Baby it's cold outside
Bensblurb #517
Brrrrr...
Drudge Report headline for 01/03/10:
“Temps plunge to record as cold snap freezes North, East states...”
Where is Al Gore?
“[Cold] of a variety not seen in over 25 years in a large scale is about to engulf the major energy consuming areas of the northern Hemisphere. The first 15 days of [January] will be the coldest...in over 25 years.” --Joe Bastardi, AccuWeather forecaster
Even so, the climate skeptics (according to noted meteorologist Neil Frank) concur with the believers that...
“[T]he Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal...
“Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor...
‘Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly over-predicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world....
‘The revelation of Climategate occurs at a time when the accuracy of the climate models is being seriously questioned. Over the last decade Earth's temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. If the climate models cannot get it right for the past 10 years, why should we trust them for the next century?”--excerpted from the Houston Chronicle.
So we can just cool it, at least for the new decade we’ve entered. Speaking of which, another writer claims we’ve got real problems, plus imagined ones aplenty on the horizon.
Nick Gillespie: There is a looming showdown in American society between public-sector employees and the rest of us, in terms of job security and, especially, unsustainable gold-plated retirement and health benefits that are working hard to bankrupt whole states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. As with some parts of the private sector (domestically owned auto companies, for instance), basic compensation packages were hammered into place in a very different America, and conferred massive future benefits when politicians were either too stupid or too cowardly to confront basic questions of fiscal responsibility. Do you want to spend your life (and have your kids spend their lives) to pay ever-increasing taxes for teacher, cop, and bureaurat retirements at early ages? Especially while you're expected to fully fund your own? This is a social contract that needs to be redrawn ASAP“--Gillespie is editor of Reason magazine.
In a piece in the Wall Street Journal, he lightens up about the 2010 decade.:
“...it’s unimaginable that we‘ll go 10 full years without a White House Conference on the Coarsening of Culture, that some form of deadly yet cuddly mammal will be identified as near extinction even as its population is increasing, that we will suddenly realize that our core common culture is threatened by the failure to teach “The Brady Bunch” in the K-12 curriculum, and that viruses are either multiplying or disappearing altogether at an alarming rate.”
Finally, here’s a thought :“Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged.”.--The Register
Happy New Year anyway.
Brrrrr...
Drudge Report headline for 01/03/10:
“Temps plunge to record as cold snap freezes North, East states...”
Where is Al Gore?
“[Cold] of a variety not seen in over 25 years in a large scale is about to engulf the major energy consuming areas of the northern Hemisphere. The first 15 days of [January] will be the coldest...in over 25 years.” --Joe Bastardi, AccuWeather forecaster
Even so, the climate skeptics (according to noted meteorologist Neil Frank) concur with the believers that...
“[T]he Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal...
“Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor...
‘Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly over-predicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world....
‘The revelation of Climategate occurs at a time when the accuracy of the climate models is being seriously questioned. Over the last decade Earth's temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. If the climate models cannot get it right for the past 10 years, why should we trust them for the next century?”--excerpted from the Houston Chronicle.
So we can just cool it, at least for the new decade we’ve entered. Speaking of which, another writer claims we’ve got real problems, plus imagined ones aplenty on the horizon.
Nick Gillespie: There is a looming showdown in American society between public-sector employees and the rest of us, in terms of job security and, especially, unsustainable gold-plated retirement and health benefits that are working hard to bankrupt whole states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. As with some parts of the private sector (domestically owned auto companies, for instance), basic compensation packages were hammered into place in a very different America, and conferred massive future benefits when politicians were either too stupid or too cowardly to confront basic questions of fiscal responsibility. Do you want to spend your life (and have your kids spend their lives) to pay ever-increasing taxes for teacher, cop, and bureaurat retirements at early ages? Especially while you're expected to fully fund your own? This is a social contract that needs to be redrawn ASAP“--Gillespie is editor of Reason magazine.
In a piece in the Wall Street Journal, he lightens up about the 2010 decade.:
“...it’s unimaginable that we‘ll go 10 full years without a White House Conference on the Coarsening of Culture, that some form of deadly yet cuddly mammal will be identified as near extinction even as its population is increasing, that we will suddenly realize that our core common culture is threatened by the failure to teach “The Brady Bunch” in the K-12 curriculum, and that viruses are either multiplying or disappearing altogether at an alarming rate.”
Finally, here’s a thought :“Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged.”.--The Register
Happy New Year anyway.
posted by Ben Blankenship at
8:07 AM
