Environment

First Day of Winter

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Today marks the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere. It’s the shortest day of the year for the Los Angeles area; the solar disk will be above the horizon for only 9 hours and 54 minutes today at our latitude.

The diagram above illustrates the orbit of the Earth around the Sun and highlights the passage of our planet through eight significant portals recognized by cultures for many millennia. Those are the two equinoxes, the four cross quarter days and the two solstices. Today, we pass through the winter solstice for the northern hemisphere.

For more information about the science and lore of these several special days, check out the website Archaeoastronomy.com and have a look around.

A History of Skepticism

Over three and a half years ago, the cat was already out of the bag that the University of East Anglia falsified their data. According to Bob Carter of Queensland, Australia, who wrote an article in March of 2006. We posted it then and will repeat it now that the alarmists have been outed . . .


Global Warming takes a Break

More and more evidence surfaces about the true nature of global warming. Real scientists looking at the hard evidence of the phenomenon, realize that claims of man-made greenhouse gasses causing warming are false.

Right: Current SOHO Sunspot Image.

Professor Bob Carter, a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, who is engaged in paleoclimate research, wrote this excellent article addressing the “Man-made global warming” myth:

There IS a problem with global warming… it stopped in 1998

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society’s continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

[read more]

By the Sea

It might be blustery and snowy in Copenhagen and there might be a blizzard heading into Washington D.C. but it’s sunny and nice in California. Maybe the planners of the Global Doom meetings and conferences should have their meetings in Acapulco or Key West. On second thought, the Gore effect would probably bring snow and freezing there and tick off the tourism industries.

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Meanwhile, here in the L.A. area, it’s still pleasant enough to go with your husband and dog for a stroll along the cliffs overlooking the blue Pacific – not too warm, not too cool.

BUT – before you schedule your move here, consider that we’re WAY overdue for our next 6+ seismic event. Just saying . . .

A Review of Climate Coverage

With all the attention being given by the conservative media (certainly NOT by the MSM) on the recent disclosures about falsifying temperature data by the CRU, now would be a good time for us to review some of our climate references.

We have been following the Anthropogenic Global Warming scam very closely for a number of years. At the risk of being called a ‘denier’ or other such terms, we have not only been skeptical, but have done some of the science homework and research. The following content may always be found on the “Climate and Global Warming” page listed in the sidebar.

Selected Articles from this website

  • Earth’s Oceans – A Mesozoic Hot Tub — Scientific Evidence that Atlantic Ocean temperatures may have once reached 107° (42°C) – about 25°F (14°C) higher than ocean temperatures today and warmer than a hot tub.
  • Ultimate Global Warming – SPF 2 Million Won’t Be Enough — The Sun is a star – a main sequence star whose business is to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. Fusion is a steady but somewhat unstable and potentially violent thermonuclear process.
  • The “O” Zone — Think of the ozone layer as Earth’s sunglasses, protecting life on the surface from the harmful glare of the sun’s strongest ultraviolet rays, which can cause skin cancer and other maladies.
  • Correlating Sunspots to Global Climate — This is a study in two observations made over the last 400 years: observed annual sunspot numbers and derived global temperatures.
  • The Indefensible Hockey Stick — The “hockey stick” (the graph resembles a hockey stick) graph emerged in 1995 and purports to depict average global temperatures over the last 1000 years or so. The basis of this paradigm, however, can be shown to be flawed.
  • Cosmic Rays, Solar Flux and Global Warming — When you consider the context of this galactic radiation effect, the impact of CO2 emissions caused by humanity literally fade away into climatic insignificance.
  • Apocalypse – Not! — These four essays, “The Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse,” as it were, are grouped into a page entitled “Good news, Mr. Gore, the Apocalypse has been postponed.”

International Conference on Climate Change (this is NOT the UN’s IPCC)

Climate Websites and Blogs

And a few of my favorites

Media Resources

First Snowfall of the Season

First Southern California SnowWay off in the distance in this photo (about 40 miles), are the San Gabriel Mountains and the Angeles National Forest. Yesterday, and the night before, precipitation came to our area and was billed by the local weather reporters as the ‘first major storm’ of the season.

After the storm passed, it got quite windy. The wind caused a short power interruption here, inconveniently, right in the middle of the Green Bay Packers vs. Baltimore Ravens Monday Night Football game. The power was only out for a few tens of seconds, not really enough time to get the emergency flashlights turned on (we always keep one at each of our desks and on the table next to where we sit to watch TV. The game came back on after the DirecTV receiver re-acquired the signal. We watched the remainder of the game without any other power interruptions.

You can click on Damsel‘s image above to see the 1024×768 pixel version. Damsel was happy that Green Bay won the game.

Winter Snow

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I took this photo of my husband walking the dog in the snow last December at the KOA campground in Flagstaff, AZ. We were on our way to the Grand Canyon and camped here overnight. When we arrived the evening before, snow was falling; it continued overnight to add to the winter scenery. Click on the cropped image above to see the full-sized snowscape.

Metrics Expose Media Suppression of Climategate

Via Planet Gore:

Climategate is now huge. Way, way bigger than the Mainstream Media (MSM) is admitting it is – as Richard North demonstrates in this fascinating analysis. Using what he calls a Tiger Woods Index (TWI), he compares the amount of interest being shown by internet users (as shown by the number of general web pages on Google) and compares it with the number of news reports recorded. The ratio indicates what people are really interested in, as opposed to what the MSM thinks they ought to be interested in.

North explains:

Tiger Woods delivered 22,500,000 web and 46,025 news pages, giving ratio of 489. That is the “Tiger Woods Index” (TWI) against which I chose to measure a raft of other issues.

Here are the rankings:

  1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
  2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
  3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
  4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
  5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
  6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
  7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
  8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
  9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
  10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

In order to more clearly see the extent to which the mainstream media are suppressing one of the most important revelations in history, I plotted North’s results in a pie chart:

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The mainstream news suppression of the climate scientist’s lies is an order of magnitude greater than the next topic, Afghanistan. Likewise, they suppress most news and information that conflicts with their far-left agenda and promote meaningless “noise stories,” like the Tiger Woods incident.

The televised and print media are not our friends.

UPDATE: Thanks to Richard North of EUReferendum and Edward Craig of Planet Gore for posting our graphic on their sites.