What does it mean that the sunspot count for the first three months of 2009 (when 87% of days were without ANY sunspots) is even lower than the average for last year (2008, when 73% of all days had no sunspots), which was the lowest year since 1913? See this article on sunspot activity.

What does it mean that the output of the sun’s extreme UV is down 6%? And that radio emissions from the sun are the lowest they’ve been in 50 some years (since they started tracking it)?

What does it mean that the average temperature of Mars has gone up in the last 100 years, by about as much as the Earth’s average temperature increase?

Could the sun actually have been the driving force behind the slight global warming that has been perceived over the last 100 years here on Earth? When I stand outside in the sunshine, close my eyes and look toward the sun — it seems to be the source of all the warmth! If that’s where all the heat for the earth is coming from, isn’t it conceivable that slight variations in its output might be responsible for the slight variances in our global temperatures?

The sun has a regular sunspot cycle of about 11 years between minimum and maximum number of sunspots.

Now that sunspot activity is tanking, perhaps that explains the severely cold winter last winter?

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to stock up on long johns, buy a warmer winter coat (I’m thinking a fully lined parka) and take in some extra firewood for next winter.

I think we’re all in for a cold spell for the next year or two.

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When I see the news with its talk of ruin, injustice, inequities (and iniquities) and failures in the world, it all seems very “gloom and doom”. Terrorism, the rise of militant Islam in the world, the impossibly high cost of health care, the high taxes, the unemployment, the failing educational system, man-made global warming etc., hurricaines, earthquakes, ad nauseum. The things that they are trying to get us to believe in so we’ll be too upset to resist their efforts at control because we’ll ASK them to come in and protect us from the bogey-men.

I try to keep my attention instead on all the opportunities that exist today for families to get ahead, for children to succeed, for adults to prosper. The Americans who whine about how hard it is here have no clue what it’s like to scrape together an existence in a third world country. I’ve seen the desperation in the eyes of beggars in Merida (capital of the Yucatan in Mexico) pleading for pennies to feed their diseased children another day — that’s real misery.

Why would 38 million illegal immigrants have flocked to this country if things were as bad as the news claims?

Here’s a great quote on the subject from Winston Churchill, written in the middle of World War II, with London being pounded by German bombs every day and night and a very real possibility of the obliteration of his country being threatened by the Nazis, who were certainly trying:

“These are not dark days; these are great days–the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.”

We Scientologists have a saying, “Make it go right.”

It’s now how right things are — sometimes things are not right at all; they can be quite horrible. It’s how right you make things go, where you are and with what you have and can scrape together as resources. We also have the saying, “Something can be done about it.” And it’s always true.

Anyone can seem to be doing well when propped up by a social system — but how right are they making things go? Are they contributing their own survival and that of their loved ones and the society at large, or are they sucking survival away from others?

Today I find myself thanking God that I live in this age of miraculous convenience, instant communication, increasing health and security. I’ve made a lot of things go right–we all have–to get to a position of relative security at this point in my life, for me and my children and grandchildren. There’s a lot more to do, and always will be — it’s all part of the great game of life.

For which, today, I am grateful to Providence and all those who’ve helped.

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Global warming is happening – there’s little controversy over that (although with snow here in Oregon in mid April, it’s sometimes hard to believe that other areas are warming up enough to average it out). There’s a lot of controversy over how much, and to what degree it is caused by human activities.

Here’s a cute little test of your knowledge of Global Warming, in honor of Earth Day. How hysterical should we all be, and to what degree should we all be trying to shut down carbon emissions and cripple industry, in an attempt to “handle” the causes of global warming? The test will help you figure that out for yourself.

BTW, lest anyone get incensed about my callous disregard for the environment — I’ve cleaned up an enormous amount of trash in my life. I firmly believe in taking care of the environment, starting with where I live and working out from there. I carry a bag with me when I go hiking, and I routinely find and pick up crap left from previous generations of people, as well as beer cans and candy wrappers from this generation.

I’m just not that easy to tip to hysteria about what appears to be a naturally occurring geological cycle.

What’s your view?

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I have finished reading the book, “Unstoppable Every 1,500 Years Global Warming” by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery.

The book is fascinating and well documented; it is dedicated to:

“those thousands of highly qualified research scientists who have documented physical evidence of the 1,500 year climate cycle from over the entire globe. Hundreds of their studies endorse the reality of this cycle. They have gone, literally, to the ends of the Earth–often in harsh conditions, climbing tall mountains and huge glaciers, sailing frigid seas, sitting cramped at consoles in long-range aircraft, digging painstakingly in remote sites for pollen and human artifacts–to help us understand our planet’s climate changes. They have done it with virtually no encouragement from the press and the public. Too often, they have had to work in the fact of hostility from their colleagues in the climate modeling community who are selling the fake ‘consensus’ of anthropogenic [man-made] global warming. We applaud them and their work.

The three scientists who led the discovery of the 1,500-year cycle–Willi Dansgaard of Denmark, Hans Oeschger of Switzerland, and Claude Lorius of France–were jointly awarded the Tyler Prize (the ‘environmental Nobel’) in 1996. However, their award citations say nary a word about the climate cycle they discovered, nor anything about its predictive power to forecast moderate climate changes. The public has remained virtually unaware that the 1,500-year cycle offers the only explanation for the modern warming that is supported by physical evidence.”

The book is only 277 pages, and is not incomprehensible scientific gobbledy-gook, but well-written explanatory science. It has nearly 500 footnotes, mainly citations of a broad range of published scientific papers.

They take the emotional arguments about a scientific “consensus” for a scary global warming scenario and show them to be false; they are not based in any facts worth giving credence to. In any event, this book is highly recommended if you are concerned about this planet and global warming. You should be concerned and interested, but not for the reasons being promoted in the newspapers, TV and radio. The media has got it completely wrong, as they so often do.

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DailyTech – Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling – this is an interesting article at Daily Tech about a drop in the last year of the temperature worldwide. It’s a fairly significant drop. Anecdotally, we’ve had a colder winter here in Oregon than is usual. The daffodils are about two weeks late in coming up.

While it’s certainly too early to predict any kind of trend on this data, it’s interesting that the info shows that worldwide temperatures are actually dropping over the course of the last year. Is it a blip in the data? Is it a trend? Stay tuned over the next couple of decades and we’ll find out.

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The manufacturers of Risperdal and Seroquel, widely-prescribed anti-psychotic drugs, have been sued by the Montana Attorney General for injury or deaths of Montanans.

I hope more state Attorneys General will get on this particular band-wagon. These drug companies have very deep pockets (billions of dollars of profits per year) and are using extremely aggressive marketing campaigns to get doctors to prescribe these drugs off-label, for things that they were never approved to do by the FDA. The pseudo-science of psychiatry is in bed with Big Pharma on this, and are guilty of pushing the whole “bad brain chemistry” myth, for which there are no scientific tests, in exchange for kickbacks from the drug companies.

The girlfriend of the killer in the most recent in the spate of school shootings, in Illinois, said that her boyfriend was on 3 psych drugs and complained of not wanting to feel like a zombie. But when he tried to come off the psych drugs, he became irrational, and then snapped and started shooting people.

These drugs are not just ineffective (placebos often work as well) their real problems revealed in the testing that have been masked by the drug companies promoting them. So it’s a good thing that at least one state is going after them.

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The Federalist (a great newsletter for those interested in preserving and protecting the Constitution of the USA), published this posting today on bets being placed on the Global Warming scam by scientists who are not media sycophants from the gloom and doom school:

FRONTIERS OF JUNK SCIENCE: GLOBAL WARMING SNOW JOB MELTING?

According to a recent National Center for Policy Analysis report, last year’s declaration of impending doom from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the form of its Fourth Assessment Report was based on opinion instead of science. As hard data continues to emerge, global warming becomes increasingly difficult to defend. Hundreds of highly qualified scientists and climatologists unrelated to the UN’s IPCC pocket-science squad are contesting the assumption of so-called “experts” that CO2 is the primary force driving climate change. A number of scientists discount the warming theory entirely. In fact, many believe that the globe may be getting cooler—and some of them are putting their money where their mouths are. Believing that the world will be cooler in ten years, a pair of Russian scientists have even waged a $10,000 bet with British climate “expert” and global-warming alarmist James Annan. Meanwhile, China is battling its coldest winter in a century. Scores of people are dead and millions are stranded. Will Leftmedia shills report the events there with newfound skepticism for global warming? Don’t count on it.

I’ll take some of that action…. Is the debate over as Al Gore says? Not even vaguely, not when China is battling its coldest winter in a century!

As Mark Twain is reported to have said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Using statistics, one can prove nearly anything.

The is some convincing evidence that the average temperature around the world may have gone up by one degree in the last 150 years. But the most damning evidence that this is a natural phenomenon over which Man has zero control, is that the temperature of Mars has also gone up about a degree since we’ve been measuring it. Is Man to blame for that as well?

What are your thoughts on this?

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If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ve probably figured out I am not a believer in the myth of man-made global warming. I’ve seen enough evidence to come to an understanding that the average temperature Earth may have risen a degree or so during the last 150 years. Even that fact is not 100% completely sure.

John Stossel has put together an interesting video about global warming [video since taken down] that is making the rounds on YouTube. It’s a good video in that it presents a case for the opposition.

The debate’s not over, no matter how much they would like to shut up the dissenters.

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Quoting some common sense:

“Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing. The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).”

—UK climate researcher Lord Christopher Monckton

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Here’s a great quote fom John Coleman, a meteorologist and founder of the Weather Channel:

“It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly
offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with
environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data
to create in allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same
environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the
‘research’ to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming
claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their
way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus… I
do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions
of either party. However, Global Warming, ie Climate Change, is not about
environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you
‘believe in.’ It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field
of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event,
a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably
won’t believe a me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy
Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be
it… There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate
is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril… In time, a decade or two,
the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature rises, polar ice
cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm pattern all fail to occur as
predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped. The sky is not
falling.”

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