I thought I should swiftly note some data which ought lessen the alarm some are made anxious by.
First, after a low “maximum” the DMI graph of the “extent” of sea-ice is showing levels higher than at any time, on the same date in June, in the last seven years.
Second, the DMI “volume” graph, which had shown the lowest levels in recent years due to much ice being flushed south through Fram Strait, has moved back to more normal levels.
Third, temperatures at the Pole continue below normal, as we reach the time of year they inch above freezing.
Meanwhile, on the icecap of Greenland, snows have accumulated 5 gigatons at a time of year the snows usually start melting
In the Colorado Rockies snow is still falling, where the snowpack had completely vanished at this time last year.
The cold weather in the Rockies slows the melting of the snowpack, avoiding dangerous flooding, while at the same time the amount of snowpack is refilling Lake Powell and soothing away mega-drought alarms.
I feel it must be hard for members of the Fake News media these days, for there are too many false narratives going on at once, and it is completely impossible to keep track of them all, let alone figure out how to keep them from contradicting each other. You might be able to shriek about horrible floods happening here and horrible droughts happening there, and you might be able to moan about horrible droughts happening this year and horrible floods happening next year, but when you state they are happening at the same location at the same time, you just look silly. And this is the predicament the media has cornered itself in, paint brush in hand.
I would like to take some credit for doing this to them, but can’t. I have been effectively cancelled and shadow banned. Therefore I feel little guilt for the media’s growing embarrassment. They did this to themselves.
Their foe is Truth, which is starting to appear more and more powerful. It needn’t do anything. It just is Itself.
I like to roam the web seeing what Truth is up to, which is usually something very embarrassing to Alarmists. For example, one thing they were sensationalizing only eleven months ago was the so-called “Mega-drought” which had lowered Lake Mead to “unprecedented” levels. Poppycock. What was unprecedented was the demand for water, used by a population explosion which was using water (in my humble opinion) unwisely. If the media bothered to take the time to behave like honest journalists and report sagely, they would have reported as Anthony Watts reported on his website, (which hasn’t been cancelled) (yet).
I’m glad some bother to do the work the media has abandoned, but know some feel the solution to our problems is to cancel Anthony Watts. This is not a sane response. If you shoot Paul Revere it will not stop the British from coming.
I noticed something interesting in a graph in Anthony’s post:
The main point of the graph is to show the drop in the level of lake Mead is due to more than tripling the consumption of water, rather than a slight decrease in the amount of water flowing into Lake Mead due to recent droughts. But what I noticed was that, starting around 2005, the consumption of water stopped rising and even decreased slightly.
What this demonstrates is that the people of the Southwest are not completely without any semblance of sanity. They do institute water bans, when they must. This does not involve Carbon Taxes, much to the dismay of those who like the gravy of tax-and-spend policies. It involves common sense, which is often free.
During my time in the Southwest I tended to work a lot of “spot labor”, and this included the job of “roofer” in places where shingles literally become too hot to use after around ten o’clock in the morning. The tar becomes so soft the shingles became like wet paper towels and tore at the slightest flex or twist. Also you sweated faster than you could drink, and you could even get first degree burns. Therefore the strategy was to start work after midnight, in the dark using headlamps, and to rush to finish before the heat got too bad after sunrise. However one did experience the legendary heat, as one quit for the day. It was a dry heat, like a sauna. However, should the automatic lawn sprinklers turn on, it was like tossing water onto the stove in a sauna; more like a Turkish bath. The humidity shot up, and you experienced getting hit by an abrupt wall of heat. Which means? Some of Lake Mead’s water evaporated even before it could water the grass.
If you multiply this by many thousands of lawns, a city like Phoenix can actually spoil the environment of dry, desert heat it was known for, and become more like a sweaty jungle. This even can be seen in weather station statistics. Such evaporation also squanders water supplies. Therefore there has been a movement to have fewer lawns, and more cactus gardens.
There is no need to be nasty about this adaptation; it is a matter of common sense. Why have a lawn you never sprawl out upon, in a house you only use as a bedroom (and/or real estate investment)? Lastly, in a place like Phoenix it is cheaper to have a cactus garden than a lawn, (if you are a skinflint like me). In the end, common sense, and not Carbon Taxes, brings about a change which one can see on a graph.
This is not to say one shouldn’t be allowed to garden. Around eight years ago a regular contributor to the comments on this blog described gardening in Phoenix. He was able to grow fine crops even in January, but, just as my garden shuts down when buried by snow, his garden largely shut down once temperatures rose above a hundred. In any case, he was willing to pay the water bill because of the vegetables he could grow.
Common sense is upsetting to those mean-minded souls who desire the power to boss everyone about and rob individuals of liberty. They prefer to believe the public is too stupid to discuss adaptations they should make, and too incapable of comparing needs to wants, and too ignorant to calmly compromise in the way a two-party-system was intended to function. Instead they prefer a one-party-system where they tax and others pay, where others work and they spend, and where they boss and others obey. It hurts their feelings when people solve problems without them, and reduce water usage more with common sense than their “green” initiatives. (For example, both the production of ethanol and computer chips use tremendous amounts of water), (and that is merely scratching the surface.)
Also the above graph fails to show the recent uptick in terms of “available water.” After fueling the “Mega-drought” narrative by hitting an “unprecedented” low last July 27, Lake Mead has risen roughly fifteen feet and Lake Powell has risen roughly fifty. This is liable to continue, as there remains a great deal of snow to melt in the mountains. A continuation of the above graph will likely show a peak in “available water” as large as the one in 1985. This, of course, spoils the “mega-drought” narrative.
What is an Alarmist to do? One thing, apparently, is to quickly change the subject to wildfires in Canada, and hope nobody notices that Truth has shattered their mega-drought forecast. Another approach is to switch the mega-drought forecast to a mega-flood forecast, attempting to splice together a narrative which includes both. However it is at this point the media starts to look silly, and cornered, paintbrush in hand.
What is a Skeptic to do? I suppose one can rebut claims that events are “unprecedented”, using historical examples that show they are not. But I’ve been there and done that, and all I succeeded in doing was getting myself shadow-banned by the mindlessness of cancel-culture. Therefore I now leave the hard work to men like Anthony Watts, or Tony Heller at “Real Climate Science”. They do sterling work, when it comes to bringing up the practical facts, over and over and over again, to people who seem incapable of listening. If you want facts outside of the “narrative”, they make a good starting point. For example, here is a graph showing the equivalent of a two inch rainstorm still lies unmelted in the Upper Colorado River mountains, whereas last year the snows had already melted away by this time. (From a post today at Real Climate Science, refuting a New York Times claim the Colorado River is drying up.) (It may have been last year, but this year even the lower Gila River has been in flood.)
Sometimes I don’t want to even bother with Alarmist claims in newspapers. They have become repetitive, and once you have rebutted the same claim ten times it starts to occur to you that there are better ways to use your time. Rather than spending time talking about what isn’t happening, I become acquainted with what is. Truth is wonderful, and quite beautiful if you don’t mind getting your ego tweaked every now and again.
One thing I like to do is just roam around looking at how the storms are moving through the skies. A couple of Sundays ago (June 4) I noticed it was raining yet again, east of LA, and northeast of LA it was actually snowing.
This small truth was of interest to me, because it spoils the Mega-flood narrative to have snow falling rather than melting, and also because cool temperatures melt the snow gradually. For a mega-flood you want a heatwave. But I was in no mood to argue. It was Sunday, and I was in the mood to go to church and face Truth.
After church I was in the mood for a bit of lightning to lace across our skies, and checked the lightning map to see what the prospects were. They didn’t look good, so I idly scanned across the rest of the country, and, again east of LA, saw a hot little storm peppering the map with dots, so I switched over to radar.
Now, while the green areas indicate lighter rain which may be evaporating before it hits the ground, the yellow and orange is indicative of downpours which, among other things, make a mess of the Mega-drought narrative. It’s hard to hold a mega-drought when thunderstorms stripe the landscape with lush green.
But I was in no mood to argue, preferring to run the radar-animation option, and witness how the rain swirled east as a tiny low. I’d noticed several of these tiny lows east of LA as spring moved towards summer, and made a mental note to ask Anthony Watts about them, if there was ever an appropriate time and place. But as for me, I am not a qualified meteorologist, and just enjoy observing Truth as it happens.
However I did notice these rains were over ground Lake Mead ordinarily would need to irrigate. I wondered if this might explain why Lake Mead has been allowing less water to flow down to Lake Havasu (where the aqueducts west towards LA and east towards Pheonix begin) even as more water than usual flows into Lake Mead.
This in turn makes a mess of further preconceptions. For example, there is usually a rationing of water, with both LA and Phoenix clamoring for more than they are allowed, and negotiations have deemed that Colorado, Utah and Nevada must allow 9,000,000 “acre feet” to be released from Hoover dam every year, to flow down to Lake Havasu, which must be kept at a stable level. But this year the water hasn’t been needed. The rains have been bountiful. And Lake Mead is falling behind in its required “payments.” With more than 71% of the “water year” past, Lake Mead’s outflow has been less than 60% of required “payments”. If this continues, what will they do? Will they just dump the water to meet the requirement? Or will they save the water, perhaps creating some sort of IOU for areas downstream? Some interesting discussions must be occurring.
But this does demonstrate the sort of problems that can arise due to preconceptions. Why? Because preconceptions are not the Truth, which simply is. Preconceptions tend to be more along the lines of worry, things that might be, but also might not be. If one becomes too engrossed in preconceptions one can invent narratives, and the narrative may turn out to not be what Truth brings about. One needs to be careful what cart they hitch their horse to. It might seem like a good idea to build your house in a riverbed if the narrative states the river will remain dry, but what does Truth say?
The real smoke is the politicization of “Climate Change” which you know you’ll be subjected to if you read much further in the above tweet.
First of all, the climate always changes. Always has and always will.
Second of all, there often isn’t a thing we can do about it beyond pray and prepare, which is much like the old motto from the battlefield, “Pray and pass the ammunition.”
Currently the climate is undergoing several “changes” we need to study. One is what happens when the AMO swings from a “warm” phase to a “cold” phase. A second is what happens at the peak of a sunspot cycle when the sunspot cycles are in a “Quiet Sun” phase. A third is how an El Nino behaves when influenced by the first two variables. We have never seen this before, and should be taking notes, not pretending we know why it is happening.
I like how the above tweet ends with the word “unprecedente…” Right there gongs and sirens should go off, for the word has been so overused even the dogs are barfing. It has the effect of violins in a bad movie, or a drum roll before a joke that flies like a lead balloon.
My fingerprints are unprecedented. Do I rate a drum roll? Why not?
The fact is there is something in every day that is fresh and new. Our Creator had no desire to bore us. I think He wants to pique our interest, and lure us in the right direction; not scare our socks off. But Climate Alarmists seemingly live in an ecstasy of dread, and are titillated by shuddering, and relish walking with knocking knees. “We are doomed” they cackle, smacking their lips, “for this has never been seen before.” Then they get mad at me because I suggest maybe it is good that things are fresh and new.
The current fresh and new storm track was utterly unexpected by Alarmists, who seem to score worse than even TV weathermen when it comes to making accurate forecasts.
How can I say such a thing? Because Alarmists were, only eleven months ago, in spasms of joy over the doom of a mega-drought which was about to ruin the American Southwest. In my opinion the people of the Southwest need to be more thoughtful about how they allocate their water-resources, but they were draining Lake Mead in a drought and it was reaching such low levels that (among other things) a body gangsters had disposed-of in waters over a hundred feet deep was exposed.
Alarmists stated the falling water levels were unprecedented, and proof of Climate Change, and we should therefore obey them, but almost a soon as they said this the drought ended, and lake Mead began rising, and rising, and rising, until even in May and June, when history tells us Lake Mead almost always falls, it is still rising. It is rising because water is pouring into it from upstream, and also rising because there is less demand to drain it. Why drain Lake Mead to water a lawn or golf course when it is raining on the lawn or golf course? And just today, (June 7), a swirl of rain fell west of Los Angeles to Nevada, where it simply isn’t suppose to rain in June. It is unprecedented!
Why are not the Alarmists focusing on the unprecedented end to the “mega-drought”? Last time I looked, Lake Powell had risen nearly fifty feet, despite the fact all the reservoirs (34 are tracked) upstream have been holding back waters and are now more than 80% full. And the snow-melt which feeds this replenishing has far to go, and in fact today it was not melting, but snowing, on the higher peaks. The unusual swirl of rain I mentioned moved east of LA, watering lawns and golf greens, and also wetting crops which usually require irrigation that usually drains Lake Mead. But do Alarmists so much as squeak about this climate change?
Why not? I suppose it is too hard to make beneficent rains sound like “we are doomed.” Also they might be asked to explain why their forecasted mega-drought busted. In any case, they changed the subject.
If this new and interesting storm track brings the moisture south, to the north it likely will be drier, and drier forests are more likely to experience fires. Fire! This lit the Alarmists’ eyes up.
And of course there was the usual talk about whether the fires were unprecedented and due to Climate Change.
Well, of course they are due to Climate Change, because the climate is always changing. However it is the subject of whether they are “Unprecedented”, or not, that involves some study of history. Oddly, Alarmists are not eager to look back too far or dig too deeply.
Careful examination of records discovers a somewhat brutal truth. All forests experience fires. Even rain forests. After fires, a fascinating process called “succession” occurs where the ecosystem seeks to revert to a “Climax Forest”, (wherein the forest can get back to behaving as if fires never happened). The swings between Climax Forest and the smoldering start of “succession”, and the various steps “succession” goes through, as it returns to being a Climax Forest, involves various plants and animals which exploit the environment when they can and dwindle away when they can’t, but apparently they never completely disappear, for they are there waiting, the next time the cycle occurs.
Certain people, who love how amazing nature is, like to study how this succession-system works, and become aware of further variables. These other variables involve how much of the forest is reduced to ashes: Just a few acres, or the entire forest? Also, how often do such fires occur. Often, or once every thousand years?
If you love such study, and want funding, then you must find a way to make the amazing adaptability of forests sound frail and able to be ruined by “Climate Change.” In other words, make it sound like a forest is healthy if it has a fire every hundred years, but Climate Change will make fires more frequent. Then you may get funding to study places where they had two fires in thirty years. The interrupted succession of such ecosystems is wonderful stuff to look at and contemplate, and happens due to sheer coincidence, but because you made it look like it had to do with Global Warming, you are granted the money to study the subject you adore.
In fact such variability has nothing to do with funding or politics. It has more to due with “luck”. For example, at a casino a person playing slot machines is bound to lose more than they win, but may experience a time of “good luck” where they win more than they lose. Should that lucky person ascribe outside influences to the fact they won? Were they nice that day to a little old lady? Did they go to church the prior Sunday? Or was it just dumb luck?
Or…..is winning at a casino caused by Global Warming?
Actually I personally don’t believe there is such a thing as dumb luck. Creation is a magnificently crafted balance of actions and reactions. Also there is power in prayer, even the prayers of a gambler, though God alone knows how the prayers will be answered; one church may be praying for rain on the corn, as the church next door prays for sun on the Sunday School picnic; if God answers both prayers the clash between the two weathers would create a tornado that would blow both churches down; for this reason I leave such things up to God, and am glad I’m not in His shoes.
However, even if you simplify things down to a level of dumb luck, “unprecedented” things are surprisingly common. If a station has kept records a hundred years, there is a one-in-a-hundred chance any given day will be the record high or record low. If you have five hundred stations across a continent, one-in-a-hundred odds means that five stations should set a record high every day, even under most humdrum conditions. That is five unprecedented events every day, for headlines to screech about.
The fires in Canada seem like a new thing, for we are used to Canadian air being pristine, and refreshingly cool. It seems only yesterday the United States was the culprit, sending acid rain north. Now we have mended our ways, with scrubbers in our smoke stacks, and it is Canada sending us the dirty air. This is the third event in a month where Canada has turned our skies brown. First it was due to fires in the Canadian Rockies a month ago, and then last week it was fires Raging in Nova Scotia.
Perhaps someone prayed well, for a weak storm zipping out to sea stalled off Nova Scotia, and intensified, and rains drenched the Nova Scotia fires. However further west the same storm’s backside brought down bone-dry arctic air on strong winds, and fires in Quebec were whipped out of control. Perhaps the praying has continued, for, for after a single smokey day the storm retrograded further west, bringing us clean Atlantic air even as smoke funneled down the Hudson River Valley, and my son in NYC could smell smoke even within his apartment.
Note in the image below how clean and green the air is over New Hampshire, even as NYC gets the worst.
The storm, though weakening, has now retrograded so far west that sprinkles of rain are falling in Quebec, slowing the fires and, more importantly, washing the air. While the air is still listed as “hazardous” in NYC, the “air quality index” has dropped to 168, a third of what it was.
There is some discussion about how hazardous the smoke actually is. One side is in a tizzy about “fine particulate matter”, but it should be noted we are not talking about the fumes from diesel buses. Also these are the same people who want to ban gas stoves, and also wood stoves. But man has been breathing wood smoke since before the Neanderthal; Homo Erectus played with fire, perhaps as much as two million years ago.
Considering people used to be exposed to wood smoke 365 days a year and there was never any great movement to quit smoking, I doubt a few days will kill us. However as a former smoker with compromised lungs I will confess I now avoid the downwind side of campfires.
But, in terms of the smoke being “unprecedented”, I suggest a study of colonial history. Without any to fight forest fires in those days, some fires became gigantic, and the “dark days” they caused downwind were noted in colonial records, especially as, rather than Global Warming or Climate Change, people tended to leap to the conclusion “The Day Of Judgment” was at hand, and some would drop their axes or hoes and hustle off to church, as others made a beeline to the closest tavern.
One such dark day in 1780 occurred right around this time of year, on May 19. There was an east wind, as we now experience. It was noticed as far south as New Jersey, where George Washington noted it in his diary as he directed the Revolutionary War, but that day was darkest in New England. The sunrise was a lurid crimson, and then a darkness rose in the west and the sun vanished. The sky didn’t merely turn brown; it grew black, and people needed lanterns outside.
As this eerie darkness grew the Connecticut legislature was in session, and some of the members grew uneasy. It was wartime, and they were all guilty of treason in the eyes of the English government, so I would think they would be used to feeling nervous, but this growing darkness was a bit too much for some, who said it might be the Day of Judgement and at any moment trumpets could blare from the heavens, and they should adjourn the session. Then, to his everlasting credit, Abraham Davenport gave this wonderful 44 word speech:
“I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.”
We could use some minds like that in modern legislatures, when faced with the fearful mindset that wants to take any fresh and new event and generate a panic, which they then use to strip men of their God-given liberties.
In past posts I’ve gone on at length about how much of the warming seen at the Pole is due to a small increase in humidity. Over the past ten years I’ve described “feeder bands” of moisture sucked up into a “Ralph” (Anomalous area of low pressure) within the Arctic Circle, and we’ve seen temperatures jump as much as twenty degrees. One December temperatures near the Pole rose a hair above freezing, leading to a wondrous slew of headlines about how Santa Claus might drown because the North Pole was melting. Besides traumatizing children, which some Alarmists are too good at, (and should be ashamed about), the sensationalism didn’t make much sense for the “warmth” swiftly was lost to the dark skies of the long arctic night. However as that moisture met the cold it was precipitated out, releasing its latent heat, (that much more “warmth” lost to outer space), and flakes fell, amounting to a startlingly small amount of snow. The arctic is basically a desert, and some “Ralphs” might only drop a tenth of an inch of snow.
A bit of simple arithmetic tells me that, at a ten to one ratio, a tenth of an inch of snow only amounts to a hundredth of an inch of rain. Yet that tiny amount of moisture can raise the temperatures ten to twenty degrees in the arctic. Such a minuscule amount of moisture would have no such effect in the jungles at the equator. Quite obviously something is going on beyond the scope of simple arithmetic.
When I attempt to apply my small mind to the problem I run up against all sorts of oddities which are fascinating, and I can’t explain. Between sunrise and noon, in jungles at the equator, temperatures rise ten to twenty degrees, but moisture increases through evaporation, and the air gains water, holding far more water than arctic air can hold. Some of this air billows up as dramatic thunderheads which pour down inches of rain which (at a ten-to-one ratio) would translate to feet of snow, but there is no warming to be seen. In fact there is cooling (especially when hailstones are mixed in with the downpours.)
In conclusion, it is obvious humidity is a metric which eludes measurement by a simple thermometer. A degree at the Pole is not the same as a degree at the equator. To treat them the same is accepting a misnomer; it is like giving a square foot of feathers the same weight as a square foot of lead. I may not understand “saturation mixing ratios” but I have gathered that a certain absurdity is involved when polar temperatures are given the same weight as temperatures at the equator, when creating an “average” for earth.
In fact the use of such polar warmth to tilt averages seems to suggest some scientists have brains like coal mines, for they claim such temperatures are canaries in a coal mine, and they are obviously bird brains.
Sorry about that. Lord, forgive me, for I have sinned.
To be more humble, there is much that baffles me. I can’t explain what I see. For example, cold and dry Polar winters seem to lead to warmer summers, especially the month of May, whereas moist and relatively “warm” Polar winters seem to lead to cooler summers, especially the month of May. For example, compare 1960’s temperatures
With 2015’s
By the way, 2015 was the coldest May at the Pole on record, until this May,
I should confess that both this spring and 2015’s make a mess of a theory of mine. Why? Because I was playing around with the idea that the “Quiet Sun” could explain the recent sightly-cooler temperatures at the Pole. The effect couldn’t appear during winter, when there is no sunshine, but would appear in the summer, when there is sunshine 24 hours a day. The slight decrease in the sun’s radiance would therefore be seen as a slight decrease in temperature. But a problem appears when the Quiet Sun is most “noisy”, at the peak of the sunspot cycle. At that point the slight-cooling should be slightest, but instead we see it set records, at least in the month of May.
Joseph D’Aleo, on his Weatherbell blog, mentioned warming associated with peaks in the sunspot cycle, back in February. He said often they occur simultaneously with an El Nino, and stated it looked like it might happen again.
And an El Nino has appeared right on cue.
So we have a repeat of three events. The solar cycle peaks, an El Nino appears, and a record cold month of May occurs at the Pole. I suppose it could be a coincidence, but it sure would be nice if we could discuss possible connections between the events, like responsible adults with active minds. Unfortunately immature adults censor and shadow-ban you, if you suggest anything but CO2 from fossil fuels cause anything to occur. If their daughter gets pregnant they blame…
Sorry. That was uncalled for. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned again.
The cooler Pole may have slowed the start to the summer melting to some extent, in terms of the “extent” graph. The extent went from the lowest recently recorded around March 15 to the highest recently recorded on June 1.
One reason for the low maximum extent was that, right at the peak of the ice-growing season, storms shifted north winds to east winds in Baffin Bay, pushing the sea-ice, which had been spread out past the 50-50 latitude-longitude, back towards the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Such compression doesn’t lessen the volume, but definitely lessens the area the sea-ice covers, reducing “extent”.
The same thing happened off the east coast of Greenland, and there, while the compression doesn’t lower volume, the export of ice through Fram Strait and down through Denmark Strait has a considerable effect on the volume of sea-ice left, back up in the arctic. This has been an impressive winter, since around the end of January, for exports. Currently Denmark Strait is filled with sea-ice from Greenland to Iceland, something rarely seen even in midwinter, and some forecasts suggest the ice may spread along Iceland’s north coast this coming week.
These large exports of sea-ice is starting to have an effect on the (adjusted) DMI “volume” graph.
I have been watching to see if the sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic dropped, for in the past great discharges (especially around 1816-1817) have cooled the North Atlantic to a degree where it made the summer in Western Europe colder. There is some colder water between Iceland and Norway, but nothing dramatic.
What baffles me is the very cold water east of New England and south of Newfoundland. You can see the warm Gulf Stream worming its way through the cold, but I should think the current will be significantly chilled on its way to Europe. I assume the chill is an up-welling, though perhaps it is a counter-current, some expanded form of the Labrador Current. In any case, all these currents wind their way north and eventually reach the edge of the sea-ice boundary between Svalbard, Frans Josef Land and Nova Zemlya.
Lifting our eyes that way, I point out the sea-ice crushed up against the north coast of Svalbard. Also the streamer of thicker ice exiting the north Kara Sea by Severnaya Zemlya and making a beeline to Fram Strait. Only recently were these easterlies replaced by westerlies, pushing ice the opposite way and creating the polinyas on the east sides of Frans Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya.
The ice crunched up against the coast of Svalbard shows the ice is thicker there in 2023 than in 1596, for on June 17, 1596, Willem Barantsz discovered Svalbard, arriving not at the south but at the northwest tip, and three days later discovered what is now called Raudfjorden on the north coast. The two, small wooden ships they sailed were by no means ice-breakers, and it must be assumed the waters were open, which leads one to assume the WSC (West Spitsbergen Current) was in its warm phase. Currently it is not as warm, or that ice would be swiftly melted from beneath, along Svalbard’s northwest corner.
Traveling further east along Russia’s arctic coast we discover a point where conflict between the westerlies and easterlies created a divergence, thinning the sea-ice in the Laptev Sea. Less ice than usual was exported from the Laptev Sea this winter (as more than usual left the Kara Sea) but now the divergence has thinned the ice in the middle, increasing the prospects for a “Laptev Notch” of open water aiming towards the Pole this summer. West of there the sea-ice is significantly thicker, and includes some multi-year ice.
The East Siberian Sea will be interesting to watch this summer, to see if the multi-year ice can survive another summer. This is an area where sea-ice should increase, if sea-ice amounts come and go in a cycle, especially as sea-ice persists more in this area during a cold PDO, and because we just had three La Ninas in a row. But with an El Nino coming on, there may be a set back to growth. That is what I’ll be watching.
I don’t call an increase in sea-ice a “recovery”, as my study of history seems to show there is less sea-ice during climate “optimums”, and humanity is happier during such times. And…
Forgive me, Lord. I know I didn’t say it, but I did think it.
The sea-ice has been cruelly toying with the sensitive feelings of Alarmists, by having the “extent” graph adopt a saw-tooth pattern as we head towards the yearly maximum “extent”.
Now, you need to understand that each down-turning saw-tooth fills Alarmists with hope, for there is a chance that the maximum extent will be at a record low, which means, among other things, that the world is going to end, which is a good thing because it means you don’t need to worry about getting a Real Job and supporting yourself. Or, if you already don’t have a Real Job because you are a Climate Scientist of the unethical sort, that maybe you can glean some extra funding from politicians. But then, when the saw-tooths jump back upwards, you are plunged into gloom.
The gloom is because yet again the sea-ice “extent” looks like it won’t set any records. It will be low, as it tends to be when the AMO is in its “warm” phase, but it is refusing to plunge downwards in a “death spiral.” In fact you hardly hear that phrase used anymore, “Death Spiral”. Seems a bit odd, as it was on everyone’s lips a decade ago. How quickly they forget. Or, nowadays, bleach their computer records.
However the saw-teeth are interesting because they show how the passage of some Atlantic Storms, far to the north of their more ordinary paths, make an accordian out of the sea-ice, first compressing it, and then stretching it out.
This does reveal a weakness of the “extent” graphs and maps. To whit: The same amount of ice can have a differing “extent”. An area is deemed 100% covered regardless of whether the the ice is densely packed or thinly scattered, until sea-ice is less than 15% of the viewed water.
In other words, the condensed sea-ice may be the same amount as the the spread-out sea-ice, like the difference between a pat of butter, and that same pat spread out over toast. It will make a big difference in terms of “extent”, but in terms of “amount” there is no difference.
Over the years I’ve learned to keep such awareness in the back of my mind, as I watch the sea-ice do it’s thing. After being fooled one develops a sort of caution, and understands things my not be as they seem. A large “extent” may be largely illusion, if it is mostly water and only 15% sea-ice, while a smaller “extent” may endure, if it is 100% ice. One seeks out ways to gauge sea-ice beyond “extent” graphs.
The “volume” graphs are interesting and helpful, but, because they are models, they contain some assumptions which can result in embarrassments.
The “thickness” maps are best, though they tend to “average” thickness, so a single thick berg next to open water looks like an area of thin ice. When possible satellite pictures help verify what is actually there. But clouds get in the way.
If I get the time (unlikely) I’d love to paste pictures to illustrate what the above paragraphs describe, but for the moment I’ll just describe a couple interesting things I’ve noticed this winter.
First, the weather patterns the first half of winter have allowed an extra export of sea-ice, not only through Fram Strait on the east side of Greenland, but through Nares Strait on the west side, down through Baffin Bay. Along with the sea-ice there will be the contributions from glaciers.
This will be interesting to watch. Arctic winds do not chill the southern waters much, because for each molecule of cold wind there are thousands of molecules of warm water. However sea-ice and icebergs are different; they bring thousands of cold molecules. When the ice hits the Gulf Stream, what will happen?
This is interesting because cold currents tend to sink below warm waters, but ice cannot sink. Also fresh water has a hard time sinking in salty water, and “freshwater lenses” may accompany the sea-ice south. Can this change the Atlantic’s sea-surface temperatures to a degree where it chills Europe? (Cue ominous music.)
Another thing interesting to watch is the situation in the East Siberian Sea. Some multi-year sea-ice got swung over there, and there has been some extreme cold, and the result is that the sea-ice there is thick, and has been immobile. To be immobile is actually unusual in an ocean as active as the Arctic Sea, and even gets a special name, “Fast Ice.” And for a month the East Siberian Sea has been behaving like it is not part of the rest of the grinding, rushing, swirling ice, but is frozen solid. Not that this will last, but it is worthy of a “Hmm…”
I hope to comment further as we reach the yearly “maximum extent”. Until then…
At times it amazes me how people prefer ignorance. They miss the amazement I gain, for they have no idea how stunning their stupidity is. In fact they think they are sensible and I am not. They are focused on what “matters” and I am not. They are politically correct, while I find their focus to be based on ignorance, and I prefer Truth. They ruffle wads of ill-gotten loot, and laugh at my honest poverty, but I know who will laugh last.
Rather than discuss the spiritual ramifications of bribery, fraud, and other unethical behavior, perhaps it is easier to keep things simple, and discuss what ignorance misses in a minor and everyday field, such as meteorological maps.
In New England we just experienced an arctic outbreak of “unprecedented” severity. It is “unprecedented” though I can remember worse, for it did set some short-term records, especially atop Mount Washington. Therefore, though the vicious cold didn’t even last 24 hours, and I can remember blasts that went on for weeks, it can be called “unprecedented”.
I accept such events as the simple Truth. They are what they are. However politically correct Alarmists cannot accept such events, because it threatens their doctrine concerning Global Warming, to have even short-term cold records set. Therefore they need to make up malarkey about how warming causes cold waves.
They find some professor attracted by fame to dress in a white lab coat and raise an index finger and make a pronouncement, “Global Warming causes record-setting cold, and therefore record-setting cold proves it is warmer.” Then, after the “expert” makes this inane statement for Fake-news media, everyone nods like crazy, while breathing a big sigh of relief, for they figure they have saved their pet theory from reality. (But the reality is that in the past twenty-five years more record cold temperatures have be recorded than record warm temperatures. In fact the only way to justify the concept of warming is to focus on some exotic metric, such as “nighttime high temperatures” or “warming where it is cold in the arctic, only in the winter.”)
But what of the people who just face reality? Without needing to defend anything? What do they see?
They just see the wonders of Truth, and one truth is that such surges of arctic air out over the warm Gulf Stream sets up an explosive meteorological situation. Joseph D’Aleo wrote a beautiful paper describing how the explosion of “bombogenesis” sets up and then happens, which I highly recommend if you desire scientific explanations, but my more mundane explanation is as follows:
If you move cold air over warm water you are creating a potential for updrafts. The water will create warm moist air which will want to billow up as thunderheads, but at first this power is held in check. Why? Because the cold air is sinking, and has a sort of inertia which keeps the warm air held down. But the warm air builds up more and more power, as the cold air loses some of its ability to oppress the desire to rise which warm air has. And then along comes a tipping point. The warm air is able to rise, usually with the help of a feeble little low pressure system. Then, as soon as the warm air rises a little bit, it experiences factors which make it more buoyant, and rise faster. A shower becomes a towering thunderhead. A minor ripple of low pressure becomes a major gale. This transition happens with such amazing speed it gets called “a bomb”. Or “bombogenesis”. Basically a map that looked innocent abruptly has a deadly feature, “exploding” onto the scene.
And indeed exactly this happened, it the last cold blast. The innocent can be seen in the wake of the cold outbreak, off Hatteras on February 6
And less than 48 hours later storm force winds are northeast of Bermuda, slipping off the edge of the map.
This powerful storm got no headlines, and ignorant people were ignorant of its existence. However it was a close call for New England. Why? Because our knowledge of what steers such storms is not perfect. The weathermen knew 95% of such storms, or even 99% of such storms, head out to sea, so they were not going to raise an alarm. However they are not ignorant, and do know about the 5% or even the only 1% of such storms that “hook back” and clobber New England. Therefore, because it is their duty to care for the rest of us, they sweat bullets looking for the slightest sign the storm is not going out to sea. Meanwhile the general public doesn’t even know the storm is there. They are ignorant.
It is one thing to be ignorant because you are busy in some other area. But it is a completely different thing to be ignorant despite having free time, and to even call the people who are not as ignorant as you are “incorrect”. In this second case your ignorance is not innocent, but has gained power, and your stupidity is becoming magnificent. How magnificent?
Well, suppose it was the 1% situation where a storm “hooked back”, (the Blizzard of 1888 springs to mind.) In only an hour a mild spring-like day darkens and there is sudden thunder, and then all hell breaks loose.
If you are like me you have been carefully attending to reality, well aware of all possible scenarios. When the 1% option starts to become 10% and 25% and then 50%, I am already making adjustments. However the person who not only is not paying attention to what is actually happening, but who also pays excessive attention to scoring political points by mocking those who pay attention to what is actually happening, is not only unaware the storm even exists, but oblivious to a rapidly changing storm-track forecast. Therefore they are likely to be blind-sided. They can be hit without having a clue what hit them. Ignorance is not bliss when you get blind-sided, especially when you get crushed, crippled, or even killed.
I think it is better to gather clues than to have no clue. I understand if you are too busy to gather such clues. However it is very wrong to use some odd snobbery to scold those who gather clues.
Also, if taxpayers support you, expecting you to gather the clues which they have no time to gather, it is wrong to take the money without doing the gathering. Therefore someone should feel ashamed about these two Sea-surface-temperature anomoly maps, from February 3
and February 6
While there are some changes between the two maps, (for example, off the coast of Brazil), large areas of the map are identical. Sorry: Things do not stay identical, in nature. And this is especially true when a record-setting cold blast has howled offshore with frigid winds blasting over sixty miles an hour, off the coast of New England.
The fact the maps are identical off the New England coast makes one map have to be untrue. It also means someone felt they’d done their job by changing the date at the top of the map, and was basically too lazy to change what the rest of the map shows. In essence, the map keeps us clueless. We are paying some slothful bureaucrat to keep us in the dark, concerning Truth.
John Keats said “Truth is Beauty”, but for lazy bureaucrats Truth is a not a close call but a no call. For them ignorance is bliss, because they get paid for not doing their job, (which is to end ignorance by giving us a clue), (but why end ignorance, if it earns them bliss?)
To get paid for not doing your job is the opposite of reaping what you sow. It is a mockery of reality. No good can come from it.
For over two decades there has been talk about how “CO2” is the “driver” of the climate. The theory was debunked immediately, when Al Gore’s lectures first hit the national stage in 2006, as portrayed by the film maker Davis Guggenheim in the film “Inconvenient Truth”. Immediately debunked? How so?
In his lectures Al Gore used a graph showing that when CO2 spiked, temperatures spiked, and suggested this proved CO2 caused temperatures to spike. However those who looked at the data that went into the graph carefully immediately saw the cause-and-effect was backwards. CO2 did not spike first, with temperatures responding. Rather temperatures spiked first. This relegated CO2 to a “response”, and it lost its prestige, and could not be called a “driver.”
At that point anyone with a lick of intelligence would have turned their attention to searching for the actual “driver”. If CO2 was not the real power, what was? Unfortunately some people lacked such intelligence, because they themselves wanted to be the “driver”. They lusted after power, and felt that they could gain power by promoting a fallacy: CO2 was the “driver”. How so? Apparently they imagined that by creating an “emergency” they could declare a sort of “marshal law”, and disrespect ordinary checks and balances which make civilization civil. They were not civil people.
Considering the truth became apparent twenty years ago, the last two decades have been painful for those who honor civilization and civil procedure. Barbarians have stormed the gates. Madmen are attempting to turn beautiful places into asylums they rule.
This will not end well. The lust and greed for power stimulates a hate towards those who advice against lust and greed, and low impulses become the “driver”, which is stupid to do. High impulses are smart and low impulses are stupid, because high impulses are built upon spiritual truth, while lust, greed and hate spring from ignorance, and can reduce us to the level of beasts. Even the most selfish person can be made to understand a world based on greed is not good, because they only have two hands to grab with, as hundreds of hands come grabbing back.
The ignorance also bites the ignorant because, if they say an untrue thing is true, they may suffer from a mistake. They may miss seeing a danger. They may wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time, when truth might have avoided that disaster. If it is untrue that CO2 is a “driver”, stating it is the “driver” (and is a danger you must rescue others from) makes you ignorant of what the true “driver” is, and the true “driver” may be a true danger, even to a degree where your ignorance costs you your life.
So what is the true driver? I don’t know. I want to find out. But we don’t really know how heat, which warms our Equator, makes its way to our Pole where it can escape and cool our planet. What is especially aggravating is that scientists like the late Bill Gray, who wanted funding to study the part the oceans play in this transfer of heat, were denied funding by Al Gore.
Furthermore, if you try to talk sensibly about this subject you wind up censored and shadow-banned on social media.
Meanwhile the planet is trying to send us messages. For example, Al Gore seemingly is exaggerating when he states, “The planet has a fever” and, “The oceans are boiling”, because the January figures from UAH show the temperatures last month were as cold (ignoring the trend-line) as they were in May 1980.
You can accuse me of cherry-picking all you want, but if you trace your finger from the far right to the far left of the graph, 42 years has not raised temperatures from May 1980 to now. CO2 is not the driver.
If you want to overwhelm you mind with the complexity of our climate systems, I suggest reading the following post from the WUWT website, (or watching the video), where an honest man tries to get to the bottom of how heat arrives and departs from our planet.
A truism we are often made uncomfortable by is that, in order to build up, we often have to take down. We are comfortable with God as a creator, or sustainer, but less comfortable with God as the “dissolver” (which I prefer to “destroyer”.) However, in the end, our mortal lives do come to an end. We do get dissolved. It is part of the process, and it is best to have a good attitude about the inevitable, like the old Blood Sweat and Tears song, “…when I’m gone there’ll be one child born to carry on.”
As a student of history, I get to see across the expanse of time and watch how nations rise and fall. One develops a sort of detachment. One cannot participate too deeply in the thrill of victory and agony of defeat, because one will lose their objectivity. And, objectively speaking, many of the primary figures in history come across as very subjective, even to a degree of being buffoons. They relish the thrill of victory as they rise and agonize about the agony of defeat as they fall, and seldom have the humbleness that knows that when they are gone one little child will replace them. “What!” they exclaim. “I am irreplaceable!”
Well, I suppose it is true one is irreplicable. But so is everyone else. We are each as unique as our fingerprint, but the Creator is so creative He easily can replace the irreplaceable with the equally irreplaceable. Assyrians were replaced by Babylonians who were replaced by Persians who were replaced by Greeks who were replaced by Romans. Each were beautiful when they sprouted and budded and bloomed, and worth sustaining as they fruited, but worth pruning when they became unproductive.
A historian attempts to step back and be objective, and not to get too sucked into the affray we call “current events”. A true historian even doesn’t care about the current event called “getting paid”. He will insult his sponsors and be fired from his job, because he sees a higher truth.
It is helpful to be a poet, because then no one is paying you to begin with. You don’t have to worry about losing your position at a university, unless they hire you as a dishwasher.
As a poet I’d like to chat about a news item in the papers almost exactly a century ago, regarding fish. The paper was the Washington Times, and the date was June 6, 1922. It contained this map:
There is something fishy about this map. How is it even possible? They had no satellites in 1922. Likely they had no airplanes. It was five years before Charles Lindbergh became the first to fly across the Atlantic in 1927. Did the reporter just make it up?
Judging from the article, the reporter did consult Adolf Hoel, proffeser of geology at the University of Christiana. Perhaps Adolf sketched the map on a napkin as they chatted in a Cafe. But how did Adolf gather such data?
The reporter goes on to mention a wise old fisherman, who had sailed the waters 54 years, Captain Martin Ingarbrigtsen. Perhaps his experience contributed to the above map. The fisherman was a primary source of data for the U.S. consul at Bremin, Norway, Mr. Iffey, who relayed the information to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
What is refreshing about all this is that there is no Global Warming crap involved. There is no narrative. There is no agenda. There is no bias. There are just honest men relaying information about an interesting and perhaps extraordinary change. And what was the change?
The 1922 article states, “Formerly vast shoals of whitefish were found about Spitzbergen, but last summer fishermen sought them in vain.” Later the article states, “On the other hand, other kinds of fishes, hitherto unknown so far north, have made their appearance. Shoals of smelt have arrived, and immense schools of herring are reported by fishermen off the west coast of Spitzbergen.”
This 100-year-old data has importance to all who want to increase the amount of fish we can harvest from the sea, without overfishing. We need to differentiate rises and falls in fish populations that are natural, caused by swings of natural cycles, from those caused by overfishing, or by altering the fishes environment by reducing coastal marshes and rivers, or by destroying the sea-bottom with dragging nets.
For example, we are actually reducing our supply of protein when we “reclaim” ocean marshes to grow grain, for those marshes are so vital to the life cycle of fish that for every pound of protein we gain from grain or rice we lose ten pounds of protein we might have had from fish. Often draining marshes is not a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul; it is a case of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
It is hard to see a smelly marsh might be better than manmade dikes and landscapes like Holland’s, and the only way to overcome such difficulty is through honestly reporting the facts.
The United States has perhaps gone too far, when it comes to “protecting wetlands”, but it has good advice to offer China about the dangerous prospect of destroying the fisheries of the Yellow Sea by developing the wide wetlands along its coast. It is a situation where China could starve its people by growing more rice.
However, in order to understand changes man causes, we must understand the changes nature causes, without any help from man.
The 1922 article may be indulging in a bit of sensationalism, for papers were guilty of that even back then, but basically, its report is describing what we now know, that they didn’t know then: The antics of the WSC (West Spitzbergen Current) can drastically change conditions, by changing where it stops being a surface current and instead becomes subsurface current. The 1922 article describes summer water temperatures switching from 5 degrees above freezing to 28 degrees above freezing.
This would explain the way sea-ice disappears, in the above map, especially along the route the WSC takes to Svalbard. It would be incidental data, from before the age of satellites.
What is most fishy is how Alarmists loathe such data and want to blot it from the record. My guess is that it spoils their narrative. They want to show current melting has never been seen before. But it has happened. It happened in 1922, and many times before. And the sea-ice must also return, over and over, for it to happen, over and over.
In 1922 the article sensationalizes the fact fishermen could sail to the north coast of Svalbard and even to Raudfjorden, but the fact of the matter is that bay was first mapped by Willem Barents in 1496. History seems to show the sea-ice comes and the sea-ice goes.
Why are Alarmists so threatened by history? God creates sea-ice, sustains sea-ice, and dissolves sea-ice. It is a cycle.
Perhaps they find it fishy. It suggests that they too are part of a cycle. They are part of a process, and were given power by God, saw power sustained a while by God, but, like the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and even little, old me, will soon face a day when power is dissolved by God.
Now that Alarmists have gone whole hog on the sheer malarkey of their non-science, it is hardly worth the time rebutting their pathetic contentions any more. This frees me up to spend more time simply watching the most splendid rebuttals of their contentions, which are the realities of the weather. Compared to the glory of nature, the propaganda of politicians seems like the nitpicking of spiders in front of a tsunami. With their tweezers they can tweeze all they want; they sound as sad as a piano with one string.
Originally I looked at the reality of the weather to ascertain if what the Alarmists claimed was truth was truly true, and when I found evidence it wasn’t, I thought they might be interested to know they were in error. They weren’t. Instead they called me a “denier”, and subjected me (and many others) to censorship and shadow banning.
I suppose this treatment did bum me out, in some ways, but in other ways it was life as usual. I was never of the “popular” crowd in school, and was not the sort of young fellow a young woman would want to see approaching, to ask them to dance. Often I wasn’t even accepted among the nerds. Therefore I had to learn how to survive without flattery. I had to play the game without cheerleaders.
I think that attempting to live midst such disdain is actually too much to ask of any man, especially a young man, for we all need, if not praise, then uplifting. And the thing I found as a substitute for public acclaim, which was most uplifting, was the reality of the weather; AKA the beautiful clouds out the classroom window.
One wonderful thing about the reality of the weather is that it doesn’t care a hoot about our politics. It does what it does, irregardless of whether we throw virgins in volcanoes or buy electric cars. The only politician who seemed to grasp this was King Canute, when he ordered the tide to stop rising, in order to demonstrate to his flattering courtiers that he lacked the omnipotence of God.
It seems Alarmists utterly lack the humbleness of King Canute, for they feel they can stop the seas from rising. This audacity would be a joke if it was not actually spoken in their speeches.
Two reasons for the awe that leads people to believe in a Higher Power, (even if they detest religion and think they are Atheists,) involve the macrocosms and the microcosms of human understanding and comprehension. Once one understands how huge our galaxy is, and how many stars it contains, and then moves on to grasping the fact our universe contains more entire galaxies than can be counted, then some part of our tweezering intellect burns out, and we just shake our heads in wonder. In like manner, when we turn our minds to minutia similar wonders overwhelm us, as we wander into the worlds of sub-atomic particles and “energies”.
Perhaps the most depressing thing about Alarmists is that they miss this wonder. They feel God is out of business, for now they control the macrocosms and microcosms. They control the weather and they control the viruses. Oh! How powerful they are! They are like the puffed-up, adolescent football stars and cheerleaders whom all other students were suppose to honor and flatter, back in high school. Only it is not high school we are talking about. It is real life, and we are not immature teenagers.
To me there is something fundamentally insane about people who think they control the weather, and have jurisdiction over who shall get sick or not. They have elevated themselves to the status of God, and in the process have dismissed God as a higher power. This is insane because, sure as shooting, a day will come when a storm they did not forecast looms, and sickness they claimed they’d cured afflicts them, and on that day they will have no one to pray to.
This is not to say that there are some others among us who are mysteriously gifted, in terms of weather and/or in terms of healing. But such such people have no need to mock God while enacting Alarmism’s mockery of omnipotence. Why deny a Creator exists, when stating that same Creator gave you a gift?
My father was a surgeon who loved science and who loathed quacks, and snake-oil salesmen, and malpractice lawyers who exploited misfortunes. A story-teller, one tale my Dad loved to tell was about a witch doctor in Africa. The witch doctor made missionaries angry by curing people with a foul, stinking tea, when missionaries could not cure the same people with prayer. As my father told the tale, there was one missionary who did not condemn the witch doctor as a witch, and actually sent his sick converts to the witch doctor to drink his putrid tea. Not only did the sick get better, but the witch doctor became much more friendly, because he had finally met a Christian who didn’t condemn him for curing people. The missionary and the witch doctor developed a friendship that lasted decades, and eventually involved them hearing the news that penicillin had been discovered in England. The production of purified penicillin involved a long and complicated process. The witch doctor, in concocting his rancid tea, also employed a process that involved many steps. But how could an uneducated man in darkest Africa stumble upon penicillin? The only answer is: It was a gift. Maybe some degree of experimentation, of trial-and-error, was involved, but the guiding light was a gift.
In like manner I’ve met some in my time (usually men who spend much time outdoors) who are gifted, when it comes to sniffing out a storm which even the weather bureau doesn’t see coming. They are gifted. When you ask them how they know, they often just shrug, or give some unsatisfactory answer such as “they felt it in their bones.” In their cases as well the gift doesn’t seem to be given without some degree of trial and error. In other words, work is involved. Yet I too have worked, and my trial and error continues to mostly involve error. I am like a person who practices the piano but happens to be tone deaf. I lack the gift.
Gifts might appear to manifest in some cases without a lot of hard work, for example in the case of Mozart writing music at an early age, but even he was not above work. After all, a child picking out chords on a harpsichord at age three is practicing, just as a child learning to walk is practicing, and practice is work. However the gifted seem to have done a lot of the work before they were even born. Is it some memory from a past life? Is it a skill picked up during preincarnation in Limbo? Is it due to the mutation of some chromosome? Heck if I know. I just work under the general principle that every child is born with some gift, and therefore has value and a part to play in creation. That statement alone can get me into enough arguments to keep me busy.
But the point I am trying to work my way around to is that the people gifted do not deny the existence of the Giver of the gift. They are humble, and lack the audacity of Alarmists. They do not think they control weather, or sickness and healing. They do not claim to be all-powerful and all-knowing. Only Alarmists are so insane.
I’m weary of their bragging insanity, and of the media blaring their braggart nonsense, so I have clicked off the news, and also have largely withdrawn from debate about Global Warming. Why plunge into fog when one can remain elevated under clear skies? Why depart from pure waters to the company of those who delight in intentionally muddying waters? Some feel one can “win” a debate about Truth with lies. It is best to just skip their juvenile reality. Far better is the beautiful reality of the weather.
Sunrise's Swansong 