This will all be over in 2012. . .

Last night, I shoveled the driveway with the hope that I'd be able to drive this morning.

We awoke to 2-1/2" new fluff on the pavement. Oddly enough, we only had 10-1/2" on the back porch, after I measured it at 9" last night. I guess it compacted, blew off, or fell through.

Like that icy first Sunday, ten days ago, I could probably drive in these conditions if it was an emergency, but really . . . my car's a summer car.

I hope the weather improves quickly. Happy Christmas Eve!

---

Further thought: I have a four-season tent but a three-season car. What's wrong with this picture?

Cold Night

I guess if it's not cold and snowy on the night of the winter solstice at the lowest point in both the solar cycle and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, when will it be cold and snowy?

A Prediction

By my calculations, our next sunspot cycle will peak in 2011 with an activity high averaging roughly the same as the cycle that peaked in the late 1940s. That will be stronger than our last cycle, which peaked in 2000. So, no little ice age redux for a while yet. The 2030s might be a little cool, though.

But don't listen to me; my model falls completely apart in 2070.

Oh, Bugger.

I guess we won't get a summer this year, after all.







Or at least, we won't have a summer if we get a big volcanic eruption in the next couple of months.

Pretty snow on the flowers, though!

Update: 1.5 inches at 10 p.m., Friday, April 18, 2008. Channel 13 News showed 8.5 inches in Everett, though, so I guess we got off easy.

No Summer This Year?

Oh look. It's snowing again.

Not sticking right now, but isn't it supposed to be springtime?

I sure hope this summer isn't a repeat of 1816. We had some snow in March last year, but this year is even colder than last.

Sunspots, get cooking! We need some warmth!

Actually, some sunspots started up, but they are the wrong polarity, so nobody knows what that means. Maybe we haven't seen the end of the low yet. Which means John McCain will definitely win the presidency. But of course he would, anyway, just because of his first name. We've already had four John presidents, after all, and zero Hillary or Barack.

Um... I digressed a bit, didn't I?

Happy Groundhog Day and other assorted holidays!

It's sunny here, so that means a lot more winter, right? But I suppose one needs only watch the local news and see pictures of the hundred feet of snow at Snoqualmie Pass to know that winter will stick around for a while. I guess that Global Warming thing is on hold this year.

But, in the meantime, we have a cornucopia of holidays to celebrate this month:

Groundhog Day
Superbowl Sunday
Naraka Day
Mardi Gras
Waitangi Day
Ash Wednesday
Lunar New Year's Day
Holy Day of Néhété
Lincoln's Birthday
Valentine's Day
Holy Day of Nazhoro
Presidents Day
Washington's Birthday
Holy Day of Vuzhí
Leap Year Day

Did I miss any?

Whatever happened to Global Warming?

It's snowing again!

I'm still in Seattle, aren't I? What is going on?!

Al Gore Vindicated

. . . in his own mind.

Mr. Cold himself has won the Nobel Peace Prize for . . . being a cult leader? Something like that.

Or maybe it had something to do with all the factual errors in that movie of his.

But let's take a look at other recent Nobel Peace Prize Winners, shall we?

2005 - IAEA, for letting Iran and others build nuclear bombs under their noses.
2002 - Jimmy Carter, for hating Israel so vehemently.
2001 - Kofi Annan and the UN, for being corrupt and a bunch of corrupt thugs.
1994 - Yasser Arafat, for hating Israel so vehemently.

And these are just the names I recognize. . .

Hm

There's a lot of leaves on the ground these days.

And the air is kinda cool.

Do you think, maybe, that autumn is on the way?

.
.
.

Nah.

Stop It with the Carbon, Already!

Every time I see or hear something about reducing carbon-dioxide emissions, I feel like bashing my head against a wall. They've got cause and effect completely switched.

Take a can of Coke out of the fridge, open it, and pour the Coke into a glass. Have a drink. Fizzy! Let the rest sit on the counter for a few hours till it warms up to room temperature. Have a drink. Not so fizzy.

What just happened? The Coke warmed up, releasing carbon dioxide (the fizz) into the air. When water is cold, it can hold more carbon dioxide than when it's warm.

The oceans of Earth hold two-thirds of the planet's carbon dioxide, just like a really dilute can of Coke. If something were to warm up the oceans, what do you think would happen to the fizz? Into the air it goes!

The ocean is so big that it takes a few hundred years for the carbon dioxide release to catch up to the warming, but release it, it does.

So, what's warming the oceans? Could it be an increase in solar activity?

What could be causing an increase of airborne carbon dioxide now? Could it be an increase in solar activity several hundred years ago? . . . Nah. That would make too much sense.

Oh, and by the way, plants really love it when they get more carbon dioxide. Farmers often triple the amount of carbon dioxide in their greenhouses to get the plants to grow better. Curiously, that tripled level of carbon dioxide approximates the conditions during the age of dinosaurs. They had giant plants back then, too, didn't they?

It's not as hot as you think it's been.

You probably already know this, but we have some shady characters in our government's employ.

NASA revised their temperature data last week to reflect a Y2K bug found in their calculations. 1998 is no longer the warmest year in America's past century. That honor has been returned to 1934. Not that a look at NASA's website would enlighten you to this fact. There are no press releases. Nothing in any of their articles reflects this change. They just quietly changed the data after someone pointed out an error in their temperature calculations.

"Calculations?" you ask. "What calculations?" Apparently our public officials have been doing alchemy on the measured data to "fix" it for heat-island effect and other such things. No one outside NASA GISS knows what their calculations are, because they refuse to let anyone else see them.

The Y2K bug meant that from year 2000-2007, they calculated the heat-island effect as if the cities were of a density from 1900-1907. It's as if they thought someone tore up all the concrete and asphalt from all the cities.

How does this affect 1998? Why, because of further hocus pocus, of course. The official numbers are actually a five-year average!

This doesn't explain all the "adjustments" to their data. There's problems like air conditioners being install next to thermometers. They also fiddle with data from natural-setting thermometers to fit urban thermometers, which are notoriously less reliable. And they've certainly increased the reported temperatures over the past few decades a lot more than they ever did before.

A good quote from the last link, CoyoteBlog, which explains what's going on here: "Temperatures that don't increase as they expect are treated as an error to be corrected, rather than a measurement that disputes their hypothesis."

In summation, the so-called scientists fiddle with any data that gets in the way of their next global-warming-hysteria-provided paycheck.

Cal Yente

Mr. Yente is the archnemesis of none other than Al Gore.

Fairly obvious, now that I think about it.

Tired of Al Gore, et al?

When next you have a spare hour (or maybe you should just make time), watch The Great Global Warming Swindle, from Britain's Channel 4.

If you hadn't guessed, it's a step-by-step refutation of the "global warming" hoax. With nifty graphics.

Greetings from St. George

The desert is kinda dusty.

It's also kinda warm.

Nifty red rock formations west of Vegas, though. Played around out there for a few hours. The candy-stripe sandstones are my favourite.

And the roller ooaster at the Sahara is a blast. Shot out of a gun, sharp turn, dip underground, back up and over loop-de-loop, zig, zag, and up. . . hang there. . . and fall backwards, zag, zig, loop-de-loop backwards over and up, disappear underground, sharp turn, brace for impact, soft return to the platform. Christina and I went, but not Chunlin.

The Virgin River Canyon along I-15 in Arizona is almost like driving up the Grand Canyon. Except I haven't seen the Grand Canyon yet, so you can't trust my opinion.

Feb 8 evening

Glowworm Caves -- thousands and thousands of tiny larvae, stomachs glowing from the energy of the food. 90% light, 10% heat. Galaxy of lights on every horizontal surface of the uneven cave ceiling. Tiny blue lights all over and around the stalactites. And oh, by the way, we were on a boat. ... The larvae dangle sticky cords to catch insects attracted to their lights.

Pig! One outside our plane. ... I think birds are living in our propeller cones.

We're definitely in the tropics again. Or at least the semi-tropics. Fiji, Auckland, Rotorua, Waitomo -- all have sunset downpours. Rain rain rainbow.

Scientific Consensus of the Non-Scientists

I happened across an article from last July at LiveScience.com that presents twelve viewpoints on "Global Warming."

The interviewed individuals include several professors, some scientists, and a former vice-president. As I read, I discovered that the individuals with climate science backgrounds tended to have differing opinions about "Global Warming" than, say, the psychology professor.

Here is a list of their qualifications, in order of believability based on background:

1. Hurricane expert and Head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University.
2. Professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
3. Professor emeritus at Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University.
4. Professor of Natural Resources, Virginia Tech, State Climatologist for Virginia.
5. Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
6. Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago.
7. Associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
8. Professor of geography at the University of California in Berkeley.
9. Associate professor of history and Director of the Program in Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
10. Senior research scientist, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University.
11. Former vice-president.
12. Professor of psychology at Harvard University.

1. The hurricane expert has been studying this stuff for decades. He's extremely skeptical of those who say humans are causing global warming. His main point is that the world heats and cools and heats and cools and it's natural.

2. The meteorology professor bashes the press and politicians for alarmism and for trying to justify costly Enviromentalist policies.

3. The professor emeretius says that climate change is partly caused by humans, but "its importance has been grossly exaggerated," and then he goes on to complain about all the other ills of civilization that are being ignored.

Skip down to #9, the history professor: "Many people have the impresson that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It's time to lay that misapprehension to rest." After reading the words of the above three scientists, you'd think he would be agreeing with them, but no. He continues, "We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it."

You gotta believe him. After all, he's a professor of history.

I won't even bother to mention what the politician and psychologist say. I'm sure you can guess.

Climate, Gods, and Monsters

The snow falling outside my window reminds me of The Year without a Summer, 1816. It also reminds me to pray to Rívorí for some more Global Warming!

But anyway, 1816. In northern Europe and eastern North America, it snowed off and on throughout the year, killing crops and humans and everything in between. Apparently there'd be days where the temperature would switch from the 90s down to freezing in a few hours.

This was at the tail end of the Little Ice Age, when generally the planet was getting warmer. But then a huge volcano erupted in Indonesia and cooled the planet back down with its ash.

A couple interesting tidbits I discovered about the summer of 1816:

Joseph Smith moved his family from Vermont to western New York because his crops died. A few years later, he'd get a visit from an angel and start a religion.

Over in Switzerland, a national emergency was declared by the government. But it didn't really ruin Mary Shelley's vacation in Geneva. She and her friends spent the summer cooped up indoors, hiding from the incessant rain, so they decided to have a contest amongst themselves to write the scariest story. Her finished product? Frankenstein.

It's Vuzhí Day Again!

And you know what that means? Rain! ... Or is that snow out my window?! Nah. Couldn't be. It's the Holy Day of Vuzhí, Goddess of Life, after all, which means that springtime is finally here.

Celebrate! Dance! Sing! Plan your wedding four months hence! Better yet, plan mine!

No more snow. Curses upon Rívorí, Goddess of Global Warming! Or, um, Goddess of Wildfire, but it's all about the same, right? Uncontrolled heat? Death, destruction, devestation? I'm sure She is Who all the Algoreites are worshipping. With Algore as Her conduit, of course.

UPDATE: Now it's definitely snowing. Big juicy flakes mixed in with tiny rain. I guess I have to credit Vítí, the Defender of Global Cooling!

Sunshine came softly through my window today. . .

It's so nice and warm and sunny and blue-sky-y, I almost feel like I'm on vacation in the summery southern hemisphere already.

Alas, no. I still have work to do.

Bummer.

Carbon! Carbon! Carbon!

Carbon dioxide contributes to a quarter of 1% of the earth's greenhouse effect. But for some reason, Environmentalists want to blame it (and thus humankind) for "Global Warming."

The problem with this is that there is no correlation between the rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atomosphere with the rate of increase/decrease of the air temperature.



So is there anything that correlates with the air temperature? Why, sure! It's the sun. When the sun emits more heat, the earth's air warms up.




Seems simple enough, if you ask me.

But why, then, is the carbon dioxide level going sky high? Surely that's caused by humankind!

Alas, no. There's a long-term correlation between air temperature and carbon dioxide, but the carbon dioxide increases/decreases a few hundred years after the temperature. Yeah, you heard me. The Environmentalists have their cause and effect completely switched.


Note that the time scale is in 1000s of years. Between red lines is approximately 100,000 years.
If the carbon dioxide is rising quickly right now, was there a corresponding air temperature increase a few hundred years ago?



Yes. The earth was just then beginning to come out of the "Little Ice Age."

So what does it all mean? Will humankind destroy the planet by driving SUVs? My answer: nah, probably not.

(ht: Moonbattery)