3-1/2 floppy drive in it.  It turned out that he also had some pretty powerful pain killers in his backpack which he proceeded to sell to the guy with the bad foot.

There’s a scene in the Soprano’s where Tony takes AJ into a poor neighbourhood to look at some houses that he is buying as part of a HUD scam.  On that visit AJ meets a crack whore and as it turned out either she or her twin sister go on the bus today and immediately started bothering the driver.  While he was busy dealing with her he also had to put down the wheelchair platform because some big fat blob was too lazy to climb the stairs onto the bus.  Once he got all that sorted out and sent the crack whore to her seat she started hollering about how “that bitch Joyce” had thrown her ass in jail again and now she had to go get her stuff.  Then there was a big discussion about how they didn’t store your stuff anymore when you went to jail and as it turned out there were 4 passengers within earshot who had direct personal experience with Seattle’s hoosegow.  Mr. Badfoot had never been to jail here “but now Vegas, that’s a whole ‘nuther story”.  I was really glad to get off at the boat show.  On the return trip I made a point to sit further back.

Fortunately our trip here from Port Townsend was less exciting than the bus ride.  A good rule for boating is “boring is good”.  We got an early start Wednesday morning, right after daylight.  There’s a narrow dredged channel down by Port Hadlock separating the peninsula from Indian Island.  We got through there close to high tide and then its just a long grind down to Seattle.  We had to go right next to the traffic separation lanes most of the way which can get pretty exciting when traffic is heavy, like it was on Wednesday.

Tonight we ran into Maximo’s mom and dad at the door to Elliott Bay Yacht Brokers.  They told us that Kahu is on the market.  Kahu is the converted New Zealand navy vessel that we were onboard in Plumper Cove last spring.  There’s a sad tale there for sure.  Kahu’s owners were so happy and excited about their world travels when we met up with them last spring.  We don’t have an internet connection here to find the story but I’m sure its not good.  Kim thought their business had collapsed when they left it unattended.

 

Oh my goodness!

Yesterday we had a glorious day for a boat trip.  We left Cow Bay late in the morning headed for the yacht club in Sidney.  It couldn’t have been better cruising weather.  It was cold of course – its January after all – but it was dead calm with clear blue skies all the way.  However, as we came out of John’s Passage we could see a solid wall of fog about at Sidney and it closed in behind us as we entered Tsehum Harbour.  No biggie – we were where we wanted to be so no worries. My only concern was that I wanted to make the crossing to Port Angeles today because the wind forecast was calm today, going to hell for the rest of the week. 

Last night we went to Jimmy Buffet night at the club and had some pretty decent jumbalaya.  Marilyn didn’t like hers but I don’t know why she ordered it in the first place.  She doesn’t like Spanish Rice and jumbalaya is pretty well Spanish Rice with seafood in it.  It was her birthday so I bought supper.

This morning when I got up I could sort of see the lights around the marina but as it got lighter the fog closed in tighter around us.  By the time we untied around 9:30 it was socked in solid.  I got disoriented just leaving the reciprocal dock and wandered into some shallow water before I got my head around simply trusting the plotter.  We crept out by Van Isle marina, following the plotter and waiting for the radar to warm up.  By the time we got out past Van Isle’s breakwater I had the radar working and I was blindly following the plotter.  Marilyn was on the foredeck watching for crab floats.  There’s always a minefield of floats at the entrance to Van Isle but today either there weren’t too many or we just couldn’t see them.

Then  it all went to hell.  The new computer crashed leaving us without a plotter and then instead of simply rebooting the piece of crap HP computer decided it needed to create some error report which took forever to compile.  About the same time the radar quit working. 

I pulled the shifters to neutral and we drifted while I sorted things out.  We were in a really bad spot at the entrance to a busy marina but we didn’t have much choice.  By this time the HP had decided to reboot so we had navigation again.  I decided I would restart the radar and if it still didn’t work we’d turn around.  About the same time we discovered that the horn wouldn’t work.  Normally that wouldn’t be a huge issue but in fog you’d like to be able to sound a horn once in a while. 

When the radar came back up it appeared to be working normally.  The nav computer came back online and it appeared to be working too.  I went below, found the old nav computer and got it running with a spare GPS puck as a backup.  The horn was pooched – too much salt water over the years.  I’ll need to find another set of trumpets but we decided to press on. 

We agreed that if we got to Trial Island light and it hadn’t cleared up we would just go into Victoria and sit it out.  By the time we got about halfway to the lighthouse the fog was lifting a little bit and we maybe had 200 yards visibility.  So I called Victoria traffic control and told them we’d like to get across Juan de Fuca without getting run over.  Normally pleasure vessels don’t check in with traffic but they had been asking all morning for us to check in if we were about to cross the traffic lanes. 

By the time we got out in the middle of the strait we had about 2 miles visibility so it was generally a pretty pleasant crossing.  However, when we entered Port Angeles harbour it closed in worse than anything we had seen all day.  There were a couple of ocean going freighters anchored in the harbour.  We could see them on radar but one of them we passed less than 1/4 of a mile away and never saw it.  The other one appeared out of the fog maybe 20 yards in front of us.  You couldn’t see from one end of it to the other.

US Homeland Insecurity seems to have figured out that we are not a terrorist threat.  I phoned them from the dock, once we finally found it in the fog.  Thank goodness for good charts and GPS. 

They asked me a bunch of questions and then sent some guy down to the dock to see us.  I’m sure it was the same guy who checked us in the time Marilyn got puking sick on the way over.  He didn’t seem much concerned about what we were doing.  They give you this great freaking long (maybe 20 digits) “clearance number” so I dutifully wrote it in the logbook and then we moved ourselves over to an open space on F Dock.  The marina staff aren’t around today but I’m sure they’ll be OK once they get out money tomorrow.

On the way over Marilyn phoned Elliott Bay marina and got us a rate there for a month.  We liked that place so much when we stayed there after we bought Gray Hawk that we’ve wanted to go back ever since.  So we will. 

Getting to know my neighbourhood

Its pretty freaking hot so I don’t walk very far from the hotel.  In theory my room is air conditioned but I think the air conditioner can maintain maybe an 8 degree differential between inside temperature and outside.  So when its 38 outside its still pretty bloody hot inside.  Nonetheless I’ve managed to venture farther afield each day.  And Google seems to be learning more about my location too.

When I first got here I did some searches for “supermercado” (supermarket) but the closest one that came up was an hour away in Montevideo.  Today however, when I searched, Google came up with a supermercado just four blocks away from my hotel.  I had previously stumbled upon one that is only about two blocks away but calling it a “super” mercado seemed quite a stretch.  Our house in Buchanan has more square footage than that one.  And it was closed today anyway.

The one that Google found for me today was considerably larger but still not in the “super” category to my way of thinking.  It had a very eclectic collection of merchandise – everything from clothing to pots and pans to groceries.  It was more akin to a small town grocery store in rural Saskatchewan than a supermarket but beggars can’t be choosers. 

All I wanted was something to keep my belly happy tomorrow morning.  They serve a pretty decent breakfast here in the hotel but they don’t put it out until 7:00.  It gets so bloody hot that I would rather be at the farm before 6:00 and that’s a half an hour away so I need to leave at 5:30, not 7:30.  This morning I actually went to the farm early and then came back before they shut down the breakfast buffet.

You wouldn’t likely recognize the photo above as a Supermarket storefront – neither would I.  Actually all the storefronts here look pretty benign. 

These two are from the great little pedestrian mall that they have right next to the city square.  Again, the storefronts are almost deliberately understated.

There’s an area of at least 3 blocks on each side of the town square that is entirely pedestrian mall but since I’ve been here it has been almost deserted.  Maybe they come out much later than I have been out – they clearly don’t get up as early as I do.  Today is Sunday so I didn’t expect to see many people but I’ve been out at 8:00 PM the last two nights and the area was still pretty well deserted. 

A long way from Saskatoon

We left Cow Bay Sunday night and drove to Sidney so that I could catch an early flight to Toronto on Monday morning.  The weather was crap in the Bay but I understand it improved dramatically as soon as I left.  It didn’t improve as much as travelling 1/3 of the way round the world made it improve.

Marilyn was probably back on the boat before Air Canada got us stuffed into their flying culvert and headed to Toronto.  In Toronto I had to clear US Customs but they seem to have lost interest in me.  They more or less waved me through again.  Then Air Canada loaded us on another tin can, pushed back from the ramp, started taxiing toward the runway and then realized that the plane was broke.  I could have told them that when they made the first turn after the push tractor disconnected.  There was a gawd awful racket coming from underneath the wings.  I’ve heard something similar in the past, I think its a hydraulic pump problem on A320s, but it typically only lasts a few seconds.  This went on and on and seemed to be related to braking somehow.  As usual in those situations the pilot lied through his teeth. 

“We’ll be able to fix it right here next the runway and we’ll be airborne in a few minutes”  NOPE, knew you wouldn’t be able to pull that one off.

“We’ll have to go back to the ramp but it should only take 20 minutes”  Not a prayer although after a mere 1-1/2 hours they did manage to get us away from the gate the second time.  I wasn’t sure whether to hope we would take off or hope they would scrub the flight and make sure the plane was fixed.  Apparently it was fixed because we made it back onto the ground in Miami close to 2 hours late.  Fortunately I had a 3-1/2 hour layover on my booking. 

I’m not sure whether it was me, the hour of the day or the airport but Miami seemed like more of a fustercluck than most airports.  Most of it also appeared to be more or less deserted.  I say “most” of it advisedly because I walked the whole circumference of the damn place getting from the Air Canada gates to the American Air gates.  Eventually American stuffed us into another flying culvert and hauled us all the way to Montevideo.  I was pretty well whupped by the time we landed close to 10 hours later and about 28 hours after first getting on a plane in Sidney.

I’m kind of enjoying Uruguay.  The culture is very Spanish, which is to say that nobody gets very concerned about timelines.  But the scenery is fantastic.  Its incredibly green. 

The hotel I am staying in is within walking distance of the central square in town.  I’ve been eating supper every night looking out over the square.  The photo below isn’t of the square.  I was trying to capture the cathedral but all the streets are so narrow that there just isn’t any good place to get a picture of it.

I’m still not sure whether I need to work Sunday in order to finish up this installation before my return flight.  I’m hoping that I can take at least part of the day off because I’m only a few miles from the ocean.  And as the picture above attests, its beach weather here.

Red is not good

Its a very pleasant shade of red but that doesn’t change the meaning.  Red means either a gale or storm warning.  I have a lot of difficulty getting my head around storm being worse than gale but either one can be nasty if you happen to have a lot of water stretching out in the direction the wind is coming from.  Fetch is the nautical term for the distance the wind has to work on the surface of the water.  The longer the fetch and/or the stronger the wind, the worse the waves.  We’re not getting bumped much today because our fetch is SE and the wind is southwesterly this morning.  We very rarely get much wave action here because we are protected by the government docks behind us.  If we get a sustained wind from the SE though it can get bumpy even this far into the marina.

Yesterday was another matter altogether.  We haven’t had many nicer winter cruising days than we had yesterday.

Some of the best boating advice we have ever received was from Captain Linda, about a month into our boat ownership adventure.  She said that if we wanted to be winter cruisers then we should just assume we would be boating in the rain and only worry about wind.  And her advice was very true for the Pacific North Wet.  It rains pretty well all the time out here – in the winter when it isn’t raining then the wind is blowing.  Yesterday however was a glorious winter day.  It wasn’t real warm and we didn’t see much sunshine but you can see the reflections in the pictures above.  It was dead calm for most of our trip home from Ladysmith.

We moved from Newcastle Island at Nanaimo down to Ladysmith two days ago.  That was a pretty uneventful move too. We slept in way past when we usually sleep in to and just barely had time left to make slack at Dodd Narrows.  We have a reciprocal dock at Ladysmith Yacht Club so the night only cost us $3 (because we wanted to plug in to the 15 amp power).  We always forget about Ladysmith but we need to remember it because it is a really cute spot and very conveniently located to catch the slack at Dodd Narrows.  Chemainus is equally convenient but they’re way too proud of their moorage and its not really great moorage because of the ferry dock next door.

I don’t know what they call these mini-tugs but they are really fun to watch.  I’ve seen even smaller versions that look more like a motorized barrel.  These guys at least look like a boat, albeit a very very small boat.  They zoom around the log booms sorting and pushing the logs into the mill.  They rock and roll so bad that at times it looks like they have to go right over but they never seem to.  Ladysmith is very much a working logging harbour.  I think the mills may all be owned by the same outfit now but there are several locations along the shoreline.  Tugs are coming and going with log booms all the time.

 

Newsflash

25,000 homes in the lower mainland without power this morning after the storms last night (the same ones that put all the red colour around the Island).  I wonder how many of the idjits that oppose smart meters realize that smart meters can report in so that repair crews know exactly which meters are off the grid?

Oh dear, this looks nasty

I could see this wreck from the marine park where we’re tied up but there’s water between us and the little island that its washed up against.  The full story is here but its the same old “derelict owner abandons responsibility for his boat” story that gets told and retold everywhere there is an anchorage outside a coastal community.  Some ass who is either too stupid to understand the implications of long term anchoring or simply can’t afford to do the necessary ongoing maintenance (or quite possibly both of the above) ends up with a boat that has a significant negative value.  In other words the cost of making the boat usable exceeds the minimal value that the boat would have if it was usable.  We’ve seen hulks floating in harbours with saplings growing out of the deck – sometime in the past a seagull shit out a poplar or birch seed on the deck and then nature took its normal course.  We had one wooden tugboat in Cow Bay that raised a huge alarm when it appeared to be sinking.  When the Coast Guard investigated they discovered that the interior of the “boat” was so full of expanding foam that it simply could not sink.  The boat in the image above wasn’t so fortunate and I suppose even the unsinkable tug would have got beat to ratshit if it drifted aground in a storm.

It was frosty here this morning.  We don’t have a thermometer but it was likely minus 5 when we got up. 

Despite the cold its really pleasant here and we are having difficulty getting motivated to untie the lines and go somewhere else.  Last night the park ranger invited us and the couple from the only other boat on the dock for a potluck supper.  We had a great visit, not to mention an incredible feed of halibut which our host had traded some fisherman for.  I forget the details of the commerce but it sounded like he had an endless supply of fish and last night we certainly ate our fill with plenty to spare.  The other boat left early this morning to make the flood tide on the Fraser River and this afternoon we’re all alone on the dock again.

I’ve been running the little red dinghy back and forth to Nanaimo for parts pretty well once a day.  Nothing major – I’m just futzing my way through a list of “nice to do” jobs.  Yesterday I replaced the starboard side deck light with an LED.  I had to butcher a new fixture but it ended up looking really good so today I went back to the chandler to get a second fixture so I can do the same to the port side.  When we walked home from supper last night the difference in lighting between the starboard side and the port side was dramatic.  LEDs have really come a long way – the chandlers are still overly proud of them, I think I’m into about $300 in bulbs and fixtures over the last 3 days – but the improvement in lighting is dramatic compared to incandescent and at a fraction of the current.  I didn’t look at the exact amperages yesterday but its usually 10% or less for comparable illumination with LED compared to incandescent.  There’s been a big kerfluffle here in BC because the gummit is forcing incandescent bulbs off the store shelves but I couldn’t care less about the environmental footprint of incandescent lighting – I’m switching because it makes my batteries last so much longer. 

It started – third pull – and it stayed running!

I haven’t had good luck with outboard motors.  My first one I bought from Archie Smith and bolted it on the transom of a little Phil Bolger design Bluegill skiff that I built shortly after we moved to Nipawin.  It was a constant surprise if it ran at all, let alone stayed running for more than 15 minutes at a stretch.  We sold that boat to someone Marilyn knew at SIAST and replaced it with a little 14’ fibreglass runabout.  It had a 65 HP Johnson hanging on the transom and while that one was more reliable than Archie’s motor I never really trusted it.  Perhaps the JB weld patch on the side of the block where a rod had clearly come through at some point in it’s past contributed to my distrust.  Or perhaps it was the knowledge that one of the 3 pistons had dropped all its skirting into the sump.  Pat Smith and I tore it down far enough to confirm where the bits I found in the oil came from but decided it wasn’t worth a complete rebuild so we just ran it with the missing skirting.  The only time it really let us down was actually my fault.

I had replaced a mag or some other electronic bit that required removal of the flywheel and apparently didn’t bother to retorque the big nut on top.  We were camped with the kids at The Narrows which is the campground at the west end of Waskesiu Lake.  The first evening we were there someone decided it would be good to run into Waskesiu for ice cream so that’s what the we did.  The Johnson ran fine all the way up the lake but when I throttled down at the breakwater it started burping and farting and generally running like crap.  By the time we got to the beach it had died and wouldn’t restart.  That presented some problems because the boat was our return passage to The Narrows where we were camped.  Eventually we ended up prevailing on the sympathy of the local fish cop and he ferried us back to our campsite in the Parks van.  Which of course didn’t solve the broken boat problem but did get the five of us back home to go to bed.  I laid awake most of the night trying to figure out what the problem might be.  By morning I had settled on a failure to retorque the flywheel so I drove back into town, borrowed a wrench, tightened the nut and all was good again.  But I never really trusted that outboard either.

Next we had a couple of inboards – dead reliable.  We had a 4 cylinder Chevy in the Swiftsure we bought from Ken Jones.  It was a little underpowered but otherwise absolutely reliable.  We’d probably still have it if it had been an 8 cylinder or even a 6 cylinder model.  As it was, the combination of it being a little underpowered anyway and our bad technique when we started skiing convinced us that we needed a better boat.  So we moved up to the Malibu with its 350 Chevy which again was 110% reliable.  And more than powerful enough to overcome our technical shortcomings in the skiing department. 

When we bought Gray Hawk she didn’t come with a dinghy and we didn’t really know what we wanted or needed.  So we bought a Chinese inflatable and a Chinese knockoff of a Yamaha outboard.  It was about 5 HP and pretty well as reliable as I have come to expect from outboards.  Most of the time it ran and it never actually left us stranded but there were times when I wondered.  The day I sold it I was astounded at how well it ran – that day it idled like a champ – prior to that, it never idled for shit.

We replaced the Chinese wonder with a 30+ year old 9.9 HP Merc and an equally ancient 12 foot Lund aluminum knockoff.  Actually the label on the engine says 110 which would indicate 11 HP but its the same Thunderbolt Merc that has been sold as 9.9 HP since the late 1960’s.  It was pretty gummed up when we bought it but I fed it copious doses of injector cleaner.  It ran better and better every time we used it last year.  Today I put the dinghy back in the water and braced myself for an ordeal getting the Merc running.  Three pulls later it was running and after a few minutes to warm up it was willing to idle.  We took it across the channel to town, bought groceries, went to the Harbour Chandler, went for coffee and finally came back to the boat with never a hiccup. 

Sweet Caroline (Neil Diamond, 1969)

I always liked that song.  A few days ago I finished reading “Killing Kennedy” wherein Bill O’Reilly claims that the subject of the song was really Caroline Kennedy.  Google seems to confirm that.

I never thought JFK deserved even half the saintly reputation that history has given him.  I can well remember father coming home in November of 1963 carrying a portable TV that he had rented from George Laberge just so we could watch the funeral.  I vaguely remember a conversation that mom & dad had about how the British tradition of protecting royalty was superior to the American process.  As I recall the argument, (that’s 50 years ago so its a little fuzzy) it was that multiple bobbing Bobbies riding on horseback surrounding a royal provided more of a screen than secret servicemen walking beside a limousine.  Looking back with our historical perspective its hard to believe that more presidents (and royals for that matter) weren’t assassinated by lone whackos.  As John Malkovich’s character says in the Eastwood movie “In the Line of Fire”, if a lone gunman is prepared to trade his life for the life of his victim it is very likely he will succeed.

Kennedy’s reputation has been polished by history but its pretty clear that he was very much responsible for the failed Cuban invasion.  His actions were timid, ineffectual and probably counterproductive enough to increase the odds of failure.  His subsequent performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis likely wouldn’t have been necessary if he hadn’t performed so amateurishly during the invasion fiasco.  History has accorded JFK a hero’s role during the missile crisis but the reality was likely more that he was an observer of history than a leader.  If I had to pick a hero of that fiasco it would be Adlai Stevenson long before it was JFK.  Victors get to write their own version of history so the Kennedys come out smelling like roses but the reality was likely a lot different.

Yesterday we moved from Chemainus to Newcastle Island, across from Nanaimo.  We had to time ourselves to the slack at Dodd Narrows but that was pretty easy because there was a slack at 2:00 boat time so we made a leisurely departure from Chemainus, ate lunch on the water and cruised right through Dodd without ever slowing down.  By the time we got there though the water was getting pretty lumpy and it rapidly got worse as we got closer to Nanaimo. 

Gabriola Island provides a lot of protection as you approach Nanaimo – I wouldn’t have wanted to be out in the Strait yesterday.  Even so, as we got closer to Duke Point the waves from the Strait started to find us even behind the shelter of Gabriola and we were getting tossed around pretty good by the time we turned into Nanaimo Harbour.  For most of the trip I didn’t bother running the stabilizers because we were headed straight into the waves.  The NAIAD stabilizers provide pretty good side to side stability for waves coming broadside but not much fore and aft when we’re headed directly into the waves.

The waves yesterday were kind of square, maybe 3 or 4 feet high and probably 15 feet apart.  Just the right size and period for us to climb up the face of one and then crash heavily down into the trough about the time Gray Hawk was perfectly balanced on top of the crest.  On the plus side the new TV mount worked perfectly.  The handheld radios that were sitting on the dash didn’t fare so well – both of them plunged madly over the edge into the abyss of the stairwell to the engine room.  They’re on the charger now – time will tell if they survived their suicidal actions.

This morning we are looking out on glassy water from the dock at Newcastle Island.  The radio tells us that the prairies are still in the grip of the arctic air that we were happy to leave behind us.  Its not real warm here but its nowhere near minus 40 either.

The sound of settled science

If you only ever listen to whores like David Suzuki or morons like Elizabeth May then perhaps you can be excused for thinking that the science is settled on global warming.  If that is the case then you need some new reading material.

That image is lifted from Watts Up With That.  It succinctly captures the dilemma that the chicken little crowd faces.  For 25 years now they have been stubbornly screaming “the sky is falling” but the sky, equally stubbornly, refuses to follow their so-called “science”.  If the science is settled, then just exactly what has it settled on?

I clearly remember the moment roughly 12 years ago when Bob Dyck said something to the effect that he didn’t believe global warming was real.  Bob was the top dog at Cargill Canada at the time so I accorded his opinion some respect.  I thought at the very least that he should be well briefed and by nature he wasn’t inclined to be controversial.  But his comments were so out of sync with the generally accepted public view at the time that I had difficulty reconciling his thinking with my own.  At the time I was likely best described as an AGW sceptic while accepting that global warming was real.  As it turns out, Bob was likely right, he was just about a dozen years ahead of himself.

Let’s be perfectly clear – the graph shows a possible slight warming trend.  The green zone ranges from nothing to as much as 1 degree per century.  The problem for the chicken little crowd is that none of their predictions have come even close to those actual observations.  The IPCC has been frantically reducing their 2013 projections in an attempt to get them at least somewhat close to the observations.  So the question for them is not “why are we warming?” but rather “WTF were you smoking when you said we were warming 5 degrees per century?”