I’m writing this from Washington, D.C., looking out at cars buried in snowdrifts and hemmed in by snowbanks, along a snow-covered street — where the occasional pedestrian toils past, like those lone stragglers in an apocalypse movie. I’ve lost track of whether Washington has already beat the record snowfall of 1898, or is just edging up on it. But if carbon emissions will warm this scene, we’re ready to exhale and switch on all the lights.
In Washington, where local authorities can’t even keep the streets open, this is of course the week the White House picked to announce plans to set up a new “Climate Service.” This will presumably be enlisted along with the United Nations, the Environmental Protection Agency and Ted Turner’s UN Foundation to tell us all how to amend our lives to control the climate of the planet.
On the basis of what? Climate “science”? Thirty years ago, the budding climate-ocracy was sounding the klaxons over “global cooling.” Then it was “global warming.” Now it’s “extreme weather.” Hmmm. Would that be “extreme” as in the record Washington snowfall of 1898? That was back in the low carbon-emissions era when people were engaged in such useful projects as inventing better, cheaper incandescent lightbulbs, so everyone could enjoy well lit rooms – instead of regulating these lightbulbs away because Al Gore and the United Nations said the earth had a fever.
The climate is always changing, and it would be interesting and maybe even useful to understand how and why. But mankind is not there yet. The “consensus” packaged as “science” by the UN is unraveling as a fraud, and the eager interest of many governments in jumping aboard the climate train can increasingly be seen for what it is: a pretext for taxing and controlling your life, in ways likely to do nothing for the climate, but plenty for the crony climate-ocracy.
What’s the real answer to changes in weather? Here’s one place to start, right now, in Washington:
It’s called a snow shovel.
A Federal program for the Unsnowshoveled will no doubt be forthcoming. It will, naturally, require a panel of experts to settle on an appropriate snow shovel design as well as appropriate OSHA regulations for snow shoveling wear and snow shoveling precautions. I suspect there may even need to be a center for snow shoveling research created in Aspen as well as snowfall adjusted taxation of the rich.
Your point is well taken and hopefully things will change so that those downtrodden souls who now have no means to shovel for themselves will soon be granted snow shovels, community snow shoveling training centers, snow shoveling inspectors, and a list of regulations letting them know why they shouldn’t use their snow shovel.
Regards
I’m visiting (stuck in) Reston Town Center in Virginia at the moment. It’s amazing how the private concerns have been working non-stop (even during the blizzard), 24 hours a day to keep their parking lots and interior streets clear (well, maybe not clear, about 2/3rds clear, 1/3rd used for piling up the snow).
The local city area, government facilities? Not so much. Well, ok, not-at-all for sidewalks and side-streets. Call ‘em axle busters – that today’s aerodynamic (i.e. low to the ground) cars with no separate chassis (all unibody) can handle. Maybe the six lane byways like the Reston parkway and Fairfax turnpike are half open.
Figures that I’m being kept awake by bobcats and frontloaders in the middle of a record breaking storm. Nothing like a free citizen and their free enterprise. I’ve no patience with those that think corporations operating largely free of the government are anything but a great goodness. Now all we have to do is get the government thumb off the scale for these other not-so-free (crony) businesses and let them compete (and fail) on their own merits.
rashputin: You’ll never make it as a bureaucrat. How could you forget snow shovel recycling centers?
Claudia wrote:
Indeed.
As a former scientist, I’ve despaired at how readily many of my colleagues have embraced the false authority of “scientific consensus” and thereby turned off their skepticism wrt AGW. Worse, using “scientific consensus” as a club, some of them have demonized and tried to shame to silence those who are critical of AGW
“Scientific consensus” is not infallible — if it were, puerperal fever would NOT be caused by an infectious organism. The scientific consensus stubbornly, and for 125 years, refused to believe that puerperal fever was either infectious or contagious, in spite of strong evidence that it was both. (Worse, empirical evidence showed that a few simple precautions could reduce its incidence dramatically.)
Pellagra is another case in point. Scientific consensus held pellagra to be an infectious process, and huge scientific effort was focussed narrowly on finding the offending organism, even though there was compelling evidence that pellagra was not infectious, and very strong hints that it was caused by dietary deficiencies.
There are many other examples of scientific consensus being not just wrong, but blind to reality and obstructive of progress.
How many thousands of people have died because “scientific consensus” blinded scientists and others to what was before their own eyes; motivated them to take the easy path to peer-approval and career advancement; or motivated consensus true-believers to scuttle their attempts to advance alternative hypotheses?
With a little luck, eight or ten more feet of snow will dump on Washington, and shut Congress down for two or three weeks. The longer the better. That should help limit the damage our esteemed legislators can impart on the rest of us. Serial blizsards during the age of global warming. God really does have a sense of humor. Algore, where art thou??
Don’t forget the snow shovel warning labels and the MSDS requirements (for the shovels and the snow). Snow can be a hazardous material!!
I wonder what exactly constitutes a sign from God in Barack Obama’s mind.
Watching the guy across the way, whose steps are now clear of snow — unlike the street, which the authorities have yet to plow — I can’t help thinking that if the government were in charge of snow shovel distribution and use, he’d still be stuck in his house.
Unfortunately for the government workers union, the Chinese have already developed a shovel that stands up by itself and doesn’t need anyone to lean on it for eight hours.
“Had authorities of yore tried to dictate, curtail, regulate into nothingness or even forbid such activities, in the name of propitiating climate gods to produce centuries of never-changing weather, the world today would be a lot closer to a scenario of mankind living naked, in the dark, assailed by the elements — or maybe fighting for access to caves.”
Congratulations, Ms. Rosett. You have grasped the worldview, and intentions, of the “deep greens”, and by extension, those of the “enlightened elite’” as a whole.
The “deep greens” were summed up succinctly by Robert A. Heinlein, as follows;
“There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who ‘love Nature’ while deploring the ‘artificialities’ with which ‘Man has spoiled “Nature”.’ The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of ‘Nature’- but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the ‘Naturist’ reveals his hatred for his own race- i.e., his own self-hatred.
“In the case of ‘Naturists’ such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate.
“As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. Sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women- it strikes me as a fine arrangement and perfectly ‘natural’.
” Believe it or not, there were ‘Naturists’ who opposed the first flight to old Earth’s Moon as being ‘unnatural’ and a ‘despoiling of Nature’.”
-Heinlein, “Time Enough For Love”, from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long.
Yes, the “deep greens” want to drive us back into the caves, to salve their own peculiar hatred of a civilization which works on logic, not mystical “connections” and “relationships” and “feelings”.
(To further quote Heinlein, if you want a gauge of someone’s relationship to reality, ask them what they think of astrology. I find that “progressive” types, generally speaking, swear by it, while simultaneously insisting that they are “reality-based”. ‘Nuff said.)
As for their political “enablers” among the elite’, their goals are more modest. They just deeply resent a civilization (ours) that has, through dint of human ingenuity, given the average man or woman the sort of comforts that were previously the sole privilege of the elite’- like themselves. And that just doesn’t sit well with them, at all.
All they want is the peasants -us- back in the fields where we belong. Spreading night soil by hand, while they go by in their palanquins.
And deciding which of us will be the “amusement” at their banquet tonight. (“Amusement” here being used in the Edgar Allan Poe sense- see “The Masque of the Red Death”.)
As Poe might have asked, how do you “reason” with people to whom reason is an anathema, and “feelings” and their own ambitions- and delusions- are all that matter?
clear ether
eon
Poor Climatgate scientist Phil Jones has said he considered suicide.
Just run out into the snow naked Phil.
Hooking a hose to your cars exhaust and dying of Co2 Carbon Credits would be humiliating.
The words ‘scientific’ and ‘consensus’ do not go together well. True scientists are a notoriously contentious group. A large part of science consists of nothing more than disproving previous theories.
The whole AGW group has acted somewhat like the scientists during the time of Galileo who supported the epicycle-based theory of how the sun and other planets orbited the Earth. Poor Galileo was an epicycle denier who defied the scientific consensus then applicable. He was lucky to escape being burned alive for it.
From Wikipedia….A hydraulic empire also known as a hydraulic despotism or water monopoly empire, is a social or government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy[1].
Often associated with these terms and concepts is the notion of a water dynasty. This body is a political structure which is commonly characterized by a system of hierarchy and control often based around class or caste. Power, both over resources (food, water, energy) and a means of enforcement such as the military are vital for the maintenance of control.
“How many thousands of people have died because “scientific consensus” blinded scientists and others to what was before their own eyes; motivated them to take the easy path to peer-approval and career advancement; or motivated consensus true-believers to scuttle their attempts to advance alternative hypotheses?”
Millions, actually, dead of malaria thanks to just those forces leading to the banning DDT in the 60′s.
In a previous business, we were one of the first in America to buy a Kubota small diesel tractor. We used it to clean out drives and sidewalks for neighbors businesses and it ran every day for several days during storms. Today it seems the government is both the source of whining and claims to have been the only solution.
The climate freeaks can’t answer what caused the record blizzard of 1899. They also can’t explain why it is colder and not mere heavy rains.
No snow in Vancouver. Record heat in Rio, the worst in 50 years, kills 32 in Brazil. A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record. The latest decade was the warmest ever.
Sean Hannity: “But now those that buy this hoax always use the phrase “climate change,” and that way, they can claim they were right, even as global temperatures continue to plummet year after year.”
And you call yourselves patriots . . . and believe Sarah Palin . . . and oppose HCR . . . and call Obama a socialist . . . because you’re clueless.
No snow, but how much rain? If it was simply a dry year, a lack of snow says nothing about the temperature.
16. skeeziks: “No snow in Vancouver…”
It rarely snows in Vancouver in February. It just rains all winter. That’s always been normal for Vancouver. You could likely find stats to say,”Relentless rain kills 32 in Vancouver.”
16. Skeeziks — Don’t get confused that “NASA” “GISS” number came from James Hansen, the same idiot that got corrected for the same mistake six months ago.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/20/giss-a-temperature-outlier-again-this-time-for-the-southern-hemisphere/
AND, he’s still using the “hockey stick.” See the graph on the right, with the notes.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/
From the comments on the first article linked just above:
yonason (20:56:21) :
HORSE HOCKEY!!!
From Wolfram Alpha…
Data from YBAS (Alice Springs Airport) in central Australia from 1945 to present show a decline in temps., with a best fit to the data of…
-0.0024 deg F/y+-0.0263 deg F/y
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+AUSTRALIA+TEMPERATURE
Data from YPDN (Darwin International Airport) for Darwin Australia for the same time frame yields the following best linear fit…
-9.9×10^-5 deg F/y+-0.008968 deg F/y
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=darwin+AUSTRALIA+TEMPERATURE
I’m really getting tired of being preached to by a bunch of idiots and/or liars.
They are obsessed with their high-tech tools, which either don’t work the way they are supposed to or they don’t know how to use them properly, but are incapable of even reading a simple #@$% thermometer.
The data that falsifies their claims is there. Why won’t someone in the field please collate and post it, before they “lose” it, too?
skeesiks…you’re superficial observations in and of themselves do not support the theory, which is really an unproven hypothesis.
skeeziks, you’re point loses its ‘oomph’ when you post it in mutiple discussions.
Ari tai, I’m a recent resident in the Reston area as well.
I am astounded by VDOT’s inability to remove the snow! For our area hadn’t received snow for nearly 72 hours from the prior Saturday snowfall, ending at ~4 p.m.
A colleague of mine said VDOT removed ~1,000 employees recently could contribute to their lacking resources. Yet, upon further research I found a majority of those released by VDOT were white-collar type positions.
Besides, private companies, as well as most irrigation companies attach their vehicles with a snowplow in the winter months for snow removal. I know for I did the very same work when a kid in Colorado.
I spoke with some irrigation people who take care of our neighborhood. They’d said most of their faithful business customers said ‘No thanks’ this winter to save some coin..
Lastly, the ‘State of Emergency’ declared last week was absurd. The days prior were in the high 30′s- low 40′s. Radiational heating didn’t allow the snow to stick for 3 hours, until ~2 p.m. Thus, a missed work/ school day for our Fed, Union types.
Then, the NWS said ’10-20′ inches from the recent Wednesday night- Thursday morning storm. Too bad they hadn’t looked at the tight isobars/ millibars (i.e. fast moving system) present. Thus, 1-3 inches rather than the 10-20.. no kidding?!
Lack of snow proves global warming; lots of snow proves global warming.
I see the Old Marxist Media–those aged hippies who once determined what is fashionable–senses they are being laughed at for the first time in their corrupt socialist lives. They are used to battle, to character assasination, but being the object of mocking–of being seen as shrill–glad most of them lived long enough to see that they have at long last jumped the shark.
To repeat what I have said in other forums: At some point in the future, when the Age of Superstition is being examined by history students, Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie will be seen as the Reefer Madness of the warmers.
To skeeziks – that is climate, my friend – changes all the time. For example, what was the cause of the heat 50 years ago in Rio? AGW? How many would die from major cooling (as I believe we’ll soon begin to find out due to the primary forcing mechanism – the sun)? Your citation of NASA is laughable. NASA (GISS) and NOAA have been “cooking the books” on surface temperatures for the past few decades, eliminating temperature stations in colder rural areas, thus increasing the percentage of temperature stations in urban “heat sinks”, and skewing the findings upward. Now that’s science you can trust, eh skeeziks? Perhaps you should become better informed.
skeezix should at least be well-informed enough to know that;
a. It’s high summer in the Southern Hemisphere (where Rio de Janeiro is); and
b. That Rio is at 23 degrees South. If you go northwest from Rio, to 23 degrees North, you arrive at…. Havana, Cuba.
The average summer temperatures in both places should be about the same, I believe. That would be in July in Havana, by the way. Opposite hemispheres, opposite seasons.
Making an argument like skeezixs’ mainly shows the ignorance of the person trying to put it forward.
clear ether
eon
There seems to be no end to the stupidity of the scientifically-illiterate right. (I loved the PJM blog in favor of teaching Intelligent Design.) Read and learn:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-vine/what-the-snowpocalypse-says-about-global-warming
Joseph, thanks for the ‘informative’ article. I loved how it used the 2007 IPCC Report for ‘validity’. Oh, and I see there was ‘globalchange.gov and ‘npr.org’
Oh, and the meteorologist from wunderground.com – those are AGW supporters too, bub. The aforementioned site gave ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ a ‘B’ for ‘actual science’! hahahahaha wunderground.com even goes as far as recommending people to look at ‘Gore’s facts’ at the 2007 IPCC Report! Giving kudos to RealClimate (snicker snicker..), Supporting (supporting?) the Keeling Curve! No mention of Michael Mann’s hockey stick faux science, Joseph. ‘I wonder why that is’?
I’m an Independent voter and Meteorologist, Joseph. Perhaps ‘stupidity’ should be considered more within, closer to home.
I really like this lady. I enjoyed her at WSJ and I enjoy here now. She’s become the female version of Charles Krauthammer IMHO.
Anyway Claudia we can talk you into writing for WSJ again too? Say, as a substitute for Peggy Noonan?
Joseph, you really should stick with the stone glasses, and reading pages from the Book of Mormom.
“I can’t help thinking that if the government were in charge of snow shovel distribution and use, he’d still be stuck in his house.”
There’s no doubt that the gov’t WILL be in charge – soon. Some people have gotten strained muscles and a few other elderlies have even had heart attacks — so the entire population ought to be required to take snow-shoveling courses — and get permits. (See the UK and “ladder permits.”)
Ditto for eating, as Mrs. O is busy “training” those “dummy” Americans. No word of eating permits yet, but wait a little while …
After that will come walking, and then …
vb (3) -
“rashputin: You’ll never make it as a bureaucrat. How could you forget snow shovel recycling centers?”
The recycling guys are represented by the Teamsters so I have to let them make their own seperate announcements .
Regards