Wednesday - January 07, 2009

Global Warming Puts The Freeze On France

First Major Snowfall in Marseille in 21 Years

France’s second city of Marseille was paralysed Wednesday by a freak snowstorm, stunning locals accustomed to balmy Mediterranean winters, and causing havoc for road and air traffic.

Some 550 drivers were stranded for hours on highways outside the port city, emergency services said, as snow fell through the morning to form a coat 12 centimetres (five inches) thick for the first time in 20 years.

Snow on the runways closed the local Marignane airport and cut high-speed rail lines to and from Marseille, while some 12,000 households were left without electricity across the region.

Caught off guard, regional officials closed all highways to traffic, while Marseille city hall suspended bus and tramway services and advised residents to stay at home.

Local residents—who last saw snow on the ground in Marseille in 1987—teetered carefully along the ice-covered streets, snapping pictures of the carpet of white.

Youths took to the streets for giant snowball fights, while others carried their sledges and snowboards up to the city’s emblematic Notre-Dame-de-La-Garde basilica, whizzing down to the historic port.

Temperatures tumbled well below freezing across France and the rest of Europe on Tuesday night, hitting a 10-year low of minus nine degrees Celsius in Paris.

Heavy snowfall in Marseille forced the international airport to close and paralyzed all train and bus traffic on Wednesday in France’s second-biggest city.

The usually busy and sunny Mediterranean port city ground to a halt as snow overwhelmed infrastructure and stopped school buses and all other public transport.

“The weather conditions no longer allow air traffic to take place in satisfactory conditions so the airport of Marseille Provence is closed to air traffic,” a spokesman said.

The airport was expected to remain closed at least until Thursday morning, management said.

France is experiencing a cold weather snap that has gradually moved from north to south. Electricity consumption has hit record levels as families turn up home heating.

Rail, road and air traffic have been disrupted for several days, notably at the main airport in the Paris region, Charles de Gaulle.

The last time it snowed there AT ALL it was just a dusting. That was on March 1, 2005 and was itself unusual enough to make the news and the blogs.




Marseille is on the south coast of France, on the Mediterranean, about 80 miles west of Cannes. I don’t think they usually have winter there much at all.

   Friday - December 19, 2008

White People Cause Global Cooling

Yup, that’s the logic behind this amazing article at Science Daily.

It’s a pretty straightforward deduction too: prior to the invasion of the western hemisphere by evil white folks, the natives were living in perfect harmony with mother earth, that is when they weren’t otherwise occupied with killing and torturing each other. They hunted, they gathered, they had sustainable growth organic farms with no environmental impact and fair trade practices. Then the whites showed up, dosed the whole continent with diseases, and nearly all the natives died. Which means all their peaceful and groovy farms went even more back to nature, and the trees took over. A few zillion more trees sucked all the CO₂ out of the air, causing Global Cooling, which led to the Little Ice Age of 1500 to 1750. See? Blame the white folks.

The article avoids pointing out that the same logic would imply that the earlier rise in native farming would have led to the same climactic warming period that gave Europe the Vikings. It also fails to point out that the same logic implies that the population explosion of white folks after 1750 and their habit of setting everything on fire led to the next two hundred years of warmer normal temperatures.

But that’s Science Daily. Just the facts. No hype, no political bias. It’s like Pravda, only with lab coats and test tubes.

New World Post-pandemic Reforestation Helped Start Little Ice Age, Say Scientists

ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2008) — The power of viruses is well documented in human history. Swarms of little viral Davids have repeatedly laid low the great Goliaths of human civilization, most famously in the devastating pandemics that swept the New World during European conquest and settlement.

In recent years, there has been growing evidence for the hypothesis that the effect of the pandemics in the Americas wasn’t confined to killing indigenous peoples. Global climate appears to have been altered as well.

Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian population centers in the Americas and in sparsely populated surrounding regions. They concluded that reforestation of agricultural lands—abandoned as the population collapsed—pulled so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it helped trigger a period of global cooling, at its most intense from approximately 1500 to 1750, known as the Little Ice Age.

Just to be on the safe side, they hedge their bets a little bit:

Nevle and Bird don’t attribute all of the cooling during the Little Ice Age to reforestation in the Americas.

“There are other causes at play,” Nevle said. “But reforestation is certainly a first-order contributor.”

I give up. Here is some hair porn. Hell, have two.

UPDATE: More of the same, only from the other side of the looking glass. It might be agriculture that is causing global warming all by itself, and right now that could be a good thing!

[ten thousand years ago,] the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases — methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests — into the atmosphere. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming.

not only is this a good thing, it may be the only thing keeping the planet from entering a new ice age, that it’s trying hard to do!

“We’re at a very favorable state right now for increased glaciation,” says Kutzbach. “Nature is favoring it at this time in orbital cycles, and if humans weren’t in the picture it would probably be happening today.”

So do your part to fight the Ice Giants. Burn something nice today.

   Monday - December 15, 2008

Global Warming Update

President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday praised former Vice President Al Gore’s ideas on the environment as one part of helping the nation’s struggling economy recovery. Obama, Gore and Vice President-elect Joe Biden met privately at Obama’s transition headquarters here for almost two hours.

We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way,” Obama told reporters

Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

“The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over,” he said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore

Draw your own conclusions, but I’d say the ice coverage is only slightly less now as in 1979, and the “old ice” levels are comparable


Those 680,000 square kilometers include such non-Arctic areas as Hudson’s Bay, and the Kamchatka Sea. Given that the Northwest Passage was open this summer, and that today the ice seems nearly as big and thick “as it should be” tells me the ice has been growing at an amazing rate. And there is only one way for that to happen: a big lack of heat.



Meanwhile, nearly half a million people in the northeast are still without power after the gigantic ice storm last week.

Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government’s machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

Obama is likely to name Steven Chu, a physicist who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as his energy secretary, three Democratic officials close to the transition team said last week. Chu won the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and is highly respected in energy circles.


summer ice levels tell a different story. But look how much “new ice” there was in 1979!


Obama also is expected to name Carol ["delete those records, do it now!"] Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, as the newly created “climate czar” inside the White House.

Chu is known to be a big Alternative Energy researcher and a firm believer in Glowball Wurming.

Obama is stacking his Cabinet and inner circle with advocates who have pushed for deep mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas pollution and even with government officials who have achieved results at the local level.

The President-elect has said that one of the first things he will do when he gets to Washington is grant California and other states permission to control car tailpipe emissions, something the Bush administration denied.

   Saturday - December 13, 2008

Britain endured its coldest start to winter in 30 years.  Anyone seen Al Bore around here?

Okay ... couldn’t resist this. 

The article is severely edited by yours true, simply because I wanted to post these few lines. 
The entire article at the link.

My research (?) is hardly scientific with regard to the warming trend I’m told I’m too damn dumb to recognize.
Thing is, I know for certain that so far this winter I have been running the electric floor heater in the bedroom almost all night long.  Didn’t do that last year. It was cold but I could turn it off.  There is no central heating in this old house and electric in this country is far more expensive then it is back home.

Example, our electric bill for the last quarter was approx. $550.00.  We estimate our next quarterly bill will be approx. $1400.00.  That’s taking into account the recent increase in electric by a whopping 30 PERCENT. 

During what was supposed to be the summer, there were many,many nights I went to bed wearing flannel PJs.  In actual fact, I did not put away all the winter stuff when spring arrived.

At the time of writing this and with a storage heater running, I’m wearing a flannel shirt over which is a hooded sweat and over that a quilted flannel shirt/jacket.  Oh yeah, am wearing long johns and have been ALL week long.  Last year hardly wore em at all.

I don’t need the hood on this thing but it’s comfortable because it covers my neck very well.  Feet still a bit chilly tho.  If I stay on the puter into the evening, I probably will pull the hood up.

Warming?  Where?  Not where I am.

The figures will come as no surprise to the millions of Britons who have spent weeks braving morning ice and scraping frost from windscreens.

The statistics came on the day ministers in Brussels were meeting to set new global warming targets and at the end of the first week of major UN climate change talks in Poland.

The frosts and night temperatures of minus 12.7C (9.1F) are in stark contrast to the recent run of mild winters.

The last time Britain had such a cold start to December was in 1976 - after the drought summer. Then the average temperature was 0.8C (33.4F).

DAMN COLD WHERE I ARE

   Tuesday - November 25, 2008

Where is Al Gore?

Massive Snow Storm Slams Europe

12” in Finland and western Russia

5” in UK, temps plummet

Rain In Spain Falls Mainly As Snow

French confused, burn cars in Paris to stay warm

Reporters panic, forget how to count, how to tell time, and how to read thermometers!!

Snowstorm Disrupts Travel in Finland, Sweden, Russia
By Juho Erkheikki and Niklas Magnusson

Residents in Sweden, Finland and Russia were left stranded and without power for a second day as the year’s first winter storm pummeled northern Europe.

Flights were delayed in Helsinki and Stockholm as northern winds forced airports to shut runways. Snow blanketed the region and the wind blew what had accumulated since the storm hit yesterday. Thousands were without power.

The storm buried the region with up to 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) of snow, catching locals unprepared after last winter, the mildest on record. The bare ground then forced Helsinki and Stockholm residents to cancel outdoor activities such as skiing and sledding.

“This comes as a real surprise,” said Tomas Lindberg, 36, as he dug out his car in Helsinki and tried to get to work. “I had to fetch my snow shovel from the attic.”

Weather apocalypse hits Europe
An enormous cyclone has wreaked havoc across Europe from Scandinavia to the Balkans, bringing snow gales and claiming lives. In Russia, weather surprises during the weekend started with beating two climate records, for warmth and low atmosphere pressure, and ended with a tempest and heavy snow which brought destruction and left more than 130,000 people without electricity.

This weekend marks a rapid halt to the abnormally warm weather which lasted in western Russia for most of November.

Moscow and St Petersburg suffered the worst because of the gale, where heavy snowfall along with strong winds have killed one person and injured several others.

A man died in St Petersburg while sitting in his car when it was hit by six trees felled by the wind. 

UK brought to standstill as five inches of snow falls in an hour

Severe weather warnings were issued by the Met Office for much of the south east of England, the east of England, the East Midlands and Yorkshire, with the freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall prompting fears of traffic chaos.

The heaviest snowfall was in Aberdeen, where 14 centimetres (5.5ins) of snow fell between Saturday and Sunday. Norfolk and Lincolnshire were the most affected places in England, with up to five centimetres (2.4 ins) falling in just one hour.

The lowest weekend temperature was reported in rural Oxfordshire, where it sank to -21F (-6 C) overnight on Saturday. With gritters and snow ploughs out in force, most major roads remained open, although the going was slow on minor roads and police received a high volume of calls reporting minor accidents.

snow on the ground at Tibbenham, South Norfolk

Even worse than the mayhem caused by a few inches of snow, every top football team in the UK go shut out this week!

England
The top five all scored a huge blank over a dull Premiership weekend. Fulham held Liverpool to a hard earned 0-0 draw at Anfield. Manchester United and Aston Villa drew a blank at Villa Park and Chelsea did the same at home to struggling Newcastle United.

Meanwhile Arsenal had a worst weekend losing 0-3 at Manchester City. All in all though it was a pretty much a non eventful weekend.

Several good little euro-socialists are displaying their capitalist roots

Both of Andorra’s ski areas opened at the weekend with up to a metre of fresh snow on upper slopes, which some resorts are claiming is the best snow conditions they’ve seen in 40 years.

On the Spanish side of the border Baqueria Beret, one of the country’s three largest resorts, also opened. All three resorts and a dozen others in Spain, several of which – including Formigal and Sierra Nevada - had already opened a week ago, are opening at least a week ahead of schedule.

On the French side of the Pyrenees, home to another few dozen ski areas, resorts are sticking more closely to their planned opening dates despite huge falls there, with ST Lary at one point reporting the biggest snowfall in Europe.

However a second major French ski area has opened, joining Tignes which has already clocked up two months of its 2008-9 season having opened in September. Val Thorens, Europe’s highest ski resort, opened on Saturday with an extensive ski test.

on the minus side, the Spainish and Portuguese local fishing fleets are grounded until the weather gets better

In the northeastern region of Galicia the strong winds combined with waves of up to five metres had forced most fishing boats to remain at port while they waited for better weather conditions.

Meteorologists predict the rough weather, which began on Monday, will last until at least on Friday.

This may lead to an acute anchovy shortage, so people are urged to stock up on frozen pizzas right away!

Here’s one of those silly maps that are only good for showing on TV with a pretty blonde in front of waving her hands around:

It looks like somebody crying and they have Spain running out of their nose, which could really hurt.

   Wednesday - October 29, 2008

First October snow in London in 74 YEARS as Arctic blast sweeps across UK.

There’s a number of photos and the rest of the story at the link below.
I had posted earlier that the snow was first in five years.  I now stand corrected.
Whatever .... until Al Bore confirms that the snow fell and it’s really this cold, I’ll reserve judgment.

(I keep hearing that old song, But Baby It’s Cold Outside)

Actually, I just thought the photos would be nice to look at.

One dead, thousands without power and the first October snow in London in 74 YEARS as Arctic blast sweeps across UK

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 2:46 PM on 29th October 2008

One man was killed and thousands were left without power today after inches of snow fell across the country overnight.

Just two days after the end of British Summertime, the first snowfall of the year saw a lorry driver killed when his vehicle collided with another lorry on the M40 in Buckinghamshire.

Tonnes of lard being carried in one of the lorries was left strewn over all six lanes of the motorway causing long delays.

Thousands of homeowners were today without power after high voltage cables were brought down by the night’s snowfall.

AN ENGLISH ROBIN. CUTE. HAVE EM IN BACK GARDEN AND FUN TO WATCH.  ENGLISH ROBINS MUCH SMALLER THEN ONES FOUND IN NO.AMERICA.

http://tinyurl.com/55tmam

   Tuesday - October 28, 2008

Damn that Global Warming!

It’s snowing here. Hard. Not much is sticking yet, but I saw a car on the road that had a good 4” of snow on it. And tomorrow the weather wieners say it’s going to be 60 and sunny. In the meantime we’re also going to have strong winds, gusting to 50mph or more. Go figure.

Personally, I think this is somehow all Bush’s fault.

   Friday - October 17, 2008

Damn That Global Warming

Ancient Sahara Graveyard Hints at Once-Green Desert

A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.

The slender arms of the youngsters were still extended to the woman in perpetual embrace when researchers discovered their skeletons in a remarkable cemetery that is providing clues to two civilizations who lived there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green.

Some 200 graves of humans were found during fieldwork at the site in 2005 and 2006, as well as remains of animals, large fish and crocodiles.

“Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don’t live in the desert,” said Sereno. “I realized we were in the green Sahara.”

The graveyard, uncovered by hot desert winds, is near what would have been a lake at the time people lived there.

It’s in a region called Gobero, hidden away in Niger’s forbidding Tenere Desert, known to Tuareg nomads as a “desert within a desert.”

The human remains dated from two distinct populations that lived there during wet times, with a dry period in between.

The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine when these ancient people lived there. Even the most recent were some 1,000 years before the building of the pyramids in Egypt.

The first group, known as the Kiffian, hunted wild animals and speared huge perch with harpoons. They colonized the region when the Sahara was at its wettest, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago.

The researchers said the Kiffians were tall, sometimes reaching well over 6 feet.

The second group lived in the region between 7,000 and 4,500 years ago. The Tenerians were smaller and had a mixed economy of hunting, fishing and cattle herding.

“At first glance, it’s hard to imagine two more biologically distinct groups of people burying their dead in the same place,” said team member Chris Stojanowski, a bioarchaeologist from Arizona State University.

Stojanowski said ridges on the thigh bone of one Kiffian man show he had huge leg muscles, “which suggests he was eating a lot of protein and had an active, strenuous lifestyle. The Kiffian appear to have been fairly healthy — it would be difficult to grow a body that tall and muscular without sufficient nutrition.”

On the other hand, ridges on a Tenerian male were barely visible.

“This man’s life was less rigorous, perhaps taking smaller fish and game with more advanced hunting technologies,” Stojanowski said.

While the Sahara is desert today, a small difference in Earth’s orbit once brought seasonal monsoons farther north, wetting the landscape with lakes with lush margins and drawing animals and people.

So now we have proof. Way way waaaaay back in the day, the Sahara was something close to Eden. And the people lived there, happily hunting, gathering, and flying their kites. They were big and strong, and probably got by just fine without National Health Care or Talk Radio.

Then things changed. Some proto-Conservative discovered fire, and it’s been all downhill since. Before you know it - in a mere 1000 years - all the grasses were gone, the forests denuded, even the rains had stopped. All because of those greenhouse gases being put into the air non-stop by those greedy people. Pretty soon they ran out of food, and had to get by on little fish, dried rats, and those awful cold MREs distributed by FEMA. To no one’s surprise, they all died out, and what was once a ripe and lush eco-sphere is now barren desert. I blame Ur-Bush for this disaster.

And speaking of Eden, here’s today’s smut Eve.

   Sunday - October 12, 2008

EU instructions on climate change.  The sky is falling and only the stupid don’t believe.

Ed Miliband will follow EU instructions on climate change

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 12/10/2008

Have your say Read comments

For all the acres of newsprint devoted to the return to the Cabinet of Peter Mandelson, by far the most important and potentially damaging move in Gordon Brown’s recent Government reorganisation could well be his setting up of a wholly new ministry, laughably called the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Under a new Secretary of State, Ed Miliband, the new department merges two groups of officials who, over the past year, have been ever more obviously at war with each other; and on the outcome of that battle hangs nothing less than whether, within a few years, Britain can still continue to operate as an economically viable nation.

On the one hand have been the civil servants charged with running Britain’s energy policy at the former DTI, now known as BERR (Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform). As became increasingly evident from speeches by John Hutton, our former business secretary now moved to Defence, his officials had become acutely aware that Britain is fast approaching an unprecedented energy crisis.

Within seven years, or even much sooner, we stand to lose nearly 40 per cent of the generating capacity which meets our current peak electricity needs. All but one of the 10 nuclear power stations which provide a fifth of our electricity are due to close and, as we were warned last week, they are all now so decrepit that much of that capacity may not be available even this winter.

Also due to close, under the EU’s Large Combustion Plants directive, are nine more large power stations, six coal-fired, which will soon be running out of the remaining quota of hours Brussels has allowed them.

This was why, as “realists”, the BERR officials recognised that our only hope of keeping our lights on and Britain’s economy functioning was to make it a top national priority to build, as fast as possible, at least a dozen new nuclear and coal-fired power stations, such as that planned at Kingsnorth. As Mr Hutton told the recent Labour Party conference, “no coal, plus no nuclear, equals no lights, no power, no future”.

On the other hand, totally opposed to them at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) down the road, have been the climate change fanatics, obsessed with global warming, for whom the highest national priority, as expressed in their recent Climate Change Act, is for Britain to lead the world by cutting its carbon emissions by 60 per cent in the next 40 years.

(HERE COME THE SCARIEST PART)

The most influential of these officials, as Defra’s chief scientific adviser, has been Dr Robert Watson, until 2002 chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a man so passionately committed to fighting climate change that he was once hailed by Al Gore as “the hero of the planet”.

For the rest of the article, link below.

http://tinyurl.com/4mescl

   Saturday - September 13, 2008

Oil Down, Gas Up: Global Economy vs Hurricane Ike

Crude Price Below $100/bbl, First Time Since April

Gasoline prices jumped at the wholesale level Friday as Hurricane Ike swept through Gulf of Mexico, prompting companies along the Texas coast to shut down refining and drilling operations.

Crude oil on the futures market, however, briefly sank below the psychologically important $100-a-barrel mark for the first time since April 2—showing that investors believe a worsening global economy will continue to drive down demand for some time in the United States and elsewhere.

The fact that U.S. fuel demand is so weak right now might mean the recent surge in the wholesale price of gasoline—which rose to about $4.85 a gallon in the Gulf Coast market Friday—might not be passed along to consumers unless Ike’s impact is severe and long-lasting.

“Major oil companies are sensitive to raising prices in this environment,” said Ben Brockwell, director of data pricing and information services at the Oil Price Information Service.

“Hopefully it’s a temporary phenomenon, but we won’t know until next week,” Brockwell said.
...
The average U.S. retail price for gasoline edged up less than a penny to $3.675 Friday from Thursday, according to auto club AAA, OPIS and Wright Express.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude for October delivery rose 31 cents to settle at $101.18 a barrel, after briefly sinking to $99.99.

October gasoline futures climbed 2.08 cents to settle at $2.7696 a gallon on Nymex.

“All week long, it’s been a gasoline story more than anything. If you just looked at the crude market independently, you wouldn’t know that we had a couple of hurricanes,” said Jim Ritterbusch, president of energy consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates, referring to Ike and last week’s Gustav.

“This dichotomy could persist for a few more days next week,” he said. But “once the storm factor subsides, we’ll see a much higher correlation between gasoline and crude oil.”

Gas prices in my part of NJ jumped 10 cents a gallon overnight. I’m hoping this is really really temporary because I’ve only got half a tank right now. Ike is making a big mess in Texas. It looks like as many as 100,000 people did not head the evacuation orders, even though Texas made a huge effort to assist folks who couldn’t evacuate themselves. Now I’m hearing that some of the rescue efforts are being suspended because the risk is too high to the rescue crews. So there are going to be some fatalities. Say a prayer for Texas and her soggy citizens.

The storm flooded Galveton’s historic district with 7 feet of water, which has since subsided to 4 feet, according to Galveston County official Margaret Bunch. A foot of water flooded the city’s main courthouse, where many people rode out the storm, she said.

A fire broke out at a Galveston yacht basin, where boats are stored and fixed, said Galveston Fire Chief Michael Varela Sr., and firefighters were unable to reach it because the area was flooded with about 8 feet of water.

Galveston City Manager Steve LeBlanc said about 40 percent of the city’s 57,523 residents chose to stay despite evacuation orders. “It’s unfortunate that the warnings that we sent out were not heeded,” he said.

   Thursday - September 11, 2008

Our one left leaning reader gets some post time too

We have a reader who leans a bit to the left, and not because one of his shoes is thinner on that side. I’ll call him “LI” because he always emails me about conversations he is having with folks online and changes their names to some initials. So he sends me this one ... and it sure sounds to me like he fully approves of the outcome. Um, you did take you blood pressure meds today, right?

The story: some UK Gaia folks broke into a power station to paint graffitti on the smokestack. They got caught. Busted. Went to trial. Claimed their actions were legal. Guess what happened then?

UK Jury To Leftist Hooligans:
That’s OK, The Ends Justify The Means



here’s the whole email. Only the initials have been changed to protect the liberal.

Subject: Wow! UK Jury Decides That Threat of Global Warming Justifies Breaking The Law

Cleared! Jury Decides That Threat of Global Warming Justifies Breaking The Law
by Michael McCarthy
September 11, 2008

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/09/11-6
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cleared-jury-decides-that-threat-of-global-warming-justifies-breaking-the-law-925561.html

This looks hopeful for real progress.  This is not legal advice.  If you’re interested, check with your attorney.  The statute involved was a UK statute, but there might be something similar in the law where you are. “LI”

Excerpt

“The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage....

“[Defendant Ben Stewart] added: “This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. When a jury of normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave Government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy. It’s time we turned to them instead of coal.”

“Defendant [Emily] Hall [from New Zealand] said: “The jury heard from [James Hansen,] the most distinguished climate scientist in the world. How could they ignore his warnings and reject his leading scientific arguments?”

Geez, putting this post up is like throwing raw meat to starving wolves. Duck and Cover, Drew!

   Wednesday - August 27, 2008

Bobby Jindal is no fool

Unlike his predecessor, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal went ahead and declared a state of emergency for his state before hurricane Gustav arrives. Just in case, you know. Four or more days before the storm might even arrive.

Tropical Storm Gustav’s impending arrival in the Gulf of Mexico, potentially as a major hurricane, has prompted Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to declare an emergency for the state.
“We are going to hope for the best, but we’re preparing for the worst,” Jindal said Wednesday.

The move puts Louisiana in position to receive federal disaster assistance. Jindal also said 3,000 National Guard members will be deployed to vulnerable areas in Louisiana on Thursday to assist with securing shelters and preparing for possible evacuations.

Jindal cited forecasts that Gustav, which killed 22 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic this week, could become a Category 3 hurricane in the coming days and hit the Gulf Coast by late Monday morning.

I wonder if he’s making sure the school buses are all tuned up and ready to go?

Alluding to Katrina’s disastrous aftermath, Jindal said Louisiana is “better prepared than before” and has hundreds of buses and thousands of shelter beds lined up in preparation for another storm.

He urged residents to fill up their cars, stockpile three days’ worth of food and water, and refill prescriptions in case evacuations become necessary.

The state has requested a “pre-landfall” declaration from President Bush, asking the federal government to release personnel, ambulances and other assistance to prepare for the storm.

Still, Jindal stressed that “our people also have personal responsibility” to prepare for the storm.

Damn, I guess he is!

Mayor Ray Nagin said he planned to cut short his trip to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, to return to New Orleans by Wednesday night.

Is that idiot still around? Oy vey. Well Ray-ray, get out your sack and start packing up yo chocolate, it soon be steppin time agin.

I read through almost the whole article and didn’t see any mention of what political party Jindal might belong too ... and you know what that means!

Jindal is scheduled to speak next week at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, but he said Tuesday that he’ll change his plans if the storm warrants it.

“As long as there’s a chance that we’ll be in this storm’s path, I’ll be here in Louisiana,” he said. “I’m going to make sure I’m here personally to help lead the preparation efforts and, if necessary, any recovery efforts that are necessary after the fact.”

Yup, there ya go. Preparedness, responsibility, a usable plan, some pro-active measures ... sounds like a Republican to me. Let’s hope the storm clobbers central Mexico instead.

   Sunday - August 24, 2008

STAND BY FOR AMERICA’S LIGHTS TO GO OUT.  (NO, IT ISN’T AN ANTI-USA RANT)

This guy is really good. He writes every week on this subject.  He lectures about the falshood re. gorebal warming.

I’ve been light on the posting this wkend for which I always feel guilty.  Working on something and not even certain if I’ll end up blogging it. Although I think I might.

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 24/08/2008

From The Sunday Telegraph

Correction: things are worse than I thought.
Last week I reported on the dangerous unreality overtaking US energy policy, as television commercials for both presidential candidates focus on the need to build more wind turbines. To highlight its absurdity I said that the 10,000 US turbines already built generate only 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, little more than one big coal-fired power station.

The reality, it turns out, is even worse.

The notional “capacity” of America’s turbines is 19GW, but their actual output, as shown by an Amherst University study, is less than 17 per cent of that - even less than that of a large coal-fired plant.

So the two men vying for the White House are centring their policy on an energy source that currently provides barely 1 per cent of America’s electricity. Some 50 per cent of it comes from coal.

Yet such is the power of the “green” lobby that of 151 new coal-fired power stations proposed last year, 59 were vetoed by state governments, while the rest face court challenges. Whether it is McCain or Obama, stand by for America’s lights to go out.

Now this part of the same column in Sunday Telegraph, shows ya just one tiny example of a country tossing away it’s sovereignty and how it impacts on England.  The EU declares and the UK says yes, oh yes. Screw me again! And they do.  Crude I guess but it sure does seem that way these days. Here,read it for yourself.

Lords produce waste paper on waste policy
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 24/08/2008

There was a time when, if a Lords committee had been asked to investigate a massive policy failure, a scandal which continues to make daily headlines in the press, it might have made some effort to ask why things had gone so horrendously wrong.

But when 12 peers last week reported on the shambles engulfing the way that Britain disposes of its rubbish, the result was 127 pages of such anodyne verbiage that no one ploughing through it would have any idea that we have a national crisis on our hands.

In fact the headlines about the disintegration of Britain’s system of waste disposal - from householders being fined for putting rubbish in the wrong bin to the epidemic of flytipping - reflect only a small part of the disaster.

Even more outrageous is the fact that, wherever one looks at it, our waste handling system is in breakdown, so that, for instance, millions of tons of rubbish supposedly collected for recycling must be shipped out to China or the Third World because we no longer have any way to deal with it.

The reason why this has happened - and why it was ignored by those 12 dutiful little apparatchiks from the House of Lords - is that we have handed over direction of our waste policy to Brussels, which requires us to implement a strategy wholly inappropriate to our needs.

Until recently we still had a waste system as efficient as any in Europe. We had a fast-growing recycling industry, mainly reliant on private enterprise. But we also used much more of our rubbish than other countries for the ultimately beneficial purpose of reclaiming otherwise unproductive land by landfill.

What has thrown all this into chaos has been the imposition of a wholly different EU policy which seeks to eliminate landfilling (originally because some countries, such as Holland and Denmark were running out of land to fill). The EU puts recycling at the top of its priority list, followed by incineration. Only then can what remains be buried.

To conform with the Euro-model, we have therefore been required to discourage landfilling by closing down our rubbish tips and imposing ever higher “landfill taxes”, to build hugely expensive incinerators and to collect far more waste for “recycling” than we can actually recycle.

Instead of all this being admitted, it has become shrouded in propagandist humbug.

We are repeatedly told we are “running out of sites for landfill”, when every year we quarry out 110 million cubic metres of soil and rock, more than the refuse we produce. We are told that incineration is cheaper than landfill, when in fact it can cost as much as £190 a ton, as opposed to a maximum landfill cost of only £62.

To please the EU we claim to be collecting millions of tons of rubbish for recycling which is then either shipped abroad or just landfilled regardless.

We have created a shambles of a system which is failing in every way - so that we still face the prospect of massive fines from Brussels for failing to conform - while the once-friendly relations between binmen and the public are reduced to open war.

And what is the response of those noble lords? They babble on about the need for “waste prevention to be integrated into sustainable business models”. They “welcome the establishment of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement”.

They suggest the Government should lower VAT rates to “promote the development of sustainable products”. They don’t even seem to know that VAT rates cannot be lowered without permission from our real government in Brussels - the one which set all this disaster in train in the first place.

http://tinyurl.com/5u25pb

   Saturday - August 23, 2008

Meanwhile, Down Under

I’ve been busy trying hard to find a job this past week, so I haven’t posted a whole lot. I thought you might enjoy this one. Sure, it’s winter down there, but come on. It’s Australia, where the temps never drop below 130 or something awful like that.

Global Warming Rally Frozen Out




Freezing conditions deterred all but the most hardy supporters when the Climate Change Torch Relay
reached Hassans Walls Lookout on Friday on its way to Canberra.

Climate change may be THE hot international issue of the moment but enthusiasm for the cause clearly wanes on a freezing Friday afternoon when the campaign moves to a mountain top where the wind chill factor is below zero.

This was perhaps the predictably disappointing outcome when the GetUp! climate change lobby group organised an enviro torch relay from Hassans Walls Lookout to Queen Elizabeth Park to focus public attention on the issue.

Ironically, global warming would probably have been welcomed by the handful of hardy souls who turned up to lend their support to the campaign on one of the coldest Lithgow days of this or any other year.

The wind and solar powered torch — created by the designers of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Torch — was carried to The Walls by two pedal cyclists.

There it was handed over to the small group of supporters who stuck to their task and ignored the big chill while on their way to Elizabeth Park.

The climate change torch continued its journey around Bathurst on Saturday where it was greeted by a big crowd at a schoolboy Rugby Union carnival at St Stanislaus College oval.

After speeches and several laps of the oval it was handed over to a representative from Mudgee to continue through the Central West.

The torch relay was simultaneously launched from several locations around Australia early last week and is scheduled to finish in Canberra on September 21.

No word on whether Al Gore had been in the neighborhood ahead of time, but it’s likely. God has a sense of humor too.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/23/2008 at 11:40 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Humor •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks (0) • Permalink •  

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