The vestiges of the great Climate Debate

As the world's leading climatologist (and government officials who deal with such things) meet in Durban South Africa to hammer out another Kyoto protocol, feverishly working to avert the ravages of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, having mistaken a 300 year gradual global temperature emergence from the Little Ice Age of 0.7 Celsius per century, Mother Nature here in East Lansing gave us 7 inches of her Global Warming counter point. A picture out of our snug-in-a- bug condo window.

As we have a four pawed guest (Sadie) for the Holidays, she needs exercise like we all do so she and I took our usual 2 mile walk out around Bear Lake. Winter came before Fall officially left. Sadie and I break trail in the fresh snow, making our way around fallen limbs and some trees along the way.

Today is one of my days to get Continuing Medical Education credits from Sparrow Hospital noon Critical Care Conference. I drove down Burcham Road, past the sledding hill filled with children and adults enjoying East Lansing School District's first snow day of the school year. It seems that the roads and sidewalks had not yet been cleared by

7 AM. Green has now become White: Go State!

Further along my journey, just after the University, heading towards the Capital on Michigan Avenue, a Volvo, with bumper stickers of GreenPeace & World Wildlife Foundation (the NGO environmentalism activist organizations that have contribute more than 1/2 the content and person power to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report #4 which Lisa Jackson, head of our US Environmental Protection Agency has used as the scientific basis for declaring carbon dioxide as a pollutant) was trying to straddle the icey roadway build-up, "slip sliding away", instead of choosing one or the other grooves that were wet but clear of ice. I can only surmise the driver was fearful of the left hand snowbanks made by the snowplows. When I moved around the car at a stop light with the Jeep Compass, I saw a women with a death grip on the steering wheel. I recon that she would have preferred some global warming right about then.

I have digressed from the main topic: our walking the unplowed trails. Sadie litterly was jumping in the air, charging back to me and then nipping at my shoes in her excitement. She buried her nose in the snow and then plowed forward. Suddenly she would be absolutely still, ears cocked forward, tail up, and listening, listening to the sounds of the woods.

For the picture at the right: "tennis anyone?"

Our world is always changing, like the climate

As summer has slipped into Fall, changing seasons mean that our home is changing also. We are embarked upon a revision of our master bathroom, the master bedroom, and the study/computer room. The master bathroom will now have heated slate floors, new cabinets, and paint instead of wall paper. The master bedroom will now have a bedside cammode, right next to Kathy's side of the bed, along with hardwood floor, a new paint job. Shhh, don't tell her that the commode is permanent, its my surprise. The study will have just a hardwood floor, paint and a new cable outlet. Otherwise, everything is the same, for now.

On another note, go to Kathy's blog and enjoy with us our Sunday journey to Uncle John's Cider Mill and our back roads trip back home. For your further entertainment we share with you the tulip tree in our back yard. The fall colors have been breathtaking.

Sadie has come for a visit. We picked her up at a Ford Truck Dealership parking lot, across from the long term parking lot, outside of Chicago O'Hare's Airport from Andre who was flying with friends to Central America for a week's R&R. Sadie, a mixed breed Dog Pond dog with some interesting lineage including some attack dog strains, seems to be anything but an attack dog. She turns out to be a very relaxed and loving dog. She is obedient and goes into her cage at night or when we both leave for daytime excursions. She goes on long walks ( 2 miles and more) with enthusiasm. She has great energy and awareness of her surroundings, particularly with regard to squirrels. And she is very powerful. One has to anticipate her lunging and reign her in before an anticipated encounter. She is very bright, keeps tract of what is going on. Inside the house she sleeps on the couch when not in her cage, and she bounds down the stairs to leap onto the basement couch, turns to the TV and watches shows/college basketball with us. She will then sully up to us, putting her head upon our leg and wait for us to pet her, stroke her, and scratch her behind her ears.

She listens for us to come home. She waits in her cage for me to awaken and turn up the heat in the morning. After I have arisen and guide myself to her cage and unlock the door, she comes out, stretches, yawns and follows me to the bathroom as I perform my daily ablutions.

On our daily walk behind Bear Lake, she acts frightened as if there is a predator hiding in the woods; more so earlier in her tenure here and less so now. I wonder if she either is now familiar with the area, or that a fox or wolverine has decided to move on. Anyway, when we get to the InterUrban Pathway with its long stretches of fencing on both sides, we play pitch and catch with a ball until she is so exhausted, that she keeps the ball in her mouth and trots for the exit to head home. No more pitch and chase.

All this canine involvement comes to an end this weekend as we trundle off to Madison, Wisconsin to drop Sadie off at Andre's house as Andre greatly misses Sadie and wants her loving welcome home attitude to be restored. Mixed feelings on my part about this entanglement; as, with most social involvements, the good and bad outcomes are not clearly delineated.

Beware the Ides of March

Puxsutawney Phil, the famous resident ground hog of Puxsutawney Pa. whose first residents were the Native American Delaware Indians; Puxsutawney translates: "area of the sandflies", well anyway, as you recall, Puxsutawney Phil came out of his log on a cold and snowy day and did not see his shadow, predicted an early Spring. Six weeks later, ie, the flip side of him seeing his shadow and predicting 6 more weeks of winter, it seems that his prediction model was backwards. This morning in East Lansing, it was 24 F and expected to go up to 39 degrees F. When looking out our window, the snow on the ground and the ice on the pond, it looks like a typical March 15th beginning and forecast for the rest of the day. Average. Now I realize that the weather of just one day in the life of Ivan Ivanovich does not totally invalidate any Climate Prediction Model for catastrophic weather on March 15th 2100, however, ALL climate prediction models (here labeled as such although generally called General Circulation Models), predicted warmer winters and warmer nights with increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. So far, at least over the last 13 years, that hasn't happened; we've been on a sort of plateau as far as the weather and temperatures are concerned (since 1998). What we do see is that Mother Nature has agendas like earthquakes and Tsunamis that have far greater impacts upon our human condition than computer models, which are based upon other computer models which are based upon yet other computer models that are amalgamated into an assemblage of computer runs to give us a forecast for 90 years into the future of a 3 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. Today in East Lansing, there is ice on the sidewalks from yesterday's melting snowpack that ran over the sidewalk and froze last night making for treacherous walking, still! Yes, winter is slowly fading into Spring, all pretty average for this time of year; averaged over record keeping for the last 150 years. Is there Global Warming? Possibly 0.8 degrees Celsius over the past 150 years. After all, we are coming out of the Little Ice Age, the end of which was in the early 19th Century, Charles Dicken's "Christmas Carol", cold and snowy in London England and all that; just like this winter. Ground Hogs and computer simulations have similar predictive abilities.

The continuing story...

Puxatawney Phil did not see his shadow on February 2 nd, Ground Hog Day; hence, it prognosticated an early Spring. Indeed, last week we had Chinook weather, temperatures in the mid-50's, an aboriginal name given to a windy warm period ending winter. All the snow had melted away except the ice piles left by the snow-plows.

Today, as if to turn our lives upside down, we have a winter storm warning: beginning Sunday and lasting until Monday morning. We are to get 3 to 5 inches of wet snow. It is now 5:38 PM and we have 3 inches accumulated already. Another 12 to 18 hours from now, at this rate, we will have feet of snow, not just inches. Kathy and I went on our walk @ 1:30PM as it had just started to snow and we wanted to finish before the going became "work". I noted that the streets and sidewalks were not melting the snow, meaning that the ground was still very cold. This was expected since the ice on all the ponds and streams was intact in spite of the brief warming, the ice was very thick, frozen by 2 1/2 months of very cold temperatures including below zero for days at a time, repeated again and again. Cold days and even colder nights.

I am looking out the study window, doing my bills that the postman still brings, regularly. Our gas usage for February 2011 was 22.6 thousand cubic feet and for February 2010? 13.5 thousand cubic feet. Is there anybody claiming that the weather as viewed winter over winter is getting colder? I am. As pundits have claimed that last year 2010 was one of the 5 warmest in the last 30 years, I think there is something to be said that we have come into a cold "spell". Of course climate scientists have said that with global warming the atmosphere will hold more moisture. Al Gore spoke about warm air "scooping up moisture from the oceans", the science does not support such a mechanism: hot warm air sucking up cold ocean moisture. Warm air can hold more water, but how that water gets there is not the mechanism Al Gore mentioned. So the argument that global warming will lead to higher moisture content of air is, well, in need of a little more observation and not speculation. What is known, that more moisture will fall out of the skies with colder air temperatures. A snowy day does not prove that mankind is not heading to hell by irresponsible burning of fossil fuels. What a more than average snowfall for a winter says, and the colder winter this year vs last year says, that the observation, more snow and colder temperatures, go together and should be taken into account, as opposed to saying a warming world leads to more snow. I am not forecasting the future, just issuing a disclaimer. Pundits, and Al Gore is just a very rich pundit, don't know their science, and the people who know the science find it difficult to speak out and say: "Hey Al, you are entitled to your own opinion, just not your own facts." Another thought popped into my head: Karl Marx commenting on intellectuals championing the communist cause: "Useful idiots."