I thought it was a bit chilly yesterday evening, but being raised to be parsimonious about public utilities, I have the heat set at 66°F (19°C for my metric readers) and I'll often just cover myself with a blanket while doing whatever I'm doing rather than kick it up to 68° or warmer. Besides it snowed Saturday and the yard was still beautifully covered in white. True, when I was a child in Canoga Park I was cold when it got below 70°, but my blood started to thicken with that 8 AM long distance running class at CSUN, there was winter 1990-91 in Helena, Montana (and this after a couple of summers in the Bay Area 😏), and this'll be my 24th winter in Peoria.
But when it seemed rather warm in the Parish Hall when I stepped in there for a few moments before going to bed and the temp in there was only 62°, I figured I needed to check the heat. Granted the Parish Hall always feels warmer than the Parsonage when their thermostats report about the same temp. But it was downright chilly when I stepped back into Parsonage. Still I didn't expect what I saw on the thermostat: 50°F (10°C)!
Well, come to think of it, I hadn't heard the furnace running, but I've washed dishes and done a couple of loads of laundry and I hear the water heater (and still feel hot water). But the furnace does not want to go on. And of course it's one without a pilot light, so this is not going to be something simple like the wind blew it out through the exhaust and I can simply re-light it. But I'm not calling someone at 11 PM, either. But with a hooded sweatshirt over the PJ's (my head is on the outside wall) and the oil-filled radiant heater at the foot of my bed, I was actually warm enough overnight.
Meanwhile, in this morning's mail is an invitation to join Sam's Club addressed to "Sandra Tibbetts" at the (correct) Parsonage address. Sandra Tibbetts? I have every once in a while received mailings for "Mrs. Steven Tibbetts" (who I have yet to meet, at least using that name), but this is the first time she's had a first name. Next to this address is a photo of a diapered baby crawling away, and on the other side is a mother with infant captioned "Big saving for growing families." I think not.
And no, that's not how I was warm enough last night.
Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts
Monday, November 23, 2015
Monday, February 07, 2011
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Global Warming? Not This Globe
Christopher Booker of the UK's Daily Telegraph writes yesterday:
The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts", reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation", reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.
As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world....
Read the rest of Booker's column here. (Hat tip to Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail.)
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts", reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation", reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.
As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world....
Read the rest of Booker's column here. (Hat tip to Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail.)
Friday, December 05, 2008
ELCA at Chaos Manor
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America hit Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail (scroll to the end of the day) yesterday when a ELCA layman from Southern California cc'd a letter he'd sent to someone at the ELCA headquarters in Chicago. Exactly what set off Col. Haynes I cannot tell. Perhaps it is the plea released earlier this week for us to sign on to this letter to President-elect Obama "calling for climate justice" (whatever the hell that is). That's the best I can do via Google for something new, though ELCA voices have been parroting the "climate change" mantra for some time. (See the Shellfish blog's articles Hanson: "Spiritual Blasphemy" from last summer and "Call Me Ishmael" or "Gore-d Again" from over a year ago for examples.)
Anyway, read the reaction of an ELCA layman to his church's enthusiasms, as it appears on "the original blog."
And for the rest of you, Chaos Manor is linked on my other blog and is highly recommended by Pastor Zip. And for Earth's sake and yours, don't sign this letter; its science is worse than its theology.
Anyway, read the reaction of an ELCA layman to his church's enthusiasms, as it appears on "the original blog."
HUMAN INDUCED CLIMATE WARMING ???Thanks, Col. Haynes. Though be prepared to be ignored. Any dissident minds at 8765 W. Higgins Road or www.elca.org have been pretty much sent to places where they can have no influence on the ELCA's public voice.
Gentlepersons:
The ELCA is once more meddling in an issue that is far above your pay grade as ecclesiastics. Clearly, you have to be accepting a premise that you and all ELCA staffers can not evaluate the truth of yourselves ... namely that "Global Warming" is human induced ... if it is, indeed even happening at all. Contrary to what you are basing your latest excursion into non-ecclesiastic issues on, there is ample and well founded scientific evidence in support of a view contrary to the IPCC ... the International Panel on Climate Change of the UN. The most straightforward way to expose yourselves to a scientifically sound source of contrary information is to Google "NIPCC", to reach the Non-Governmental IPCC, here: http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=NIPCC&btnG=Google+Search
How can this be possible? How can a prestigious UN authorized scientific inquiry be in error?
Well, go and see at NIPCC.
Before you do that, permit me to point out an example of a similar mass misapprehension that has now apparently slunk off the public stage without even a polite goodbye.
I speak of the so-called "Hydrogen Economy",,, remember that one?
Not more than a year or so ago that was going to solve all our air pollution problems, make us independent of foreign oil, in fact, make us independent of hydrocarbon fuels, basta, period!
Our esteemed governator here in CA was going to install a number of hydrogen filling stations on our freeways to help the "HE" along.
What happened?
An "inconvenient truth" rose up and smote the HE right out of the nation's awareness.
It would require far more energy from non-hydrogen energy generation to produce the hydrogen than the hydrogen could ever produce by being burned in turn. Now that's a law of physics that you will not find in the Bible, but that is woven into the reality that is God's Universe.
And where was all that energy going to have to come from?
Why by conventional power generation, including coal, petroleum and of course, a vast new investment in nuclear power plants. But did the once so enthused media sources formally announce the "Death of the HE"?
Of course not. That would be too embarrassing, and would generally undermine their credibility.
So, please, before our ELCA is once again led down a dead end garden path by a new array of enthusiastic dunderheads, at least expose yourselves to the hard facts available on the Internet that counter the dominant but false propaganda that has persuaded you and so many other well meaning, scientifically under-educated, enthusiastic would-be do-gooders that they will contribute to saving our precious world by ceasing what they are not doing: causing Global Warming. Please note:
Even if there is Global Warming (and that is also unproven) it does not automatically follow that it is human induced. Realize that in the '60s of the last century the threat was global cooling, and we were regaled with a flood of articles predicting an imminent "little ice age", and about the same time the "Club of Rome" was predicting world wide famine if the world population rose above 5 billion souls... it is now estimated at 6.5 billion.
One interesting example of an argument against the HIGW claim is this: When the same computer simulations used to support the claims of coming HIGW are applied to conditions say, 100 years ago, they fail to properly predict the actual global weather that was subsequently recorded.
Do yourselves, the ELCA as an organization and all of us parishioners a favor and open yourselves to the possibility, just the possibility that we are all being deceived.... yet again. Well, almost all!
And when you have confirmed that, think about concentrating in the future on the proper business of the church, and avoiding a vain search after virtue by climbing aboard the bandwagons pursuing solutions to every purported, claimed catastrophe that looms up in our so-gullible media.
Very sincerely yours,
William E. Haynes
St Paul's Lutheran Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, CA
And for the rest of you, Chaos Manor is linked on my other blog and is highly recommended by Pastor Zip. And for Earth's sake and yours, don't sign this letter; its science is worse than its theology.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Leif Erikson Day
Yesterday, a Monday, was the Columbus Day holiday. Columbus Day used to fall on October 12, recalling the day in 1492 when Christopher Columbus "discovered" the New World.October 9 is Leif Erikson Day, commemorating the Viking pioneer who landed in North America some 500 years earlier. Here is President Bush's proclamation:
Leif Erikson Day, 2007For Leif the Lucky's discovery of North America, you can read this portion of The Saga of Eric the Red from 1387 (translated, of course). Or there is this more modern telling the life of Leif Erikson. While Leif himself only visited in the year AD 1000, Vikings from Iceland and Greenland soon settled in North America, as proven by the archaeological discoveries at L'anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, beginning only in the 1960s. But it seems that it was then a period of what we would currently call "global warming" (think farms in Greenland), and the outpost was abandoned as the pioneers went back to Iceland.
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America
On Leif Erikson Day, we commemorate the enduring legacy of a brave explorer and honor the significant contributions of Nordic Americans who continue to enrich our culture and our way of life.
Leif Erikson, a son of Iceland and grandson of Norway, led a determined crew across the Atlantic more than 1,000 years ago and became one of the first Europeans known to reach North America. The courage of these pioneers helped open the world to new exploration and important discoveries. Today, Nordic Americans help strengthen our country, and their determination and optimism make America a more hopeful land. Our Nation continues to benefit from strong ties with Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, and we are grateful for their continued friendship.
To honor Leif Erikson and to celebrate our citizens of Nordic American heritage, the Congress, by joint resolution (Public Law 88-566) approved on September 2, 1964, has authorized the President to proclaim October 9 of each year as "Leif Erikson Day."
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim October 9, 2007, as Leif Erikson Day. I call upon all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs to honor our rich Nordic-American heritage.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-second.
GEORGE W. BUSH
Oh, why October 9? According to the Leif Ericson Viking Ship organization, October 9, 1825 was the arrival date of the first Norwegian immigrant ship, the Restauration, in New York.
So Columbus only re-discovered America. I'll go see the replica of the Nina anyway, since it is still in Peoria.
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