Keep yer filthy green paws off my beer fridge!

I don't have much in this life. In fact, by American standards, I qualify as dirt poor -- I don't own a car, I don't have cable or satellite tv, I don't have a phone of my own, I don't even own a working computer, any more (thx, Mom, for the use of yours!). My house is crumbling around my ears (thx, kittehs!) and I'm ungainfully unemployed (thx, IL gummint, thx to my crazy ancestors who handed down the crazy gene, and thx also to uneven sidewalks in Chicago!).

But still, I have one thing to which I can still cling: I have a lovely 1950s or early '60s Coldspot refrigerator with pink-and-coppertone interior, out there in my non-car-holding garage. In the summer, I clean that puppy up, plug it in, and fill it with my favorite beverages, so they'll be handy for all of us folks who play in the dirt in my back yard.

But now, some eco-wackos are saying that it's a bad thing, and they want to take that luxury away from me and others like me. They think that beer fridges are causing the icecap in the arctic circle to shrink, and Canada to thaw. Well, I say, Canada needs a longer growing season! Pass me those six-packs -- I'm gonna head right back out to scrub my machine out, and I'm gonna plug it in just a little early, this time. Anyone up for a really cold one?

Did I miss something?

One of my old lefty friends has -- along with many others of his political bent -- argued that citing the newly revised stats from NASA regarding US temperatures is insufficient. As proof of the woes of global warmism, he dredges up the evidence of icecap melt on Greenland. We should, it seems, not be so quick to dismiss the liars and crackpots who fudged data to support their theories.

It's not really just about the NASA report -- although, that's a darned good place to start. The whole argument supporting anthropogenic global warmism has quite a few problems. For starters, the planet's top climatologists all admit they lack sufficient data for a long-term answer. The whole of the field is still in its infancy, with scientific readings still scattershot outside the influence of our own Western scholars and their institutes. Dendrochronology, geology and paleontology as studies have been around for only a couple of centuries, and data collected is only newly-applied to this field, with mixed results.

Also, too many on both sides of the issue toss away information which disagrees with their beliefs -- one of the top global warmists refused to believe all the accounts of the 17th century "little ice age" because it didn't fit his narrative. Many of the new religion's foes refuse to accept the reduction of glaciers as evidence that the planet is changing. A few others claim they have evidence that supports the old global cooling -- that is, they believe their evidence shows the burning of fuels over the past centuries may have actually slowed the natural process of extraterrestrial(solar and deep-space)-powered warming.


Okay. So the Greenland icecap is melting. This doesn't necessarily prove global warmism. For all we know, the oceanic currents are shifting the way the Mississippi shifts in is bed occasionally (or did, before we went and put it under lock and dam).

And, even if it did mean the planet's temp is rising a fraction of a degree each century, how horrible (and how novel) can that be? Seems to me, it would beat out the other possibility cited by scientists in the field (the one that was screamed from Newsweek's headlines thirty years ago, about "The Coming Ice Age").

Greenland was named Greenland for a reason -- and it wasn't simply to fool Scandinavians into buying real estate, sight-unseen, a millennium ago. According to archaeological evidence, Greenland had a wide band of verdant farmland when the man our books call Erik the Red and his son Leif walked the earth. It really was green. Beneath that more recent permafrost lies still some fairly rich earth.

How horrible would it be to have an expanded area for farming, and a slightly longer growing season across the rest of the temperate zones?

What media bias?

John Hinderaker at Power Line blog has the latest Global Warming bias piece from the AP. First, they interview the world's foremost scientific expert on hurricanes, then proceed to hold him up as an object of scorn for speaking out against Gore's shrill alarmism.

Further, they then cite the UN release as though it were scientific consensus, when it is, in fact -- like Gore's stuff -- political maneuvering. As John quotes and comments:

Gray's statements came the same day the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change approved a report that concludes the world will face dire consequences to food and water supplies, along with increased flooding and other dramatic weather events, unless nations adapt to climate change.

As we have noted elsewhere, the U.N.'s IPCC is a political body, not a scientific one, and its findings have been subject to withering criticism. But the AP implies that the U.N's report represents a scientific consensus. Next:

Rather than global warming, Gray believes a recent uptick in strong hurricanes is part of a multi-decade trend of alternating busy and slow periods related to ocean circulation patterns. Contrary to mainstream thinking, Gray believes ocean temperatures are going to drop in the next five to 10 years.

Now it's explicit. The elderly crank who "rails" and disagrees with the U.N. is not part of "mainstream thinking," notwithstanding the fact that, as the AP acknowledges, he is the world's foremost authority on hurricanes.

This is downright appalling, and far from honest journalism. Take this along with a spoonful of Carolyn O'Hara's TNR column handing gems from on high about how the new, independent, "citizen" sources for journalistic reports will never compare to the stuff that gets hashed out behind closed doors (the old "seeing sausages made" comparison crops up), and we have a not-at-all-surprising dose of arrogance from the High Priests of the Temple of "Knowledge" Sans Provable Data.

The more I see of this media sale of pseudo-consensus stuff, the more I am reminded of an old bumper sticker I saw when I was younger: "EAT SH*T. MILLIONS OF FLIES CAN'T ALL BE WRONG".

Exactly what are these people trying to feed us?

Day is Done

Gone the sun... almost





I walked the dog one last time before I prepare to head home. He's as good an excuse as any for taking a couple more pictures of the ice storm remnants.

Gratuitous postcard: Greatest threat to the earth

According to the latest reports, these beasts are farting their way to global destruction.


I know I'm afraid of them. They have me thoroughly cowed.