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Last updated on August 9th, 2017 at 07:53 am
Another reason to admire George W. Bush:
On most of the 365 days he has enjoyed at his secluded ranch here, President Bush’s idea of paradise is to hop in his white Ford pickup truck in jeans and work boots, drive to a stand of cedars, and whack the trees to the ground.
And then he burns them. In other environmental developments:
Global ocean levels are rising twice as fast today as they were 150 years ago, and human-induced warming appears to be the culprit, say scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and collaborating institutions.
“Twice as fast”, in this case, means two millimetres per year rather than one millimetre. At that rate it’ll take 3000 years before the US faces those threatened 20-foot ocean rises.
- What about this recent NY Times article?
SAN FRANCISCO – In the effort to slow Earth’s rising temperatures, even a well-intentioned proposal could backfire, scientists said Wednesday. One suggestion has been to grow more trees, which absorb carbon dioxide, the gas blamed for trapping heat. More trees mean more carbon dioxide removed from the air. New computer simulations, however, indicate that establishing new forests across North America could provide a cooling effect for a few decades to a century, but that after that, they would lead to more warming.
Geez- I guess George Bush cutting down and burning his trees makes him an environmental hero!
Posted by Mystery Meat on 2006 01 01 at 11:35 PM • permalink
- In some cases land may be sinking.
You don’t get to the truth of this particular story until the second last par.
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2006 01 01 at 11:57 PM • permalink
- 2 millimeters per year? Instead of 1 millimeter? On a planetary scale over millenia? Geez. These boffins must really need new funding grants.Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 02 at 12:10 AM • permalink
- Actually, a bit of inside baseball here, thank God that W. is whacking those central Texas cedars! They put out a nasty pollin in December – January that wreaks havoc on lots and lots of people (like me) who’d never had an allergy to anything before. Trust me, nasty Kervorkian-inducing stuff. In 2003 I nearly lost a job after two weeks of hellish unremitting caughing obliterated my voicebox when I was really needing to be able to, y’know, TALK.
And so, felling those bastards for health reasons is a great pastime here, it is indeed a war on plants. In fact there is a local organization committed to the cause, called “Humans against Cedars”!
- Supercat – it’s due to the fact that the places enduring the temperatures you mentioned aren’t used to it. Although I agree; Melburnians are wusses.Posted by James Waterton on 2006 01 02 at 12:52 AM • permalink
The State University of New Jersey
Yeah, boy – that gives me great confidence. ;-p
Posted by Barbara Skolaut on 2006 01 02 at 12:59 AM • permalink
- Who had the ability to measure a 1 mm rise in the ocean 150 years ago?Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2006 01 02 at 01:36 AM • permalink
- #8 Supercat, western US is no stranger to high temperatures. While driving from Las Vegas to Seattle in July 2003 the thermometer in the car showed outside temperature topping 117 deg F twice, in Vegas and again in Utah in the Arches National Park. At the time I tried fiddling with the display to get it to show the temperature in Celcius but couldn’t get it to change. And yes, it felt the same as yesterday, stinking hot.
- That whole article on the Bush brush-clearing was just bizarre. I can almost see the writer of this article, standing on his toes peering through a pair of opera glasses in puzzlement at the strange outdoor activities of the president. And I hope our journalist was wearing his silk dressing gown when he typed this up:
Professional brush removal can cost up to $200 an hour. The irony is that many working ranchers cannot afford it in these days of declining profits. Surely, the president could afford to hire professionals. The White House declined to make the ranch manager available to a reporter to explain who, if anyone, clears brush when Bush returns to Washington.
And they end with a quote from Imitation Blogger™ Wonkette! Something so epicene could only have appeared in the pages of the NYT.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 01 02 at 01:44 AM • permalink
- Mr. Bingley — The Jews, of course. Ask Hugo. Very meticulous people…Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 01 02 at 01:52 AM • permalink
- I’m glad. In a few hundred years, my inner city Melbourne property will be a waterfront property. It will be nice to drink my morning cafe latte overlooking the greater Port Phillip BayPosted by WeekByWeek on 2006 01 02 at 02:36 AM • permalink
The irony is that many working ranchers cannot afford it in these days of declining profits. Surely, the president could afford to hire professionals.
Now we know why John Kerry didn’t carry his bird out when he went hunting just prior to the 2004 elections…..he hired a professional to do manual labor!!!
/sarcasm
Jeez! That Peter Baker sure had a slow news day. Well, at least he pointed what is the real reason Bush clears brush:
White House counselor Dan Bartlett explained it this way: “It’s therapeutic for him, I guess. There’s very few things he gets to do hands on.”
I do a lot of office work. It’s a great release for me to get into the field, or just go home and putter. That’s why some people like mowing grass (but not me—I prefer other tasks).
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 02 at 02:39 AM • permalink
- #18 – and sip your Chardonnay over an al-fresco lunch with some academic friends of yours; topic of discussion a frightfully interesting dissection of the Whitlam dismissal – it could happen again, you know!
Lefty alert! Lefty alert!
Posted by James Waterton on 2006 01 02 at 02:42 AM • permalink
- Interesting passage Andrea…
The irony is that many working ranchers cannot afford it
—What’s ironic about that? I mean, I just don’t see any actual irony.
—And, if the market can’t afford it, then who’s bidding the fees up to $200 an hour?in these days of declining profits.
—Profits don’t seem to be declining for professional brush clearers, heh
—And, are profits really falling for Texas ranchers? Where did that immutable truth come from? But if that is a problem, I can tell you it results from the juicy ag exemptions on property tax that cause half the people in Texas to throw cattle on every spare inch of land they have, rather than let market forces guide them to doing something naturally more profitable with it.
- They put out a nasty pollin in December – January that wreaks havoc on lots and lots of people (like me) who’d never had an allergy to anything before.
Plus they crowd out other species by hogging up all the water. They really have no redeeming qualities.
The one thing I don’t miss about Austin is the allergies. And the property taxes. Good God.
- I wonder has anyone worked out what is the optimum sea level to maximise the length of coast line (because most people want to live near the coast)? Too high a level and there is almost no coast because of too much water, too low and there is almost no coast because of too little water. I’m guessing somewhere in between is the optimum, but where exactly is it, and how does it compare to the current sea level?
Sounds like a well-funded Global-Warming-related research effort is required!
- Funny—the fabulously complex computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that average sea levels will rise by anything from 90 cm to 880 cm between 2001 and 2100. If my metric ruler thingy is working right, that means between 9 mm a year and 88 mm, i.e. almost a meter, a year!! Oh, would that it were so and the race of man could soon(ish) be swept into the bottomless ocean!! But the only rise occurring in the real world is a paltry 2 mm a year. How to make this reality still look thrillingly gloomy? <Thinx hard> Oh, yes! Glide briskly over the fact that some land masses are helping the figures along by obligingly subsiding, and emphasize that the measured rise is twice as big (and therefore twice as bad—surely?) as it was in some other old century when nobody measured stuff very carefully…Posted by arrowhead ripper on 2006 01 02 at 05:28 AM • permalink
- More Reasons To Admire George Bush:
and to say once again that our media are superficial hucksters who make no in-depth contribution to important debates.
Today we saw again the ABC and others continuing the story about GWB riding roughshod over all that is good and true about democracy, and authorising phone taps. Even worse, this sabotage of truth and justice proceeded despite an official having problems with it! Wow, damning.
But the ABC thought it made a good story, fitting in with its usual execrable standards.
Please read the posting at Captains Quarters about this misreporting of a program which has bipartisan support and undergoes regular review. Scroll down to the “Grey Lady” story.
And after that, ask yourself if you want to be still living in a modern western democracy in ten years, or whether you are ready to succumb to Mark Steyn’s Scary Demographics.
If the ABC’s arty-left-drone-clones and their favoured wet secular humanist multi-culti “governments” have their way it will become dangerous for us too, not just for the very weakened Old Europe.
- My sense of logic tells me that during the last big ice age the oceans must have been much lower. Then the troubling questions begin to arise, like:
How the hell did Bush melt all that ice one million years ago? and:
Why the hell would we want it back?
Unable to answer these apparently meaningless or misguided questions, I’m stuck with my only option – joining with the experts, who are now also my spiritual leaders. And so I again make this vow: I shall not rest until all glaciers are advancing!
- I hate to ask silly questions, but if the rate of ocean rise was 1mm/yr for 100,000 years until 150 years ago,….
WHY IS MANHATTAN EVEN THERE? That’s at least 325 feet.
I am personally going to combat this threat by spending my family’s life savings on aluminum foil and spreading it out to increase the world’s albedo!!!!! It’s our only chance
Posted by epaminondas on 2006 01 02 at 10:10 AM • permalink
- #19, 21, 23—all spot on. I live less than a hundred miles from Bush’s ranch. The land here is more similar to there than either is to the Hill Country. Hill Country is a limestone reef; Crawford is on the water side and I on the land side of the shore of a shallow Permian sea.
The other thing about cutting cedar (and mesquite, the other weed here): both species concentrate on springing up where they aren’t wanted and are annoyingly persistent. Vegetative lefty trolls.
Regards,
Ric
- [Anecdote Alert, but dovetailing with my recently stated vow to oppose human inspired Global Warming at all costs so that Gaia will perhaps not smite me, I make this disturbing intimate report involving the secret enemy within the environmentalist whacko movement itself.]
My Liberal Bush-Hating, ostensibly Environmentalist partners in a land ownership entity also clear our land with a vengeance – cutting, logging, and then burning everything they can get their hands on – including anything left unattended “cluttering up” the storage sheds, like couches, mattresses, and metal curtain rods. They wanted to burn down one of the old log cabins on the place, but I interceded just in time, essentially claiming it for myself. [The cabin was salvageable and has an excellent, lurid history.]
But my partners’ cabin is now surrounded by a desert-like area which also looks like it should be irrigated to plant corn or something. This buffer zone is intended to save their cabin from the catastrophic fire which will engulf the whole canyon, now “managed” expertly to certainly cause the fire, since there is literally no cutting of even dead trees allowed on the Forest Service land in the canyon. This public land comprises nearly all of the canyon, itself now destined by environmentalist whackos to recreate the “pristine” Garden of Eden – until it burns, that is.
Still, curiously, my partners obsessively burn on our property. Once, when the Forest Service was visiting us due to my partners trying to negotiate what turned out luckily to be an illegal trade of some of our land for Wilderness land which surrounds us – in order to recreate the pristine “even boundaries” which Nature intended – they started burning their piles. I could not dissuade or stop them – the forest had been without rain for two months, but it had sprinkled for the last two days, whetting their appetite for a good fire.
Surrounding trees began to crackle, sway, and whip violently due to the fire-wind which the burning piles created. In a panic, I began to tear down the piles while one partner smiled approvingly at the impending holocaust. Again luckily, the Forest Service people were within the cabin drinking, er, negotiating and did not see what was happening and about to happen.
This crises was averted. We did not burn down the forest before the very eyes of the Forest Service managers, who would have had to flee for their lives while stuporous [just kidding]. But the next day when I wasn’t there, my partners did start a small ground forest fire which they managed to extinguish only by desparately hand-carrying buckets of water to it before it went up the hill into the Wilderness. Apparently they realized just in time that they couldn’t blame me for that one.
They are also “saving” the Salmon, but I think they’re all really just pyromaniacs who would destroy our Gaia in order to save Her.
[I’m sorry, it’s 3 am. here, and I can’t sleep. I did manage to “strike” all the directions for posting, though.]
- A little history about Texas cedar trees (which are actually junipers, not cedars, and are, in these days of steel fence posts and fake Christmas trees, totally water-table-sucking useless). There used to be a tribe of people in central Texas known as the Cedar Hackers. They were mostly descended from displaced Confederate soldiers and Appalachians moving west to escape the carpetbaggers, and they made their living by cutting down cedar trees to make fence posts. The tiny pothole known as Bunger, Texas, was one such Cedar Hacker village. You could drive through there (in the time required to blink an eye) and see cedar posts stacked up next to the shacks, taller than a man. On Saturday night, the Cedar Hackers would go to the nearest bar, and it was always the rule of the bar that they had to leave their axes stacked outside, due to a tendency to get drunk and have axe-fights. The Cedar Hacker culture declined and vanished (or more likely, assimilated into the NASCAR and Harley Davidson clans) in the late 50’s. Wonder what greenies and lefty sociologists would have made of them, had those movements been more than a gleam in some university professor’s eye?
George Bush: Son of the Cedar Hackers.
- If anybody’s interested, here’s our old friend Gryphen’s take on the Bush brush story.
And they call us oafish and infantile.
- Woke up, dragged a comb across my head,
Actually , I turned on the TV and CNN was reporting about the wild fires raging through Texas and Oklahoma destroying homes and sundry properties.
Bush is simply a responsible neighbour taking care of his property.
Posted by Go Canucks on 2006 01 02 at 02:31 PM • permalink
- #36: According to Emily P. – the grit in Tim’s oyster that produced all those pearls yesterday – we’re also cesspit dwellers. I guess, being one myself, that’s why I don’t smell anything funny.
Gryphen’s take on the Paul Buyanesque past-time of President Bush is one lame piece of writing; it’s sarcasm on crutches, and with the plaster flaking off the body-cast. Why not just walk around wearing a sandwich board that says, “I hate George Bush”, and stop trying to be “witty” about it.
- Well, PW, it seems that sometime between the Industrial Revolution (AD 1760-1830) and the Second Industrial Revolution started (AD 1850-1914), the sea level started to rise.
Which is interesting, because the modern steam engine was invented in AD 1769, although steam engines had been in limited use up to then.
1769….well before the AD 1855 window (2005 – 150) specified by the New Jersey Boffins™. Well, in human terms, that’s a long time. But on geologic terms….that’s an eye blink. One has to wonder just how much coal and wood had to be burned to cause the rise of the sea level to double.
Another thing about that date of AD 1855 (give or take); that’s about the end of the Little Ice Age in Europe. The Little Ice Age may not have been a global cooling trend (read the linked article), but the “LIA” is a confirmed event, including the Atlantic ice pack recorded as growing in size around AD 1250. Doubtless people burned a lot of wood and coal to stay warm, although, again, I wonder just how much could they burn, in a non-industrial society, compared to the Industrial Revolution?
Hmmmmmmm……could the sea level rise starting in AD 1855 and the end of the “LIA” around the same time be a coincidence?
Possibly. But I have to wonder if those scientists considered this in their analysis.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 02 at 04:30 PM • permalink
- Reading Gryphen reminded me of Matthew 7:1 “Judge not that you be not judged.” According to the commentaries this command does not require us to suspend all judgement, including reasonable judgement, but only judgement that springs from a “depraved eagerness for biting, censuring, and slandering” (Calvin) or judgement that is “rash … , interpreting men’s words and deeds to the worst sense, and censuring them in a very severe manner” (John Gill). Matthew Henry says that we, “must not judge rashly, nor pass such a judgment upon our brother as has no ground, but is only the product of our own jealousy and ill nature. … We must not judge uncharitably, unmercifully, nor with a spirit of revenge, and a desire to do mischief. … We must not judge the hearts of others, nor their intentions, for it is God’s prerogative to try the heart”.
- I realise that this topic provides y’all with an opportunity to get creatively witty about lefties, but my irony sensors have been dulled by some intemperate NYE partying (or at least that’s what i’m putting it down to). Are you all actually dismissing the consensus opinion of the scientific community that human-induced global warming is actually occurring?
Note: I’m saying consensus, which is obviously a somewhat flexible term, but it seems pretty appropriate at this stage, despite a few hold-outs.
- I am, Scuffs
Maybe you can explain the temperature variations over the last 500,000 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png
You will note that the CO2 level decreases during the ice age and increases and the eath warms. Which is following which.
Also, the climate has been high and stable for the last 10-15000 years allowing our civilization to flourish.
Global cooling seems to be the big negative.
Posted by Go Canucks on 2006 01 02 at 11:14 PM • permalink
- Here is some fun from the Telegraph.co.uk. There is a “Dangerous Ideas” article one of which is – in part –
Environmental crises are a fundamental part of the history of the earth: there have been dramatic temperature excursions, severe glaciations, vast asteroid and comet impacts. Yet the earth is still here, unscathed.
This quote is from the news and features editor of Nature.
- I don’t accept a human-induced global warming, scuffs. I would accept a natural warming trend, “warming” having a vague definition at this time, and “trend” being largely open ended.
In other words, I don’t think anyone really understands our global climate, and I’m tired of hearing Mother Gaia worshippers and anti-civilization twits prat about how The Earth Is Doomed™. For every study that says humans are causing global warming, there’s another that says no, and yet another that results in confused findings. Climate studies tend to be more of a measure of our ignorance on the subject than .
As for “consensus”—not everyone agrees that we are seeing human-induced. Or human influenced.
And just a comment—we’ve had several people come here preaching what amounts to Mother Gaia worship, in the form of global warming, and with a high degree of ignorance in science and technology. Do a search in Tim’s archives for “Ender”. Unless you want to get blown off like him, for similar reasons, learn a lesson from his idiocy.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 03 at 01:27 AM • permalink
- What about the surf? It’s been lousy on the Gold Coast for a whole week now.
When’s this GW (I always knew whose fault it was) thing going to kick in?
- Try AgainPosted by Go Canucks on 2006 01 03 at 02:02 AM • permalink
Are you all actually dismissing the consensus opinion of the scientific community that human-induced global warming is actually occurring?
Number one, there is no “consensus.”
Number two, “consensus” is not a scientific concept. Michael Crichton has a nice speech that puts that red herring in is place.
- Crichton speech
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
“There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
- Dave, got a link to that speech by Crichton? I missed that one.Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 03 at 02:28 AM • permalink
- Whoops! Thanks, Dave!Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 03 at 02:29 AM • permalink
- Good speech! Thanks, Dave.Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 03 at 02:37 AM • permalink
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Quick, somebody tell Ender!