THE ICE AGE COMETH

The weather has been on everyone’s mind of late. First it was Katrina, followed by Rita, and then Wilma wondering about in a fashion that defied the ability of the most sophisticated computers of the U.S. Weather Service to predict. Typically, the perpetrators of scare campaigns were quick to announce that the number and ferocity of these and other hurricanes this passed season was due to “global warming.”

This is as false as the theory of global warming. Climatologists agree the hurricanes were due to the Atlantic Ocean Conveyer, a system that determines whether the ocean is warmer or cooler, moving large currents around. It is, like most things in nature, a regular cycle, one that produced many storms in the 1940s and 50s, then eased off until the 70s and 80s, and has now returned.

It is well known that, of the course of billions of years, the earth has gone through warming and cooling cycles. From 1850 to 1950, the earth gained about one degree Fahrenheit in warmth. It has been warmer in the past such as during the millions of years that dinosaurs existed. The earth, however, is not showing signs of significant warming. The Ice Shelf in Greenland and Antarctic is actually getting thicker and, in 2004, the temperature in the Arctic grew noticeably cooler. This is not something to be ignored because the earth has been in an interglacial period between ice ages that lasts about 11,200 years and we are due another ice age any day now.

Just as there is nothing mankind can do to prevent a bogus global warming, there is likely nothing we can do to avoid the very real prospect of the next ice age. When it comes it will be extinction time for people, plants, and animals north of the equator. That’s the way it was the last time. Indeed, in the course of its five billion years, the earth has experienced such extinctions on a regular basis.

While the environmentalists have flooded the classrooms and media of America with endless nonsense about global warming, the fact is that the schedules, i.e. the movement of the earth around the sun, galactic timetables, and ways in which the earth and our solar system function are well known to scientists who study these things and, frankly, none if it bodes well for the human race and other critters. At least, that is the conclusion of Robert W. Felix, the author of Not by Fire, But by Ice: The Next Ice Age Now ($15.95, Sugarhouse Publishing, Bellevue, Wash.) Piling scientific fact upon fact, Felix notes that, “We’re beginning to realize that earth is a violent and dangerous place to live. We’re beginning to realize that mass extinctions have been the rule, rather than the exception for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on earth.”

There’s environmental propaganda and then there is hard, cold science. No pun intended. Here’s what Felix writes: “Then, about 11,500 years ago, the ice age ended. And it ended fast. As the world grew warmer, tropical animals moved back into Europe, and the barren tundra filled with trees once again…It was a global sweep of death--mass extinction--destroying not only the mammoth, but some 75% of all of America’s larger mammals. But why only the big ones? And why so fast?”

It hardly does justice to Felix and his book to try to encapsulate his view that a predictable reversal of the magnetic poles will act as a trigger for the next ice age and it is not the much ballyhooed global warming that troubles Felix, but evidence that vast, unseen, underwater volcanic warming of the earth’s oceans will bring about the next ice age. As the oceans warm, evaporation increases, which leads to more precipitation and when the excess precipitation begins falling as snow, it portends a new ice age.

“There is a cycle,” says Felix, “a cycle that includes orogenesis (creation of mountains), seismic activity, sea level changes, black shale deposition, volcanism, extinctions, seafloor spreading and magnetic reversals.” (To learn more, visit www.iceagenow.com)

Science is a wonderful thing. It gathers huge quantities of facts, organizes, tests, and analyzes them. It is science that has given us an understanding of gravity, our solar system, the human genome, and everything else that has influenced and advanced our lives. Felix has peered into the past and into the future to warn us that all to bundle up. Is he right? I hope not, but the science he cites, plus the climate worldwide, seems to suggest that he is.

Source




HORRORS! NUCLEAR REACTORS ARE NATURAL

And "natural" is the Greenies' highest term of praise

It took humans until the 20th century to build a nuclear reactor. Mother Nature, on the other hand, built one that turned itself off and on, stored its waste, never threatened a meltdown—and did it 2 billion years ago.

Physicists analyzing a tiny sample of this ancient georeactor—discovered in the African country of Gabon in 1972—have now determined how it worked. Alexander Meshik at Washington University in Saint Louis and his colleagues conclude that river water trickling into uranium-rich bedrock acted like the control rods in a modern reactor, increasing the efficiency of fission and causing the uranium to produce a chain reaction. The reaction released heat that boiled the water. Once all the water was gone, the fission fizzled out, preventing a meltdown. Gradually, more water trickled in and the process started anew.

By analyzing how xenon (a radioactive by-product of the reaction) was trapped in the rock as it periodically cooled, Meshik’s team could measure the timing of this ancient nuclear cycle. For 150 million years the reactor switched on for 30 minutes every couple of hours or so. “What’s amazing is that it was exactly 30 minutes—not 25, not 35,” Meshik says. Grains of a natural compound called alumophosphate had sequestered the xenon waste for eons without leaks. Eventually so much of the original uranium decayed that the reactor shut down for good. The whole process confirms that the laws of nuclear physics worked just the same 2 billion years ago as they do today. Now we just need to match nature’s finesse.

Source






THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF "BIOLOGICALLY IMPORTANT"

I guess I am biologically important to the bacteria that infest my gut

In the community where I live, environmentalists are hard at work to put a stop to all developments, meaning, all efforts to increase the available housing and other human amenities for people wanting to live there. Orange County, CA, is a highly prized area—the weather is very desirable, there is nowadays an abundance of jobs, schools are passable, and the entertainment and amusement being offered up are better than in most places around the globe. So it’s no wonder people want to live there, and those with land find a demand to fill for homes and other amenities—developments, as they have been dubbed, probably because the designation tends to remove from it the human element and suggests raw greed.

Just now the biggest land owner in the region, the Irvine Company, has proposed what is referred to the "East Orange scheme," which is the nemesis of the local and other branches of the Sierra Club. The Club and all its allies are hard at work to try to bring the project to a halt. Their first line of attack is based on the contention that the new development is likely to grind the local traffic to a halt. But, in fact, this is only the first of their salvos. The far more important sounding reason they offer—when you check out their web site at www.eastorange.org — is that, "These lands are part of one of the most biologically important open space areas in the entire state." ....

Anyway, what struck me about the crucial reference to how "biologically important" is the land to be used for development is that, while it sounds significant, if one thinks about it a bit, that phrase carries very little meaning. Suppose it said that the land is botanically important? Or zoologically important? Or residentially important? All these might convey some nearly clear meaning because they point to an area of life that the land may benefit. It may help plants, or animals, or people looking for someplace to live. "Biologically" is too broad a category and, since the company’s plans to develop it for human habitation, that, too, may well be part of what makes it important. We are, after all, biological entities, and when land is used to provide us with living space, that could be construed as being biologically important.

Surely, however, this is not what the Sierra Club & Co., want to convey by that phrase. But then, what? Something, one may assume, that is left deliberately unspecified in the text on the website. For something to be important, it must be important to something else. Water is important for most life, as is oxygen and inhabitable land. Because, however, there is probably more demand for such land in certain regions of the world than is available, priorities need to be set.

In a free society the priorities are set by way of the pricing system, because costs show just how badly people want something. This amounts to a reasonably sensible rationing process, where the quantity and quality of goods people receive depends on how well-off they are, how hard they have worked to be so well-off, how lucky they have been, etc. All this works out without some group of central planners of the kind they had in the old Soviet Union, groups that are in the end clueless about how to allocate resources rationally.

My bet is that the Sierra Club people are just as clueless about that as were those in the Kremlin, although I am sure they fancy themselves very wise. And this they evidence by using such ambiguous and thus useless language as exemplified by the phrase "biologically important." Don’t get me wrong—gridlock on Orange County roads can be hellish, in part because they are built by government, which tends to plan much like those guys did in the Kremlin, without a clear idea what actually is in demand and how much it will cost. Still, one can appreciate worries about crowded roads and other infrastructure challenges. What is a mystery, however, is what on earth "biologically important" should be understood to mean

More here

***************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************