It's so frigging cold here

[oldbuckster]

No matter how cold, my house is set to 68 highest, if your cold, put on sweater, or do some work ...................EH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[customsteve01]

I don't think our house ever gets above 65 in the winter. OB is right if your cold put more clothes on.

Steve

[boomac]

Oldbuckster said: No matter how cold, my house is set to 68 highest, if your cold, put on sweater, or do some work ...................EH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Why do you care what temperature someone else maintains in their home? Do you keep it set at 68 all summer as well?

[flannj]

Yesterday morning (Tuesday) I woke at 3:15 am so I could drive to O'hare to catch a flight. It was 10 below, but not as cold as the previous mornings of 15 and 14 below. Not as windy either, 10 -15 mph as opposed to the 25 - 30 on Sunday and Monday.

Landed at LAX about 8:30 am, it was 52 degrees. Drove all over the Los Angeles area during the day visiting with clients. To Pasadena, to Newport Beach, and back to LAX. It was sunny all day and got up to about 78 degrees by afternoon. Drove with the windows down. Ate lunch outside in the sun.

Caught a 6:00 pm flight back to O'hare, and landed at midnight. Temperature was up to +7 degrees. So, you can see I brought some of that S. California weather back with me. All you fellow mid-westerners should be thanking me right about now.

- Jim

[mark1101]

68F right now in Athens, Ga. Perfect day outside.

[IndyKlipschFan]

Nice to know that Global Warming thing is all real..... Thank's Al Gore

[Guest " "]

Nice to know that Global Warming thing is all real.....  Thank's Al Gore

Global warming is real....but it occurs naturally about every 125,000 years based on core samples for the poles.

We are currently in the warming up phase of that cycle.  This means increases in average tempertaures.

What you have to keep in mind is that as more moisture is retian in our atmosphere due to global warming...temperature extremes will continue to prevail.   It will still get cold...wicked cold.

[mas]

Do a bit of reading regarding topics such as the "Maunder Minimum" (the Little Ice Age) and "solar variability" (cyclical variation in sunspot activity).

[IndyKlipschFan]

JEFF JACOBY

Climate of fear

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | December 24, 2006

BACK IN 1961, Rod Serling set an episode of "The Twilight Zone" in New York City at a time of uncontrolled global warming. Somehow the Earth's orbit had shifted, and the planet was moving inexorably toward the sun. "This is the eve of the end," Serling intoned in his introduction. "Because even at midnight it's high noon, the hottest day in history, and you're about to spend it -- in the Twilight Zone."

The episode revolves around a few desperate New Yorkers struggling to survive the murderous heat. As the temperature climbs, social order crumbles. An intruder, crazed with thirst, breaks into an apartment to steal water. An elderly woman collapses and dies. Thermometers shatter, their mercury boiling over. Finally Norma, the main character, screams and passes out. Then comes the twist: Norma wakes up to find that it's snowing outside. She'd been having a nightmare. The Earth isn't hurtling toward the sun, after all; it's spinning away from the sun. The world isn't going to end in searing heat, but in a dark and deathly deep-freeze. Fade to credits.

Well, that's climate change for you. Maybe Mother Earth is warming up, or maybe she's cooling down, but either way it's always bad news.

Here, for example, is former vice president Al Gore in 2006, on the threat posed by global warming: "Our ability to live is what is at stake." It doesn't get much more dire than that.

Yet here is climatologist Reid Bryson, in Fortune magazine's award-winning analysis of global cooling in 1974: "It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth -- like a billion people starving." It doesn't get much more dire than that, either.

Bryson's article is quoted in "Fire and Ice," a richly documented report by the Business & Meida Institute, an arm of the Media Research Center. Climate-change alarmism is at least a century old, and the report offers many examples of it:

In 1902, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing "their final annihilation" due to rising temperatures. But by 1923, it was the ice that was doing the annihilating: "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada," the Chicago Tribune declared on Page 1.

So it was curtains for the Canadians? Uh, not quite. In 1953, The New York Times announced that "nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat." Yet no sooner did our neighbors to the north breathe a sigh of relief than it turned out they weren't off the hook after all: "The rapid advance of some glaciers," wrote Lowell Ponte in "The Cooling," his 1976 bestseller, "has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union." And now? "Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say," the Times reported in 2002.

Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again. You don't have to be a scientist to realize that all these competing narratives of doom can't be true. Or to wonder whether any of them are.

Perhaps that is why most Americans discount the climate-change fear-mongering that is so fashionable among journalists and politicians. Last spring, as Time magazine was hyperventilating about global warming ("The debate is over. Global warming is upon us -- with a vengeance. From floods to fires, droughts to storms, the climate is crashing"), a Gallup poll was finding that only 36 percent of the public say they worry "a great deal" about it.

Still, there is always a market for apocalyptic forebodings. Paul Ehrlich grew rich predicting the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings from starvation and epidemic disease. "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome's 1972 bestseller, warned that humankind was going to experience "a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline" as the world's resources -- everything from gold to petroleum -- ran dry. Jonathan Schell and Carl Sagan forecast a devastating "nuclear winter" unless atomic arsenals were frozen, or better still, abolished. Those doomsday prophesies never came to pass. Neither have the climate-change catastrophes that have been bruited about for a century.

"The whole aim of practical politics," wrote H.L. Mencken in 1920, "is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Some things never change.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[IndyKlipschFan]

Al Gore, Global warming, Inconvenient Truth

Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe

"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists

By Tom Harris

Monday, June 12, 2006

"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

See also:
The Gods must be laughing
A sample of experts comments about the science of An Inconvenient Truth:

But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.

Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.

So we have a smaller fraction.

But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."

We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.

Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:

Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"

Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."

Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."

But Karlen clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," KarlÈn concludes.

The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.

Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."

Karlen explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says KarlÈn

Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."

Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."

Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.

Tom Harris is a mechanical engineer and Executive Director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (www.nrsp.com), a new Canadian environment and natural resources non-profit group. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com

[oldbuckster]

Oldbuckster said: No matter how cold, my house is set to 68 highest, if your cold, put on sweater, or do some work ...................EH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Why do you care what temperature someone else maintains in their home? Do you keep it set at 68 all summer as well?

I don't care what others set their temps at..............I was talking about mine.............68 degrees is a perfect temp year round, yes in the summer too, when it's 80 and sunny outside, 68 is cool inside.................YEAR ROUND TEMP in house, 68 degree's..................66 degrees at night or during the day.................automatic thermostats are awesome, installed it when I had central air put in....................

[colterphoto1]

nothing like nice toasty hydronic heat! No 'burnt air', dry skin, or fan noise (YEAH).[]

So what if it costs $300 a month?

[IndyKlipschFan]

How much snow do we have Michael?

Gonna be different than mid to high 70's here today!!

[boomac]

I grew up in a house with hydronic heat and we had it in our second house. I miss it. Its a great system for sure. Aint nothin like scoochin' up against a warm radiator when its cold. Well, there might be a couple exceptions!

oldbuckster - we keep it at 65 most of the time but if we're just sitting at the computer or watching TV we jack it to 68. In the summer we rarely use the air and never set it below 76 when we do. I don't mind the heat but would prefer it warmer in winter. Sometimes when the boss lady ain't lookin'' I click it up a notch!