Garcia Media Life

Alberta in red- proposed fence in black

So, I was thinking. We’ve built thousands of miles of fences between us and Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants who are not the problem they used to be because there are no more jobs in America. What we really need is a super-high fence between us and Canada to keep out the Arctic air masses.

You think I jest?

From the Modesto Bee newspaper just a few months ago:

The bad economy and stepped-up federal immigration audits have dramatically slowed the influx of illegal immigrants, experts say.

Demographers, government officials and business leaders say illegal immigrants not only are returning to their homelands in response to more intense government scrutiny, they’re also staying there.

And as word spreads that jobs are harder to come by in the United States because of the recession, others are deciding not to come in the first place, slowing an unprecedented flood of immigrants that’s lasted more than a decade.

Meanwhile…from Maine to Georgia, from Minnesota to Texas…we are all chilled to the bone, dressed in multiple layers as inhuman, frigid, arctic winds make a mockery of our sad attempts to keep warm. Water pipes are bursting, people are bitching, the bitter cold is killing strawberries in Florida and taking down gigantic stadiums in Minneapolis.

We are 20 degrees below normal and this comes on the heels of one of the worst winters in history last year. The real peril, my friends, is from the north.

So how big does this American/Canadian fence need to be? Here are some simple, undisputed facts about earth’s atmosphere, from a brief article entitled How High is the Atmosphere, by meteorologist, Jeff Haby:

5.5 kilometers- about half the atmosphere is below this height
9.0 kilometers- about 70% of the atmosphere is below this height
16.0 kilometers- about 90% of the atmosphere is below this height
36.0 kilometers- about 99% of the atmosphere is below this height
100.0 kilometers- atmosphere is so thin that it is virtually the vacuum of space
above 600 kilometers- atmosphere is so thin that it is considered outer space

It’s got to be higher than the jet stream, right? Jets actually use those tailwinds and they’re usually at 35,000 to 37,000 feet. For sure the American/Canadian fence needs to be higher than that which would be about 7 miles up.

Using my trusty kilometers-to-miles conversion chart, 16 kilometers translates to just short of ten miles…and as you can plainly see—90% of the atmosphere is below that height.

I don’t think we need to build the fence the entire length of the border with Canada. The frigid air is not coming from the extreme west. That’s where Vancouver is and that’s a fairly temperate zone with temperatures in the 50s most of the time. Not a lot of cold air comes down to us from the east either. That’s St. John’s and Halifax. If it stays this cold from now on we could get their icebergs, but not frigid air.

The culprit resides in the North Pole and generally comes down from the Canadian province of Alberta- hence the term Alberta Clipper. The way I see it, we should be ok if we start the fence at Idaho/Montana and continue east to Lake Superior. We don’t have to worry about the other Great Lakes because people in Michigan, Indiana, Upstate New York, etc., are already used to that Lake-effect snow stuff.

Needless to say, construction of a 10-mile high, 1000-mile long fence would create a shitload of jobs.

And it has to be retractable. If we don’t allow some cold Canadian air in, our summers will be more miserable than they already are.

The American/Canadian fence also has to be lowered for about a five-hour period around midnight, December 24th into the 25th. We wouldn’t want to have to scrape Rudolph off the giant structure. That would be both sad and difficult to explain to the children.