High tide at Falling Downs

We've been having some screwy weather in these parts. Could that be a symptom of "climate change?"

There's no doubt winter is lingering. We woke up to -10 C this morning, and spring officially arrives this week. Last week we had a couple of days of rain. That washed out the Burgess Sideroad and also brought Indian Creek up four or five feet. For a few hours on Saturday afternoon the water was actually going over our bridge instead of under it, which we've only seen once before in the ten years we've been here.

I remain what might be called a climate change skeptic. According to the experts, ten or twelve thousand years ago Falling Downs would have been under a mile and a half of ice and snow. Obviously a lot of climate change happened long before humanity went wild with the fossil fuels. Climate is constantly changing whether we burn fossil fuels or not.

Which is not to say we shouldn't be trying to minimize our carbon footprint. Tread lightly on the earth, and leave things better than you found them has always been my mantra. But when you see outfits like Goldman Sachs promoting carbon tax solutions to our alleged climate crisis... that's always struck me as the equivalent of an obese person paying an anorexic not to eat.

I think there's a certain amount of unacknowledged hubris involved in the climate change debate.

"We are the master species and we can kill off all life on earth."

Well, I doubt it. I don't think Mother Nature gives a shit one way or the other if our species survives or not. Here at Falling Downs we've got pre-historic snapping turtles climbing out of the marsh every spring to lay their eggs in our driveway. They were doing that a million years ago and they'll be doing that a million years after we humanoids drive ourselves to extinction. They've survived cataclysmic volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes.  They roamed the earth in the age of dinosaurs and they're still here.

My favourite environmentalist isn't Rachel Carson or David Suzuki. It's Wiebo Ludwig.

Wiebo was what you might call a "direct action" kind of environmentalist. He was also a fundamentalist Christian. Oddly enough, neither Christians nor environmentalists have ever embraced the guy.

So we had the water going over the bridge and then the rain turned to snow and things got colder. The water level dropped over the course of Sunday. By late Sunday night, when I went out on the stoop for a breath of fresh air, you could hear the ice sheet cracking and collapsing all through the marsh and down to Bass Lake. It's an eerie sensation. A dead quiet night punctuated with the groans of fracturing ice and sudden crashes.

But, it's forecast to warm up this week. Another couple of weeks and I'll be able to put the canoe in across the way and paddle down to Bass Lake.


By then, the snappers should be digging their way out of the marsh again.

Climate change and motorsports

That's got an oxy-moronic tone to it, eh?

How does a quarter million people driving to Indianapolis help fight climate change? It doesn't, obviously. There's probably not that many these days, because motorsport has been dying a slow death anyway.

They're bulldozing grandstands at NASCAR tracks so the stands look full on TV.

I love the old hot-rod days and I'll miss them.


But they're fading out.


The other day I came across one of those Poker Run shows. There's forty feet of fibreglass with three, four, or, God help us, five Merc 400s hanging off the back.

And that's just one boat. There's well over a hundred on this run...


Why?

Here's a big ole scoop 'o irony for ya

Clicked on Google News this morning and found these two headlines in close proximity:

From the National Post, Conrad Black: Thirty years of climate hysterics being proven wrong over and over again, and just an inch or so away, we get this from CTV News; Amid extreme heat, 33 die in Quebec.

Which I think proves that artificial intelligence, as manifest in the Google News algorithms that create their home page, has both an appreciation for irony and a mischievous sense of fun!


There you go; artificial intelligence is nothing to be afraid of!

Quaternary glaciation and why I'm not sweating global warming

Here's a scholarly article that claims that the real estate I'm sitting on right now has been subject to multiple ice ages over the past million and a half years or so.

Before the glaciers of the last ice age receded, Falling Downs was stuck under two kilometers of ice. Obviously, it took a lot of global warming to melt all that ice, and that was long before us humans started using fossil fuels.

Sometimes I think all the hoo-ha about "global warming" is just a bunch of hucksters trying to sell me everything from new taxes to electric cars.

So the seas will rise and coastal areas will be underwater? Guess folks will have to move. The seas have been rising and falling for millennia. And humankind and our various ancestors have been moving out of the way just as long.

Nothing new there.

What's new is that our brightest minds have figured out how to financialize these historic ebbs and flows in the planetary ecosystem.

That's bound to be a dead end.

Snowblower in the morning, lawnmower in the afternoon

Yup, this climate change shit is one hell of a thing.

Had a snow storm here at Falling Downs this morning. On the 14th of May. I know!

Get the fuck outta here!

I don't know what to make of the entire "climate change" imbroglio. Ya sure, fossil fuels are fucking up the planet. But how serious is anybody about getting off fossil fuels? Have you noticed that the number one polluter on the planet, the US military, gets an automatic pass on any anti-pollution legislation? We can't let carbon emissions jeopardize national security after all...

So me and my pick-up truck are gonna get carbon taxed up the ying-yang, while the US Navy and it's twelve or nine or whatever the latest number is of "carrier groups" get a free pass? One carrier group puts more shit in the air every ten seconds than my truck will in its lifetime, but I'm the problem?

Get the fuck outta here!

Some thoughts on the warmest winter in memory

So this is global warming?

I was kind of OK with this narrative about how fossil fuels are destroying the climate, till I heard that some sharpies at Goldman Sachs had figured out that something called a "carbon tax" would help set things right.

That's where the over-polluters buy carbon credits from lesser polluters, and it's all good because GS will be having their sticky fingers all over this little global carbon credit exchange thingy.

Sounds like the fat kid paying the anorexic kid hush money so he can keep gorging.

This has in fact been the softest winter in memory, at least so far. That could change yet.

By contrast, the last two winters were among the harshest ever.

Which proves nothing.

Which is why you need to scratch your head when you hear that the Rumpelstiltskins at Goldman Sachs have figured out a way to stop climate change.

After a thorough review of the peer-vetted sources, I've come to the conclusion that climate has been changing as long as this little marble of misery we inhabit has had a climate.

For instance, I'm told that here in southern Ontario, ten thousand years ago, the snow was piled up miles deep.

There must have been a whack of climate change to make all that snow melt. And it melted way before the fossil fuel era and the industrial age.

So there's nothing new about climate change.

Hollande the Magnificent has austerity for workers but an extra billion to combat climate change

Workers are stupid.

Can they not see that saving the world from climate change is more important than their jobs?

What's a job worth compared to climate change?

That's why Francois Hollande is prepared to sacrifice the working class for the greater good!

And that underlines yet again one of the more problematic aspects of democracy.

Workers vote.

In France, it's not looking like many will vote for Hollande the Conqueror in the next go-round.

Hollande is in a bit of a pickle, and neither he nor his army of well-paid advisers can figure out why. Has he not saved Mali? The CAR?

And have French warplanes not led the way in that apocalyptic war on the Towelheads of Terror in the Islamic State?

And yet his poll standings plummet?

What is a great leader desperate for re-election to do?

Why, save the entire planet from climate change of course!

Who will pick up Rob Ford's Escalade at impound lot?

Let's see now; potentially life-changing or even world-changing elections in half a dozen countries in the past week, Ukraine troops and "terrorists" fighting it out in front of the Donetsk Porsche dealership, 2-300 Nigerian schoolgirls still in the clutches of terror obsessed Koran-crazed radical Islamists, the Pope in the Holy Land, climate change threatening to drown and bake or bake and drown all of us years before we ever thought possible, and the number one story in Toronto is this;

Who will pick up Rob Ford's Escalade at impound lot?

Fukushima disinformation campaign alive and well

Bob McDonald has a science program on CBC that I often listen to. I generally find his show informative and he does a great job of making science accessible.

However, I don't think he's doing the public any favours with this story which seriously downplays the Fukushima disaster.

He's essentially saying that Fukushima is a nasty bit of business, but it's not nearly as serious a threat as climate change.

Even if that eventually turns out to be true, Fukushima is the most catastrophic nuclear accident in history and we are a long way from seeing how much damage will be done by the time it has run its course.

Meanwhile, the public suffers from severe climate-change-global-warming oversaturation. Most people no longer have strong reactions to yet another climate change story. By telling the public that Fukushima is nothing compared to the story they are more than tired of hearing, the public will respond by shrugging it off.

I'd like to think that's not what Mr. McDonald had in mind.

Bad call, Bob.