Lally's Alley: NEW YEARS MESSAGE

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

NEW YEARS MESSAGE

Thanks to my friend, the artist Leslie Greene for this link.

7 comments:

AlamedaTom said...: Wise.

~ Willy; December 30, 2008 at 8:24:00 PM EST
Harryn Studios said...: splendid ...; December 31, 2008 at 10:19:00 AM EST
JIm said...: It is nice to see old farts engaged in life and thoughtful expression. The fact that they are engaged does not mean that their thoughts are usefull or pertinent to todays problems. Silly inpractical thoughts can from old folks as easily as from younger inexperince people. I suspect most of the people on this clip believe that man caused global warming is a problem that requires world governments to spend trillions of dollars to fix a problem that probably is not man caused, thus harming much of the mankind by diverting assets from efforts that will have a greater positive influnce on mankind.
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The Warm Turns
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 12/30/2008

Climate Change: The Earth has been warming ever since the end of the Little Ice Age. But guess what: Researchers say mankind is to blame for that, too.

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Read More: Global Warming

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As we've noted, 2008 has been a year of records for cold and snowfall and may indeed be the coldest year of the 21st century thus far. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.

Global thermometers stopped rising after 1998, and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-2008 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. But it was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000.

When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop near zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year, the start of a new cycle, the sun has been eerily quiet.

The first seven months averaged a sunspot count of only three and in August there were no sunspots at all — zero — something that has not occurred since 1913.

According to the publication Daily Tech, in the past 1,000 years, three previous such events — what are called the Dalton, Maunder and Sporer Minimums — have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called the Little Ice Age (1500-1750).

The Little Ice Age has been a problem for global warmers because it serves as a reminder of how the earth warms and cools naturally over time. It had to be ignored in the calculations that produced the infamous and since-discredited hockey stick graph that showed a sharp rise in warming alleged to be caused by man.

The answer to this dilemma has supposedly been found by two Stanford researchers, Richard Nevle and Dennis Bird, who announced their "findings" at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. According to them, man not only is causing contemporary warming. He also caused the cooling that preceded it.

According to Bird and Nevle, before Columbus ruined paradise, native Americans had deforested a significant portion of the continent and converted the land to agricultural purposes. Less CO2 was then absorbed from the atmosphere, and the earth was toasty.

Then a bunch of nasty old white guys arrived and depopulated the native populations through war and the diseases they brought with them. This led to the large-scale abandonment of agricultural lands. The subsequent reforestation of the continent caused temperatures to drop enough to bring on the Little Ice Age.

Implicit in this research is that the world would be fine if man wasn't in the way. We either make the world too cold or too hot, a view held by many in high places.

In a speech at Harvard last November, Harvard physicist John Holden, President-elect Obama's choice to be his science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, presented a "top 10" list of warming solutions.

Topping the list was "limiting population," as if man was a plague upon the earth. This is a major tenet of green dogma that bemoans the fact that the pestilence called mankind comes with cars, factories and overconsumption of fossil fuels and other resources.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre of Canada's Carleton University, says: "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Indeed, a look at a graph of solar irradiance from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows little solar activity during the Little Ice Age and significant activity during recent times.

Don't blame Dick and Jane — blame sunspots.; December 31, 2008 at 5:09:00 PM EST
Unknown said...: Happy new year to you too Jim, ya party pooper.; December 31, 2008 at 6:29:00 PM EST
Lally said...: Jim, get your own blog or post links on your comments but don't take up all the space with several pages of spin. As I've written before when you spout this nonsense or quote one or six or sixty-three scientists or wannabe scientists versus thousands and thousands and thousands of experts in the field as proof, tell it to the islanders who've had to move their families and homes and villages and entire societies to higher ground or an entirely other country, et-endlessly-cetera. Any scientist will tell you that you can't claim a trend from a period of two years or even ten. Global warming is a reality, based on decades and decades of studies and centuries of data, not a few years and a few naysayers interpretations of those years.; December 31, 2008 at 7:19:00 PM EST
JIm said...: A Liberal's idea of debate is to attempt to close it down a'la Gore Lally. It seems like most, if not just more learned scientists disagree. Hopefully the voters will close this idiocy down, before it exacts a huge cost from humanity.

Note: The 60'a generation of enviromental hysteria was the "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson. Because her literary garbage was accepted as fact, millions of people died from malaria because of the discontinued use of DDT.

To digress, some of her ideas led to positive enviromental change but the world would have been better off it had taken a more reasoned approach than wholesale banning.
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Michael Lally's New Years scientific dictum.
"Global warming is a reality, based on decades and decades of studies and centuries of data, not a few years and a few naysayers interpretations of those years."
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Happy New Year, Caitlin. Sorry I missed the Bach performance. Maybe you will put it out on cd.; January 1, 2009 at 5:43:00 AM EST
JIm said...: Here are the latest sea ice figures. Those villagers are liable to be moving back.

Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979
Michael Asher (Blog) - January 1, 2009 11:31 AM

Thirty years of sea ice data. The record begins at 1979, the year satellite observations began (Source: Arctic Research Center, University of Illinois)Rapid growth spurt leaves amount of ice at levels seen 29 years ago.

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.

Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.; January 5, 2009 at 11:27:00 AM EST