This seems so unimportant now.....

OB will have to deal with his nut jobs worrying him over polar bears to dumb to get off icebergs. (yes, I know better but I like to stick these poor bastards.)

How do you bail out the arctic?

Happy New Year my ass.

The Hot Air of Climate Change, Part 1 - Scragged

1. Is the weather changing?

In the 1970s, as satellite technology and global communications began to be widely available, scientists noticed a disturbing trend: the Earth appeared to be getting cooler. Various conferences and symposia were convened to discuss the available evidence, which did indeed indicate cooling from about 1945 on. Eventually, this concern made it into the popular press, culminating in an April 28, 1975 Newsweek article, "The Cooling World." Other popular books and even songs on the subject appeared, reflecting the widespread concern.

Needless to say, these worries were entirely misplaced. We have not entered a new ice age; far from it. Today's worry du jour is the exact opposite, one of global warming.

It's easy to imagine that figuring out whether the earth is warming or not, should be fairly straightforward. After all, we all know how to use a thermometer, and they have been around for several hundred years, how hard can it be? It's not nearly that simple though.

For one thing, the location you are taking the temperature matters. I could prove any trend I please, if I'm allowed to cart around the thermometer in between measurements. Heck, if I took the temperature of the North Pole, and compared it to a 1945 measurement in Tahiti, I could conclusively prove that the Ice Age was already here. I could do the same thing even staying in one place - the top of Mt. Washington, NH - if I'm allowed to vary the time of year in between. Clearly, the only relevant measurements are ones where the reading has been taken in the same place for a long time, and on a regular basis over the course of the year.