The "Ides" of August
14/08/07 01:43 PM
I don't know if August has "Ides" like March has but
it should. Here we are hard on the centre of the
Eighth month and I am pretty sure we have not had a
spoonful of rain in 9 weeks. Least not while I was
awake and paying attention. It has been a remarkable
summer here in Sweetwater, reminds me a lot of the
summer of 1957 when it was also dry and hot. The date
stands out because it was the summer after the
Uprising in Hungary against the Soviet occupation and
we had a lot of Hungarian refugees show up in Canada
that following year. Some new faces at my school
questioning in broken English just what they had let
themselves in for. Escaping the cauldron of war for
the frying pan of a + 100 degree F summer in
supposedly cold Canada.
In those days, it was pretty rare for anyone to water their lawns. That is what rain was for after all and if it didn't rain the grass could just go dormant, the way it was designed to. A lot of brown lawns around here this summer and the lady who cuts our lawn, (OK, her lawn) is bemoaning the fact that she has not had to cut the grass since June. Got so bad the other week she stomped all over the acreage with a battery operated weed whacker looking for any blade or leaf bold enough to poke it's head up above it's peers or looking a little bit green. Thankfully, she is a farm girl and understands the cycles of nature and knows that Feast follows Famine just as Night follows Day. A remarkably practical attitude that is all too rare these days. We could do with a lot more farmer's daughters in the world and in Ottawa.
Big news this week that the squints at NASA have been miscalculating, and mis-reporting their warmest ever years top ten list since 2000. Caught out by a Toronto blogger they (to their credit) quickly revised their list to reflect the fact that the dust bowl year of 1934 not 1998 was the warmest year on record, as a matter of fact, the revised data shows that 5 of the top 10 were in the Dirty Thirties. Remarkable too when you realise that this occurred when the Industrial output of North American Industry, oft blamed for the current so called Global Warming Crisis, was in a slump having suffered a 30% decline as a result of the Great Depression as we have posted before on this blog.
Another blogger has caught out a Chinese American researcher from a New York College who is a contributor to the ICCP report on Climate Change, in "fabricating" data to support his pre-conceived conclusions. He quoted data which he said was from 30 years of detailed record keeping weather stations in China when there did not appear to be the number nor the locations of stations listed in his report.
Earlier this week I heard another "expert" come down on the side of Global Warming as a catastrophic event. This guy, a "communicator" for the Toronto Chapter of the SPCA, a hotbed of whackos and animal "activists" at the best of times, was on the local CBC expounding on his theory that Global Warming has modified Nature by influencing CATS of all things into having an extra litter of kittens each year. This genius has elevated the work of Charles Darwin to new heights with this claim.
No big surprise that he was given air on the CBC to distribute this drivel.
I think I am going back into my burrow until it cools off, talk to you in September.
30
In those days, it was pretty rare for anyone to water their lawns. That is what rain was for after all and if it didn't rain the grass could just go dormant, the way it was designed to. A lot of brown lawns around here this summer and the lady who cuts our lawn, (OK, her lawn) is bemoaning the fact that she has not had to cut the grass since June. Got so bad the other week she stomped all over the acreage with a battery operated weed whacker looking for any blade or leaf bold enough to poke it's head up above it's peers or looking a little bit green. Thankfully, she is a farm girl and understands the cycles of nature and knows that Feast follows Famine just as Night follows Day. A remarkably practical attitude that is all too rare these days. We could do with a lot more farmer's daughters in the world and in Ottawa.
Big news this week that the squints at NASA have been miscalculating, and mis-reporting their warmest ever years top ten list since 2000. Caught out by a Toronto blogger they (to their credit) quickly revised their list to reflect the fact that the dust bowl year of 1934 not 1998 was the warmest year on record, as a matter of fact, the revised data shows that 5 of the top 10 were in the Dirty Thirties. Remarkable too when you realise that this occurred when the Industrial output of North American Industry, oft blamed for the current so called Global Warming Crisis, was in a slump having suffered a 30% decline as a result of the Great Depression as we have posted before on this blog.
Another blogger has caught out a Chinese American researcher from a New York College who is a contributor to the ICCP report on Climate Change, in "fabricating" data to support his pre-conceived conclusions. He quoted data which he said was from 30 years of detailed record keeping weather stations in China when there did not appear to be the number nor the locations of stations listed in his report.
Earlier this week I heard another "expert" come down on the side of Global Warming as a catastrophic event. This guy, a "communicator" for the Toronto Chapter of the SPCA, a hotbed of whackos and animal "activists" at the best of times, was on the local CBC expounding on his theory that Global Warming has modified Nature by influencing CATS of all things into having an extra litter of kittens each year. This genius has elevated the work of Charles Darwin to new heights with this claim.
No big surprise that he was given air on the CBC to distribute this drivel.
I think I am going back into my burrow until it cools off, talk to you in September.
30
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