Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
The Sun Also Sets
MIT Student Says It’s OK to Yell “FIRE!” in a Crowded Theater
Public School Teacher Sex Abuse Scandal
Thousands of our kids abused since 2001
Don’t play blame game
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
By Lorne Gunter, National PostMonday, February 25, 2008 |
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Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record?” Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it’s not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It’s way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it’s way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
The Sun Also Sets
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore’s mythical “consensus.” Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.
Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.
To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming.
Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.
This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.
Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a “stethoscope for the sun.” But he and his colleagues need better equipment.
In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun’s emissions more rapidly and accurately.
As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth’s climate over time has been the sun.
For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s temperature over the last 100 years.
R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”
Rather, he says, “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”
Patterson, sharing Tapping’s concern, says: “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”
“Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again,” Patterson says. “If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than %lsquo;global warming’ would have had.”
In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming “community” — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by “dramatic changes” in temperatures.
A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.
“The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100,” according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.
The study says that “try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures.”
The study concludes that if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, “there would not be much effect on temperatures.”
But if the sun shuts down, we’ve got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that’s hanging in the balance.
© Copyright 2008 Investor’s Business Daily. All Rights Reserved.
MIT Student Says It’s OK to Yell “FIRE!” in a Crowded Theater
By Doug Nekrasz
Friday, February 1, 2008
Here we go again with another absurd First Amendment claim.
Remember that stupid MIT student who wore a hoax bomb to Logan Airport last September then got arrested? Yes, she is stupid, because only a stupid person or one with serious mental problems would challenge security in such a blatant and dangerous way. She’s lucky she didn’t die that day of a 5.56 mm brain hemorrhage.
Now Star Simpson is claiming that she has a First Amendment right to wear a hoax bomb into a post-9/11 airport and instigate a major security alert.
You remember the First Amendment. That’s the thing that protects Star’s right to scream “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, but not your free speech, because as Republicans and/or Conservatives, our speech is hate speech and now a federal crime.
As usual, here in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, “East Boston District Court Judge Paul Mahoney took the motion to dismiss under advisement.” Yes, under advisement. What could possibly be the issue here, such that this supposed wise and erudite judge needs “advisement?” Sounds like he needs my “advisement”: Throw this young anarchist in prison immediately and quit wasting court time and our tax money on these garbage motions. Then, in addition to finding Ms. Simpson guilty as soon as practicable, fine her, forcing her to reimburse the taxpayers of Massachusetts the cost of her stupidity.
In a situation like this, of her own making, there is no issue of “freedom,” “free speech” or “rights.” One does not have the “right” to instigate a major security alert in an airport any more than one has the “right” to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. If anything, all the other passengers and their loved ones’ rights were violated by being reminded of 9/11 and what kind of dangerous world we live in today. With her stunt, Ms. Simpson threatened every person in the terminal that day. That, my friends, is a crime.
In a previous post, some of you misunderstood my message. I did not mean to offend teachers, accuse any teachers of sexual misconduct, nor imply that collectively, all teachers are sexual predators. My aim was to point out the Main Stream Media’s obvious bias in selectively reporting crimes against our children while reinforcing their irrational hatred of the Catholic Church.
As a parent, I know that sexual assault against children is a danger I need to be aware of in any situation where adults have a trusted and/or unsupervised relationship with my children, be it teachers, the clergy, soccer or gymnastics coaches or babysitting relatives.
I am not apologizing for what I wrote, nor how I wrote it. I adopted a caustic, in-your-face style, relying on sarcasm to get my point across. My aim was to get you fired up, energizing you to the issues of media bias and Liberal propaganda that we battle with everyday. I depend on you, as intelligent free-thinkers, empowered to reach your own conclusions, to get a chuckle out of my ramblings yet pause to consider the important issues.
The Fourth Estate holds real power and sway over those who unfortunately are incapable of filtering out the crap from the real news and issues. These people read the Boston Globe everyday then assume all Catholic priests (and only the Catholic ones because that is what the Globe reports) must be pedophiles and that I, by remaining a Catholic, tacitly approve the actions of the very, very few evil priests.
These readers may not understand that sexual abuse of children will, unfortunately, continue to happen, and can happen anytime parents put unconditional trust in adults we let watch our children unsupervised. Yes, there are teachers who do this. It may make you uncomfortable to face this awful truth, but our kids are at risk in schools as much as they are at risk in church. They are at risk at soccer practice and gymnastics class, too. But the Main Stream Media chooses not to report it. And some people think that if the press isn’t reporting it, it must not be happening.
I count on you to point out the truth, not necessarily proselytize, but correct your misguided and hopefully well-meaning associates when they propagate Liberal myths.
Go Pats!!
Public School Teacher Sex Abuse Scandal
Thousands of our kids abused since 2001
By Doug Nekrasz
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Just try to imagine my surprise when I opened up Mondays’s Boston Globe only to find this article. I nearly fell out of my chair! The Boston Globe – the local satellite office of the New York Times Company’s Liberal propaganda machine, actually published an article attacking the Liberals’ sacred cow, public youth indoctrination OOPS, I mean, “public education.”
Yes, the Boston Globe published an article (from the Associated Press) calling our attention to what all of us non-Liberals have known truly is a problem even more shocking than the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal (which, for your information, is not and never was limited exclusively to the Catholic Church).
Thousands of public school teachers sexually abuse their students, dozens in New Hampshire alone! (See article) Then the school districts, taking a page out of Bernard Cardinal Law’s playbook, play “pass the abuser” on to other schools or districts. According to the article, “A nationwide Associated Press investigation published in October found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered, or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct.” Yes, 2,570!
The article goes on to say, “there is a persistent problem with sexual misconduct in US schools. When abuse happens, administrators too often fail to let others know about it, and too many legal loopholes let offenders stay in the classroom.” Hmmm, “loopholes.” I wonder if these are similar to the “loopholes” our governor keeps complaining about when discussing taxes. Someone call the National Education Association for clarification.
If the writer replaced “public schools” with “Catholic Church,” “teachers” with “priests” or “administrators” with “Cardinal” or “Archbishop,” Columbia University would be handing out Pulitzers like candy at Halloween. Remember that the Boston Globe won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Public Service for its reporting of the Catholic Church priest abuse “scandal.” The citation reads, “Awarded to The Boston Globe for its courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy, stirred local, national and international reaction and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church.”¹
What priests really should do is join the Teachers’ Union.
Who sneaked this past the editors? I’m posting the article, because I fear once the Globe’s editors realize their mistake, they will pull the article from the Web and microfiche archives. I can only hope LexisNexis already entered it into their databases. I was encouraged that there really is hope for Truth, Justice and the American Way when, in my research, I came across a second article, appearing on page B6 of October 22, 2007’s Boston Globe titled N.H. teacher screening misses warning signs. I don’t know how I missed this back in October.
But alas, all is right (or should I say “left”?) in Loony Left Land. Yesterday, the same Defender of the Loony Left version of the 1st Amendment (freedom of their speech, not yours; freedom from all religion, except Islam, Wicca and their Cult of Atheism) redeemed itself with the following article on page A1, Vast archive on abuse aids victims, scholars, Database lists 3,000 accused priests. That’s funny, Monday’s article was buried on page A7 and the previous on B6 while the priest one yesterday was on A1. All better. Beats the confessional.
Notes
¹ 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Public Service. See the citation online here.
Don’t play blame game
By Ken Smith
Letter to the Editor, Littleton Independent, January 24, 2008
To the editor:
Last week’s Independent left me a bit troubled and concerned about the Town’s financial future.
First, there was Rep. Geoff Hall attempting to cover his posterior region by blaming the Town’s lack of State highway funding on a Mitt Romney veto. Please. Because of the State’s one-party-rule and its fiscal disposition, any and all vetoes, not to mention spending cuts enacted by Gov. Romney that the State Legislature wanted to override, were overridden in minutes on Beacon Hill. It is, to say the least, disingenuous for Rep. Hall to blame Beacon Hill’s proclivity for spending and lack of fiscal discipline on anyone else but themselves, never mind a governor who has been out of office for over a year.
Second, I was troubled by Town Administrator Keith Bergman’s comments in the paper. I know that confronting our state rep on issues needs to done with political tact, but by not challenging Rep. Hall when he tried to pass blame for a lack of highway funds seems to indicate Mr. Bergman’s tacit compliance with the status quo. It’s becoming clear that our town’s fiscal outlook is weakening and we need to let Rep. Hall and the State Legislature know that excuses and poor planning are no longer acceptable. I think Mr. Bergman missed the opportunity to put Mr. Hall on public notice. The State’s failure to fulfill expectations established by their budgeting has to be forcefully challenged by our leaders.
Equally troubling were Mr. Bergman’s comments regarding the standard practice for budgeting money for snow removal. Again, he seems resigned to a failed method of economics. He told the selectmen that “most communities low-ball the estimate for snow removal and under-budget because excess money in this line item can’t be removed” and applied elsewhere in the budget. Aside from the fact that this line item never carries a surplus, it doesn’t make sense or demonstrate leadership or original thought to adhere to a failed practice just because everyone else does. Why not apply a more realistic number for snow removal, and, if there is anything left over, carry it over the next year? For example, based on past years’ snowfall we budget about $500 for our driveway to be plowed each year. With the small amount of snowfall last year we only had to pay out about $100 this year. Instead of spending the left over money we kept it aside for this year’s plowing.
It’s evident that we can’t rely on the State for budgetary guidance. Nor can we continue to march in lockstep with failed economic policy. We need our town leaders to put commonsense back into our budget and demand that those who represent our interests on Beacon Hill start doing the hard work of undoing all that hampers our ability to determine our own economic fate.
Ken Smith
Powers Rd.