Life

As many readers of this blog know, I am unsure about the effects of global warming and whether it even exists. This is an interesting article from a British newspaper, not withstanding the 60 degree temperatures that we had in Ohio today. I have highlighted some of the very very interesting lines.

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

By Christopher Booker Last Updated: 5:51PM GMT 27 Dec 2008
Comments 0 Comment on this article
The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.
As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

Bengals 14, Browns 0. Another fun day in Cleveland with Henry.

So I meet a guy with my comapny for a drink prior to the event at an Irish bar near Harry Carey's in downtown Chicago. I'm going to have my one drink and then we'll go over to the party. Just as we are ready to leave, a guy comes over to our table and introduces himself as the Chivas Regal Rep for Chicago and can he buy us a drink of Chivas 18? No, we have to be going but my dad is a big fan and can you send him a keychain or something? Ross gives me a card and tells me to send him a note and he'll take care of dad. So Dad, if you get a package, that's why.

The event is fine, I get my 60 seconds with the Alderman and its time to leave. I need to kill some time so I go back to Sullivans and take that guy up on his free drink. Now, I've stayed true to my vow of one drink a day. Sure, there has been once or twice that I've had two but they've all been when I've had someone offer me a free drink. I think its rude to turn down a gift so I've bended the rule in those cases. But I've kept the spirit of my new life intact and don't intend to deviate.

Chivas has a special place in my heart although I don't particularly like scotch. I have mostly only drank it with Dad and only on special occasions. I figured this was one, if Ross hooks my dad up with some Chivas trinkets and I get a free drink why hey, its a win win.

Now its back to Columbus, arriving at 11:25 pm. I hope I can sleep in tomorrow.

Midway has short runways because of its location in a Chicago neighborhood. I always have the worst landings here. The pilot literally slams the plane down so that the plane can come to a stop.