This Sunday morning dawned dark and dreary -- so what else is new in the Pacific Northwest?
Grumpy was innocently sitting by the kitchen window, which looks out over Lake Washington, reading a recent issue of the magazine, "Country Extra". Being engrossed in the beautiful photographs of pastoral scenes of Spring flowers and dark green hillsides with milk cows contentedly grazing in the distance, he hadn't looked out the window since the light of day revealed the day's weather. The fast, skinny son came into the kitchen, began his usual routine of micro-waving a cup of water into a sufficient temperature to make a cup of instant Mocha, and then asked Grumpy, "Are you going out somewhere this morning?"
Now, this household well knows that Grumpy gets up early Sunday morning and goes to church for the 8 am service. So Grumpy looked up at his youngest son and answered, rather sneeringly, "Why, yes of course!"
"In this snow?" Darrell asked with concern.
"Huh!? Wha.. ... -- Oh my gosh!!" Grumpy declared as he peeked out toward the lake and beheld an inch or more of snow on the balcony railing, with more snow wafting down from the dark grey sky.
This photo of our front yard, with the picnic table awaiting warmer weather, shows what it looked like at about 6 am this Sunday (20 April 2008) morning. The outside air temperature was 28 F, but the road surface was too warm for the snow to stick or turn to ice, so Grumpy got to go to church after all.
Grumpy heard that other places got lots more (and some, none at all!). Up north in Snohomish County around the Buffalo Ranch, he heard that there was 6-8 inches of the stuff a day or so ago. Where did Al Gore get the idea that we are headed for "global warming"?
Now, this household well knows that Grumpy gets up early Sunday morning and goes to church for the 8 am service. So Grumpy looked up at his youngest son and answered, rather sneeringly, "Why, yes of course!"
"In this snow?" Darrell asked with concern.
"Huh!? Wha.. ... -- Oh my gosh!!" Grumpy declared as he peeked out toward the lake and beheld an inch or more of snow on the balcony railing, with more snow wafting down from the dark grey sky.
This photo of our front yard, with the picnic table awaiting warmer weather, shows what it looked like at about 6 am this Sunday (20 April 2008) morning. The outside air temperature was 28 F, but the road surface was too warm for the snow to stick or turn to ice, so Grumpy got to go to church after all.Grumpy heard that other places got lots more (and some, none at all!). Up north in Snohomish County around the Buffalo Ranch, he heard that there was 6-8 inches of the stuff a day or so ago. Where did Al Gore get the idea that we are headed for "global warming"?
All the warm air at the North Pole which is drowning the Polar bears is pushing the cold air south to snow on North America.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't Al Gore's idea. He was just passing on the information, and rather poorly, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteHave you looked at the glaciers at Mt Rainier in the past 20 years? Compare them to the size and location of the end of them when we first moved out here and you'll see that they have receded an incredible distance.
They say the same thing has happened in Antarctica, and in the Artic Ocean the ice is nearly gone in the summer time.
I'm not quoting Al Gore here, I'm talking about what the Eskimos are saying. Polar bears are drowning because there isn't enough ice for them to land on.
So a little unusually cold weather here and there is nothing on the global scale.
Why take Gore's word for it?
ReplyDeleteWhat about the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office?
They compiled this data from 1860 to 2000 which clearly shows an overall trend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
And in all of that you can see plenty of year over year declines. One day in Seattle in April is a bad guage. Besides, February was pretty warm as I recall.
But don't take my word for it, the National Weather Service has records you can query here.
http://www.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=sew
There is no doubt that the Earth's atmosphere is getting warmer; it's been doing that for the last 15,000-20,000 years! But this puny series of samples taken over the last 188 years is not statistically significant! Think about it: 188 years out of 15,000; about 1 percent. Al Gore and even the scientists who take this data and make a mountain-out-of-a-mole-hill case with it are just trying to stir up the emotions of people who don't stop to think about the illogic of trying to extrapolate a teeny-tiny bit of data into a prediction of what is to come.
ReplyDeleteNothing man can do will stop the natural global warming that has been taking place for the last 15,000 or so years. Can man slow it down? Maybe -- maybe not significantly, though.
The Earth is huge naturally equalizing system; man and nature produce CO2 and hydrocarbons, trees and plants consume same and produce O2 in return. Young, rapidly-growing trees and plants consume more carbon than older, slower growing trees. Man cuts down old trees, they are replaced by young, new trees. Such it is and such it will always be.
Live conservatively, but don't stop living.
Several years ago, the same people whose religion is Global Warming predicted that within 10 years the weather would be so cold that many of the world's population would starve to death because farmland now in production would be permafrosted. When that did not happen, they decided that we must be warming up, using the aforementioned speck of data to attempt to prove the case. I have a few questions though: The Farmer's Almanac by Ben Franklin became famous because it predicted a July snowstorm which Ben wrote in a Flu delirium. Fact is that a volcano erupted and summer never came that year on the planet. The last mini-ice age was ending which had devastated Europe because of the reduced growing season and a stimulus to migrate to the new world. The temperature before this was actually warmer than it is now but the populations were not huge, nor were autos invented yet nor other industrial revolution machines. Mt. Etna pumps more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere in one day than all the cars on the Earth in a year. So how does all this random gobbledegook make it doomsday for the Polar Bear? I think that the few (as in not a majority) scientists that claim global warming are spouting a religion similar to those who claim that although nothing has ever evolved that can be proven, that is how we came to be. It is easy to provide examples of a species devolving by the way..
ReplyDeleteJust my 2cents..and if it is hot, then throw a virgin into Mt. Rainier.