Wednesday, April 23, 2008
LAND OF ETERNAL SORROW
The Sydney Morning Herald frequently wrote that Australia’s drought was a cause of depression. We’ve had a little rain lately, yet the SMH reports continuing sadness:
Sydney’s run of rainy days in a row - 11 - is the most in April for 77 years ...
NSW Bureau of Meteorology climate estimation officer Mike De Salis said the rain was getting people down.
Not the people mentioned in those earlier articles, you’d assume. One fellow who must be feeling blue, however: rainmaker Tim Flannery, who in 2005 foretold of Sydney’s dams running dry by last year. Flannery is currently cooling his heels in Canadian snow, possibly to prepare for global coldening:
Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that - far from warming - the globe is about to return to an Ice Age.
Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory showed no spots on the sun.
He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.
Hmmm ... this happened during the year Al Gore organised the Live Earth warmy concerts, was awarded the Nobel Prize, and his Styrofoam movie won an Oscar. Global Gore Effect!
"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Dr Chapman writes in The Australian today.
"If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."
A few people have argued that it was never a big deal to begin with. Meanwhile, Lubos Motl notes an encouraging trend in Amazon’s climatology book sales:
1. Roy Spencer, realist (#116)
2. Bjorn Lomborg, realist (#959)
3. Fred Singer, realist (#1324)
4. Brian Fagan, neutral (#6156), a book about the little ice age
5. James Lovelock, Gaia priest (#8706)
6. Wallace Broeckner, alarmist (#9202)
7. Mark Lynas, alarmist loon (#10308)
8. Patrick Michaels, realist (#12027)
9. Tim Flannery, alarmist loon (#16135)
10. Henrik Svensmark, realist (#16309)
11. Dennis Avery and Fred Singer, realists (#19266)
Climate scepticism is positively raining down:
China’s plans to force Mother Nature’s hand with “cloud seeding” and keep rains at bay during the start of the Olympic Games this August may be all wet, one scientist said today.
"I’m very skeptical about what they claim they can do,” said Roelof Bruintjes, the lead researcher for U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research ...
(Via Peter N., Chris P., Arnaud, and Gaia Her Bitchin’ Self)
UPDATE. Further brilliant enviro news: mud crabs - delicious mud crabs - are back. Everybody loves mud crabs. They’re like Prozac in a shell.