The Arctic Comes To California

Post below lifted from Blue Crab. See the original for links

Forecasters are warning Californians that they are in for a rough weekend as arctic storms barrel into their state. There are wind, rain, avalanche, blizzard, mudslide, boating and a bunch of other warnings being announced. This is going to be a doozy. Best advice: stock up on supplies and stay home.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - People throughout California braced themselves as arctic storms moved ashore Friday, threatening to paralyze the mountains with deep snow and bring devastating rains to a coastal landscape already charred by wildfires. Forecasters warned the fierce winds and other extreme weather would last through the weekend.

Homeowners rushed to stack sandbags around houses lying below fire-ravaged hillsides in Southern California, while Northern California residents - like those along the Gulf Coast before a hurricane - scurried to stock up on last-minute provisions. In the eastern Sierra ski town of Mammoth Lakes, resident Barbara Sholle went to the supermarket after receiving a call from the town's reverse-911 system. She waited an hour to pay for her groceries amid a crush of residents. "People were waiting in line for shopping carts," she said.

The storm system began dumping rain and snow Thursday in parts of Northern California. Power outages, damaged electrical lines and downed trees were reported in the Sacramento area by nightfall. The U.S. Forest Service issued an avalanche warning for Mount Shasta, in the Cascade Range in far Northern California, while the National Weather Service issued a rare blizzard advisory for the Sierra Nevada. The storm system brought high wind warnings along the coast. Ocean tides were expected to swell to 30 feet, leading the Coast Guard to caution boaters to remain in port. "If you don't have to go out this weekend, it might be a nice weekend to stay at home after the holidays," said Frank McCarton, chief deputy director of the California Office of Emergency Services.

Meanwhile, there are completely different warnings going out in Florida. Rain warnings, of a sort. Specifically, beware of iguanas falling from the sky as temperatures fall. Plummeting temperatures lead to plummeting iguanas.

MIAMI - The bitter cold that swept across the region came like a giant Sominex pill for the tree-dwelling iguanas of South Florida. The plummeting temperatures Wednesday night and early Thursday - which hit 39 degrees at Miami International Airport - caused the large green lizards to drop out of the trees and litter the ground.

The cold-blooded reptiles, exotics from Central and South America that can reach six feet in length, maintain a body temperature similar to the air around them. When the temperature falls into the low 40s, their bodies go into a deep sleep - with basically only the heart continuing to function and with little blood flow, experts said. ''The worst part of the cold comes in the evening, and they literally just shut off,'' said Ron Magill, communications director for Miami Metrozoo. "Their bodies shut off and they lose their grip on the tree, and they start falling.''

They aren't dead. At least, most aren't. It is as if they are in suspended animation, said Robert Yero, park manager at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park on Key Biscayne, where it was raining iguanas Thursday morning. Two were underneath buttonwood trees; another lay beneath a sea grape. All were about 30 yards from the beach, in the coastal hammock.

Sleep-falling reptiles plummeting down on passersby is not what you expect in the Southernmost reaches of Florida. But it indicates just how cold it is down there, doesn't it. Our advice: buy an iguana-proof hardhat if you're planning on going for a stroll in the Miami area. Getting bonked on the head by a six-foot somnambulating (somnambu-falling?) iguana could ruin your whole day.







Heavy Snow In Pyrenees Leads To Avalanches, Deaths

Post below lifted from Blue Crab. See the original for links

Heavy snowfalls in the Pyrenees have led to avalanche conditions that have claimed the lives of three skiers in Spain. The snowfall has been so heavy that many ski areas have been forced to close entire sections.

Mountain rescue teams said they were found in an off-piste area near the resort of Formigal. Two of the skiers died while rescuers tried to resuscitate them, but the body of the third was discovered later. The avalanche occurred on Friday morning and the centre said a warning had been issued for off-piste areas because of recent heavy snowfalls. Some of its ski runs have been closed, at what is considered to be a busy period for Spanish resorts.

There have been additional deaths at ski areas in Europe due to extreme snow conditions. One woman died in Austria after being buried in snow, but her three companions were rescued. (I also saw another report of a death at another European ski resort yesterday, but can't locate it at the moment.)





Winter Storms Lash Europe

Post below lifted from Blue Crab. See the original for links
Bulgaria and Romania are reeling under heavy snow that has caused near collapse of the transportation systems. A ship appears to have been lost with all hands in the Black Sea as the storm battered the areas. Bucharest, Romania is buried under as much as two feet of new snow.

Rescuers from Ukraine and Russia are searching for the other crew from the Vanessa. There were 10 Bulgarians and a Ukrainian pilot on board. The crew reportedly took to life rafts when their ship, carrying iron, sank en route to Burgas in Bulgaria. Heavy snow has severely disrupted transport in Bulgaria and Romania. There is transport chaos in the Romanian capital Bucharest, with snow 50-60cm (19.5-23 inches) deep in places. Bucharest's two airports were closed and train passengers were hit by long delays. The airports later reopened.

Bulgarian airports were also closed, as were ports in both countries. The BBC also has pictures from the storm-ravaged Balkans. Much of Britain has been hit with heavy snows as well, although not as badly as the Balkans. But the winter is wreaking havoc there as well.




2007 warmest year on record? Coldest in this century

Post below excerpted from Lubos Motl. See the original for links and more

One month ago, we noticed that November 2007 was the coldest month since January 2000. Well, the RSS MSU satellite data prepared by remss.com show that December was even cooler. The December anomaly was -0.046 °C, compared to -0.014 °C in November. That means that December 2007 was also cooler than the average December from 1979. Moreover, we can finally complete the ranking of the years!

Let me start with forecasts in the mainstream media.

In January 2007, we were informed that 2007 was either likely or certain to surpass 1998 and become the world's warmest year on record by most media, including:

Reuters
AP & Foxnews
IHT
BBC
MSNBC
CBS
USA Today
The New York Times
The New York Sun
The Washington Post
National Geographic
CBC
The Guardian
The Independent
China People Daily
ABC Australia
Discovery Channel
Science Daily
Met Office

as well as virtually all other media you know. They justified this statement by referring to scientists who have combined greenhouse gases with the observed El Nino. Many sources, such as the New York Sun, even gave you the probability that 2007 would be the hottest year as 60 percent. They immediately added that this should "add momentum for the next phase of the Kyoto protocol", a comment that clarifies what is the actual goal of many of the people who study these questions professionally.

In the middle of the year when it started to be clear that the prediction was bogus, Phil Jones (Reuters) changed his mind only infinitesimally. It would be the second hottest year, he said. These big-shot agenda-driven scientists never have the courage to say that they were simply wrong.

Reality: thermometers

However, the greenhouse gases are not too important and El Nino was replaced by La Nina. As a consequence, RSS MSU data for the lower troposphere (graph, more graphs) show that 2007 was the coldest year in this century so far. In alarmist jargon, it was the ninth hottest year on record: the most recent year was cooler than all other years in this century as well as 1998 (by a whopping 0.41 °C) and even 1995. According to different datasets (HadCRUT3, UAH MSU, NOAA), the year is going to be approximately the 8th (HadCRUT3) or 7th (NOAA) or 6th warmest year. UAH might report 2007 as the 4th warmest year and GISS will be a real exception because 2007 will be almost certainly its 2nd warmest year (as James Hansen said a few weeks ago, after 2005 but slightly above 1998) - but it is still very far from the hype about the hottest year. Your humble correspondent is not the only one who believes that the satellite measurements such as RSS, UAH are more accurate than GISS, HadCRUT3. It just happens that HadCRUT3 is closer to RSS than UAH to RSS, as far as the recent rankings go.

The RSS MSU linear trend extracted from the 1998-2007 interval is -0.48 °C per century of cooling! Numerically, it's almost the same trend that we assign to the 20th century but with the opposite sign. The RSS MSU data imply that 2007 was 0.12 °C cooler than the already cool year 2006. Other teams will generate qualitatively compatible results but substantially different numbers, raising doubts about the reliability of the temperature measurement even in the modern era.



Figure 1: Global cooling. Nine hottest years on record as shown by the RSS MSU calculations, from the hottest year 1998 to the coolest year 2007.

The choice of 1998 as the beginning of this graph is, of course, a P.R. trick to make the trend look as cooling as possible. If someone chooses e.g. a year in 1970s - the coldest year in the last 70 years - as his beginning, it is a P.R. trick, too, even though the goal has the opposite one. Certain qualitative conclusions simply depend on these choices and one must be careful about this fact. Similar issues are also discussed in the fast comments. Moreover, I only included the last 10 years for efficiency because typing three times as many numbers to the Excel file would be rather tiresome. Incidentally, if I wanted to demonstrate recent global cooling, I could have been even tougher and show you 36 months since January 2005, including the linear regression:



Figure 2: Global cooling 2005-2007. The trend is over 15 °C of cooling per century. ;-) Also, the trend is accelerating: for the 12 months of 2007, a similar linear regression gives about 35 °C of cooling per century. :-)

Let me emphasize that if someone thinks that the "ninth hottest year" is still hot, it is of course an irrational reaction. The global mean temperature is a continuous function of time and is auto-correlated. It follows that a short time after what has been identified as the hottest instrumentally measured years, we can't abruptly return to years as cool as 1850 or 1660. The laws of mathematics just make such a possibility extremely unlikely.

Let me offer you a metaphor. Imagine that all newspapers in the world would cite "experts" and predict that Nico Rosberg would almost certainly win in the Formula One 2007 season. However, the first three drivers would be R„ikk”nen, Hamilton, and Alonso while Rosberg would be ninth. Would the readers appreciate the "expert" who would just decide that Rosberg was the best guy? It would be an entirely foolish prediction. Why is the climate so different?






Panic du jour: overpopulation

The Dominion Post in New Zealand recently published a doomsday prognosis based on the antiquated bugaboo of overpopulation. They actually avoid defining what they mean by overpopulation, which is always convenient. But let us look at some of the claims they make.

1. They say the world's population "growth rate has been slowing in recent years, but only slightly."

This is as understated as their claims of eminent disaster are overstated. They say that the United Nations estimates the world's population will top out around 9.4 billion. Only a few years ago the UN was saying it would be 12 billion. So in a few years time they have reduced their estimate by 3 billion people. The Dominion Post calls that slight.

To put that into context that is equivalent of the total population of China, India and the United States combined. Hardly a trifling number I would say. In Kiwi terms that is the same as eradicating the entire population of New Zealand 650 times over.

The total fertility rate, that is the number of children born to each woman on average, has been dropping like a stone in spite of the Post's claim that there have been only slight decreases. In the early 70s the TFR was 5.2 children. By the early 90s it had dropped to 3.6. By the beginning of this century it was standing at 2.97. And today it is estimated to be 2.59. So the world TFR has been cut in half over the span of about half a lifetime.

It is generally conceded that for a nation to have a stable population it must have a TFR of 2.1. According to the CIA World Factbook there are 103 countries in the world with a TFR that is at or below this level. This includes the United States and Canada, virtually all of Europe, much of South America, and much of Asia. Nations that are close to dropping below their replacement levels include Mexico, Indonesia, Colombia, Jordan, and India.

Of course birth rates only tell you how many people are entering the building, so to speak. What about the exits? The main driving force of world population today is not birth rates but death rates, or to be more precise, the decline in death rates. People are living longer. More infants are surviving into adulthood. This decline in deaths is the main reason populations have grown. That, however, is a conundrum for overpopulation hysterics like the Post. It is one thing to recommend that people have fewer children but how does one recommend that people die faster and in larger numbers? That is why they actually ignore the driving force of population growth today -- longer life spans.

2. The Post argues that there are "ominous signs that the world might be reaching capacity." Doomsday day prophets never have a shortage of ominous signs since almost anything unpleasant is usually attributed to their panic du jour. Their evidence in this editorial is that the UN "called for immediate help for poor countries hit by spiralling food prices. Those countries were spending 25 per cent more on food imports in 2007 than they had in 2006..." No doubt this is true. But let us look at what has happened and who is responsible.

World food production has been increasing dramatically over for decades now. World food supplies have been increasing faster than the world's population. In the 1960s only 42 percent of nations had an average daily caloric intake that was equal to 100% of daily requirements. By the 70s it was 52 percent, by the 80s it was 66 percent. Nations which previously couldn't produce enough food, such as India, China and Vietnam, became net food exporters. Then the environmental hysterics got involved and starting pushing biofuels.

To push biofuels they confiscated large sums of money poorer taxpayers and poured it into the coffers of wealthy special interest groups like Agribusiness and Big Energy companies. The politicians decided to offer subsidies to produce biofuels. Those biofuels started gobbling up massive amounts of the agricultural sector bidding up world food prices. One fuel tank of ethanol requires the food sufficient to feed one person for an entire year. The Financial Times reported that Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme "said policy makers were becoming more concerned about the impact of biofuel demand on food prices..." The paper said "biofuel production will sustain food inflation and hit the world's poorest people."

The politicians in Europe and North America particularly have adopted policies which are guaranteed to divert food from human consumption to energy and they are starving people to death because of it. The question is not so much a lack of food but food being wasted on "green" solutions that create more problems than they solve.

3. The Post gets all worried about the how much land each person has available to them. This has to be one of the biggest non-issues around. Individual prosperity and thriving is not directly effected by available land. The nations in the world with the lowest population densities also tend to be poverty stricken, death traps.

Some of the least densely populated regions of human habitation are in Africa whereas Europe is among the most densely populated regions in the world.

In any specific nation prosperity increases with population density. Auckland is more prosperous than South Island. London is more prosperous than the rural regions. New York is more prosperous than Wyoming. Population density for a nation is not the full story by any means. The rate of urbanisation is also important. For instance there are very wealth nations with low population densities: Canada, the United States and Australia are three. But in all three of these nations there are vast areas that are unpopulated with heavy concentrations of people in urban settings.

The Post seemed to chide one UN official who said population growth was a problem but "he shied from the next step, saying instead that forcing people to stop having children would be a simplistic answer." The Post seems to think that using force to sterilize people, or similar coercive measures, are the "next step." I can think of people who have supported such policies but I'm not sure the editors at the Dominion Post want to be in that hall of infamy.

The Post warns that "the pressure from an ever-expanding population on a world that is finite cannot be ignored forever." This summation shows their lack of factual content. The world's population is not "ever-expanding" even by the UN's own projections. They full anticipate the world's population to go into steep decline within the lifetime of many of the people alive today.

I have just looked at the UN's projections. Their projection using their medium variants maxing the world out with 9.19 billion people in 2050, not the 9.4 billion the Post mention. The problem is that UN has a history of overestimating and then later reducing their figures to match what actually happened. Even their medium projections have a history of being too high. Their low projections, which I think are more realistic, show the world's population maxing out at 7.87 billion in 2040 and then declining.

In the next few years Russia is expected to see populations decline by up to 50 percent. Europe faces a decline of 25 percent on a whole. Japan expects to loose 16 million people, Italy will lose 15 million, Spain 8 million, Germany 12.4 million, Netherlands 6 million. Nations like New Zealand, who have built a pension/welfare system based on the premise of more people paying in than collecting will face the dilemma of more and more people collecting benefits while fewer are paying in. Unfortunately as long as publications like the Post push the bogus crisis of overpopulation politicians find it easy to ignore the crisis of declining population that will impact the welfare states in the near future.

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Tree laws KILL trees

As an attorney I am sometimes consulted by property owners who want to remove trees without fear of tree regulations. As an attorney I cannot advise my clients to ignore laws (though often tree laws seem easy to ignore). I can tell clients what a lot of people do: they don't plant any tree that is covered by tree laws. And any tree protected by tree laws that is still small enough to be legally killed, is killed.

Tree laws can be amended to include other trees, so that under modern government every tree is a potential risk that a property owner will be restricted in the future use/alteration of his property. Tree laws make treeless property the safest route.

Tree laws kill trees, as every libertarian knows. And rightfully so, because tree laws violate private property rights by "socializing" trees. All freedom is founded on private property. The joke about the endangered species act is: shoot, shovel and shut up. Under "tree-preservation" laws it is: chop, chip and chill.

Tree laws illustrate the fatal conceit of socialism via its unintended consequences. Tree-huggers must have fallen out of a stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down. If public officials were any more stupid, they'd have to be watered twice a week. If their antidisestablishmentarianism continues then more "protected" trees will die. Tree laws prove that socialism is environmentally disastrous. Government built roads through forests, straightened rivers, drained wetlands, cut canals, and subsidized other agricultural uses with taxes and other socialism. The government has already done more environmental damage than private enterprise could ever have afforded to do.

Capitalism saves trees from socialism's destruction. Capitalists farm trees for paper, and other uses. Capitalists created alternative forms of power to replace the burning of wood. The best environment is a capitalist environment. Trees prove that the color of a healthy environment and the color of money are the same. Mother Nature is a capitalist. Capitalists are the true greens.

Even so, Government threatens tree owners on private property with tree laws. Tree laws fail to distinguish non-violent private acts from theft and violence. With tree laws, the government threatens theft and violence against peaceful people.

Many jurors do not know that they have the absolute power to acquit if they believe a law is wrong. As an attorney, I have been asked how I sleep at night after representing "tree killers." I sleep like a log after I protect peaceful property owners from guilty government. My counter-question is "how can anyone sleep after defending the statist quo?"

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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