Maggie's Farm

First off, a commenter (I wouldn't want to mention any names but his initials are Z.A.C.H.) made a very good suggestion in my AGW post the other day.

According to him, belching volcanoes lower the earth's temperature.  This, despite hearing about the dreaded 'greenhouse effect' for the past 50 years.

This esteemed commenter noted that it's estimated when Mt. Pinatubo blew its stack back in '91, the planetary temperature lowered by 1/4 degree.

By implication, then, he was suggesting that we nuke a number of volcanoes, causing them to belch their mightiest into the atmosphere, thereby saving the planet from immolation because of your neighbor's SUV.  At 1/4 degree of cooling apiece, I figure about a dozen of them should hold things off for at least a few decades, then we can set off a few more should the need arise.

The commenter raised the issue of having to breathe all that volcanic dust, but I quickly pointed out that (1) at least volcanic dust was natural and organic, as referred to smog and smoke, and (2) breathing volcanic dust was scientifically proven to be better than melting.

As it turns out, though, we're all wrong on this direst of subjects.  Me, I've got 8,144 words spread over two articles that's about to get flushed down the toilet because of what I just found out.

Global Warming Is Epic, Long-Term Study Says

Almost every major news site carried this story yesterday, some of them right at the top.

Before we get to the big surprise, though, let's first attack this piece like any AGW screed, just for old time's sake.

It begins:

Global warming has propelled Earth's climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest -- in just one century.

Decades? Decades??  Judging geological climatology by decades is like judging how your day went by evaluating one minute.  When you're speaking in global geologic terms, 'decades' are irrelevant.

Ice age?  Pardon me?  Although it eventually earned the sobriquet Little Ice Age, it only covered a few hundred years, hardly a geologic 'age' by any definition. Slight Cooling Trend Period would be more accurate.

And, if we're admitting the Little Ice Age existed, then doesn't that indicate that the temp must have dropped pretty far for it to have earned such a lofty title?  Might this extra-warm period it dropped from be the Medieval Warm Period?  But, if so, then why was it missing from Prof. Mann's infamous 'hockey stick' graph that so swayed the Kyoto delegates?

And wait, didn't it say this is just one of the century's hottest decades?  You mean, there were other hot decades in the distant past — like the Dust Bowl 30's — but without an SUV or coal plant in sight?

And that was just the first sentence of the article.

But, rather than continue in this vein, let's get right to the facts of the matter.

I guarantee you'll be stunned.

If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according to the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University.

So, to sum up, SUV owners should be thanked for helping to save the planet.  Remember, without them, as the article clearly states, it would be getting even colder right now, with Florida projected to be the last state with unfrozen summers by 2060.  See accompanying picture for specific details.

As usual, Maggie's Farm has some suggestions on how you, too, can fight the impending menace of Natural Global Cooling:

— Let your car sit there idling whenever you're not using it.  This might cost you a few bucks in gas, but what price, saving the planet?

— Buy some cows and feed them lots of baked beans to encourage high methane output.  Methane, remember, is 21 times better at saving our planet than mere CO2.

— Start a campaign to bring back the SST.  Because of the ultra-high altitudes it flew at, it was estimated that it did hundreds of times more damage to the upper atmosphere than regular commercial airliners.  Put another way, and with what we've learned today, the higher up you go, the more help CO2 can offer.

— If the SST project seems a bit daunting, you can do the same thing from the comfort of your own back yard.  Merely start a compost pile, then collect the resultant methane, pump up large weather balloons with it and release them.  Once they hit max elevation and pop, you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done.  While they cost a bit more, get the ones that don't pop until they hit 50,000 feet as they're deemed to be much more effective than the 30,000-foot model when it comes to preventing the current ice age that's threatening to engulf us all.

The latest scientific results are in, folks.  We're literally fighting for the survival of the planet and it's up to each and every one of us to do our part in staving off this menace.

If you won't do it for yourself, do it for the children.

What price, life?

Jeff Daniels, from the TV show The Newsroom, lists out America's standing in the world in a few choice categories.  (language warning in effect)

I loved the comment about angels.  One of my sisters-in-law believes in them.  (Or is it fairies?)

Of course, all of the above could be easily dismissed as 'So what?'.  Okay, friggin' Uganda beat us in math.  So what?  It doesn't make any difference.  The only bottom-line question is, would you rather live here or in Uganda?

And there's one facet of life that America's so good at that there's not even a second place:

Weather.

Because our one big mountain range is placed exactly where it is, slightly off to one side, our continent has the vast Food Belt in the center, and on the outside of the eastern coast runs the Gulf Stream current, protecting that side of the continent with a belt of warmth.  On the west coast, the Sierras and Cascades act as a buffer, keeping the worse ravages the Pacific has to offer at bay.

In South America, the mountain range is too near the coast, so you end up with very little habitable land on one side and lots of barren or swampy nothingness on the other.

The Eurasian continent is simply too big and is becluttered by large mountain ranges, and what little 'food belt' there is lies in some of the poorest, most underpopulated, underindustrialized countries on the continent, the ex-Russian -stan states.

So, when it comes to a nation's overall weather — you know, the stuff you actually have to live in — ours is so bountiful that, as I said, there's not even a second place.

Viva America!  And pass the tanning oil.

Now this is amusing.

Of course, since the subject is global warming, I suppose I wax redundant.

As you know, every storm, drought, plague, meteor shower, volcanic eruption and earthquakian upheaval is because of your neighbor's SUV.  Curse his ragged hide.

This is especially true with large storms, the perfect example of which would be Superstorm Sandy, she of the Category 1 level — the lowest hurricane level — with some meteorologists claiming it had dropped down to Tropical Storm level by the time it actually hit land.

The only reason New York City had all the flooding was because Sandy (1) hit at high tide, (2) hit right as there was an extra-large low pressure area out to sea, allowing the tide to rise even higher than normal, and (3) the fact that NYC had been hit by two storms even larger than Sandy in the previous 100 years, both times the sea wall had been breached with the resultant massive flooding, yet they never did anything about it.

In the meantime, how much money has NYC spent on 'green' measures because of the peril of global warming?  True; it, too, is supposed to breach the sea walls, but over the course of a century — not the two hours it took Sandy.

This week's example of global warming run amok was Snowquester, the largest, meanest, baddest storm that global warming run amok has yet produced!

Washington DC shuts down ahead of winter snow storm

So did all the schools.  The AGW advocates, however, were thrilled, and were halfway through writing their next article citing Snowquester as just a sign of things to come when the bad news struck.

Which brings us to this morning's headlines.

Sadly, Snowquester was not to be.

Snow fail: Predictions almost all wrong this time around

'Snowquester' doesn't pan out in DC

Chicago native Kaitlynn Scannell, 23, said she was surprised at the early decision to close schools.

"I think it’s too warm for the storm to stick," she said.

 And there's your ultimate example of global warming run amok:

Warm snow.

Then I glance around the page and notice this:

Popular Indonesian volcano shoots ash into the sky

What the article doesn't mention is that the popular Indonesian volcano is probably belching more CO2 into the atmosphere every half-hour than mankind has over its entire existence.

Then I notice this:

Ancient arctic camel fossils link to modern desert breed

Wait, how can this be?  A warm-blooded mammal up in the Arctic?

Without any coal plants or your neighbor's SUV around?

Impossible, I say!  As any AGW advocate will tell you, the current slow rise in temperature is a planetary first.

And you can just bet that the lamestream media really doesn't see the irony when it posts a headline like this:

Hill hearing on global warming cancelled by D.C. snowstorm

Or, represented graphically:

Thank you, MSM, for another wonderfully entertaining morning.

There's a fairly interesting documentary out there called Microcosmos.  It's a flick on the world of bugs, a subject I've always been interested in.  To all the bugs I inadvertently killed by placing them in glass jars to study when I was a kid — sorry about that.  Shit happens.

The documentary did, in one way, set itself apart from your usual documentary fare.

Here's what the narrator says at the beginning:

A meadow in early morning, somewhere on earth.  Hidden here is a world as vast as our own, where the weeds are like impenetrable jungles, a stone's a mountain, and even the smallest pond becomes an ocean.

Time passes differently here.  An hour is like a day, a day is like a season.  And the passing of a season is a lifetime.

To observe this world, we must fall silent now, and listen to its murmurs.

Those are the last words spoken for over an hour.

Herewith I present ten of its more magical moments.

That Damned Interdimensional Barrier

At least, if you're a bug.

Here are four scenes dealing with that dreaded interdimensional barrier — at least, if you're a bug — known as adhesion or surface tension.  In the first one, while it probably just looks that way, it appears the ant is having trouble penetrating the bead of water.  Yet, in the next scene, the ants are lappin' away around the ol' water hole like a herd of buffaloes.

That brings us to the third part and one of everybody's favorite critters, the water skeeter.  Now here's an animal that knows how to use adhesion to its advantage.

But the fourth scene poses something of a question.  If the water skeeter is using adhesion to its advantage, what are these guys using?  Reverse adhesion?