NOAA Study Suggests Global Warming Not Increasing Hurricanes

After Hurricane Katrina, lots of people were quick to tell us how global warming was to blame for an increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes. Now, a recent study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggests that this isn't the case. Read the title link for the full story.

This is the sort of thing that frustrates me about globing warming alarmism. Otherwise rational people jump to unsubstantiated beliefs much in the same way primitive peoples used to blame bad things that they didn't understand on evil spirits. We have enough proven and fully understood environmental problems that we can work on without needing to invent a climatic bogey man. Lets cut down on water pollution, slow down population growth, protect some natural habitat and work on things that we can make a definite impact on. When science comes up with a climate model that actually works, is accurate and survives a couple of decades of peer reviews, we can use it to figure out what negative impact mankind is having on global climate and what we can do to minimize it. In the meantime, let's make quantifiable and measurable progress towards making the world a better place without relying on guesswork and ineffective knee jerk legislation that is far more likely to harm our economy than it is to save the planet.

Global Warming or Global Cooling?

The title link is to a great article showing how different sources of historical temperature data tell conflicting stories. Data from NASA implies that global temperatures are increasing while information from the UK Meteorological Office, University of Alabama and Remote Sensing Systems clearly show that temperatures have been falling for quite some time. To further confuse matters, the often cited NASA data did not support global warming until the raw data was massaged to no longer match the original measurements. Older temperatures were interpolated and adjusted downwards, and recent temperatures were presented as higher than the actual raw values that were initially recorded.

I suggest you peruse the entire article, as it offers graphs and visual aids to clearly illustrate the issue and help open-minded rational people understand just how imperfect global temperature predictions are. You might also like to read the much shorter Herald article discussing how global temperatures are not likely to increase in the next decade.

Global warming is an easy and seductive cause precisely because it is so difficult to measure or prove. Climate models are imperfect and ever changing. Good intentions, alarmism and knee jerk reactions have taken the place of objective science in this politically charged issue. Vote to tax SUVs or mandate that corn be turned into fuel instead of food and suddenly you are “saving the planet”. Climatic data never actually needs to improve as lack of success can always be blamed on too little effort, freak climatic anomalies, or the ever popular "we did our part but China’s pollution nullified our efforts". To make matters worse, now that the global warming movement has gained so much momentum, powerful individuals and groups have become vested in the global warming “problem”, and scientists must produce research that supports this belief or risk losing their funding and positions. Science is rapidly being replaced by dogma which makes it much harder for us to objectively learn more about our climate and what impact our species is having on it.

In the late 1800’s there was fear of an impending ice age. By 1930, we were supposedly threatened by global warming. In the 1950s, people decided that global warming wasn’t happening after all. In 1975, the New York Times reported “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable” and public schools taught children that we were beginning a new ice age. Most of these scares were based on a perceived average surface temperature change between 0.5 and 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Think about that for a moment. As little as ½ of a degree of change has been grounds to proclaim globally and historically significant climate change. Here we are on the surface of a thin crust of rock covering a ball of molten magma spinning around a massive and ever fluctuating ball of burning gas, subject to cosmic radiation, solar flares, plate tectonics and volcanism and yet people really think that a perceived and heavily disputed tiny average temperature change is absolute proof of a long term trend caused by humans. It is especially absurd if you consider how few years worth of data we have to analyze compared to the vast and complex climatic history of our planet.

Glaciers are indeed melting in places, but they are growing in others. In places such as Greenland and Switzerland, receding glaciers have revealed ancient villages, proving that the areas were devoid of glaciers in the not so distant past. How can we then say that the current absence of glaciers in such areas is unnatural and caused by manmade carbon emissions? Sure, polar bears and other species are threatened by climate changes, but so were dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and countless other species that were wiped out long before the dawn of human industry. Our climate is so vastly complex that we are unlikely to understand it well enough within our lifetime to accurately predict long term climate changes.

We would be far better of if kindhearted people applied their good intentions to othe environmental issues where they could make real and measurable progress. If for example, global warming activists instead spent their efforts buying up land to protect it from development, globally distributing contraceptives and educating people about the dangers of overpopulation, they could protect a vast amount of unspoiled habitat and slow the rate of new polluting consumers being brought into the world.

Peeping Tom Beaten and Arrested

According to a Fox8 news story, a Greensboro N.C. man heard noises from under the bed he and his girlfriend were laying on:

"(When) I looked underneath there, I saw these eyes staring back at me. I was like 'what the crap! This ain't normal,'" said Lynn. "So I start(ed) slinging him around. I was upper cutting him, beating him left and right."

...

"I talked to the cop. He told me if I wouldn't have caught him, he planned on spending the night."

Police are in the process of notifying the victims of the other cases and anticipate more charges will be filed.

Click the title link for the full story, a photo of the peeper and a video interview with the man who found him and give him a well deserved beating.

Female Blackbelt Marathon Runner Foils Burglary

This from the sun-sentinel.com:

A would-be burglar met his match when he tried to elude Margo Foster, a marathon runner with a black belt in karate who also knows kickboxing and kung fu, police said.
...
Without thinking twice, she said in an interview, she bolted through the living and dining rooms and followed the startled man out to the backyard. Police said he had one of Foster's backpacks strapped on his shoulders, filled with her property. She wanted it back.
A seven-block-long chase had just begun.

...

As related by Foster, the intruder began to climb the 6-foot-high wooden fence in the yard, when she "grabbed him by the neck, ripped him off the fence.. threw him to the ground, and put my knee to his chest."

...

"Go ahead and run," the former yacht detailer said she yelled. "You're not going to get away from me. I've been running for 40 years."

This is great! If everyone fought back like this, crime would go down. Yes, it's dangerous and obviously some victims will end up hurt, but if most people were willing to fight back like this crime would be much less attractive to thieves. In the long run, we would have a better, safer and more mentally healthy society.

14yr Old Boy Beats Burglar With Bat

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I haven't posted in quite some time. This is because I got tired of following the mostly disappointing and frustrating news feeds in order to find the occasional good tidbit worth commenting on. Yesterday, however, a friend sent me a great story that I just had to share with you all.

From MSNBC.com:

“I only hit him twice,” Michael said almost apologetically of the incident that played out Tuesday morning in the Phoenix suburb.
He demonstrated for Vieira how he whacked the burglar, later identified as Thomas Garza, a 30-year-old career criminal who was on parole at the time, twice across the back and shoulders.
On the 911 tape of the incident, Garza can be heard yelling “Please! Please! Please!” after being hit.

…

When Garza left the building, Michael climbed out his window behind him, saw the police arriving, and showed them where to go to find the suspect.

Nice work, Michael! Too bad you didn’t get him in the head before the police got him.

Weapons and Tactics Reviews from Iraq

The title link is to a letter posted on the Tactical Shooting Forums allegedly from the son a U.S. Marine in Iraq. It provides an interesting review of both U.S. and enemy weapons, and describes some of the groups of people that our soldiers are fighting.

Here is an excerpt:

The .45 pistol: Thumbs up. Still the best pistol round out there.
Everybody authorized to carry a sidearm is trying to get their hands on one.
With few exceptions, can reliably be expected to put 'em down with a torso
hit. The special ops guys (who are doing most of the pistol work) use the HK
military model and supposedly love it. The old government model 45's are
being re-issued en masse.

Warning:
The full story contains some profanity and may not be safe for work or appropriate for young children.

Thanks to Palantirion of Sanitycheck 101 for sending me the link.

11yr Old Girl Kills 2 Armed Illegal Alien Home Invaders

Here's an excerpt from the Libertypost.org story apparently borrowed from the NRA Files:

Two illegal aliens, Ralphel Resindez 23 and Enrico Garza 26, probably believed they would easily overpower a home alone 11 year old Patricia Harrington...
It seems the two crooks never learned two things, they were in Montana and Patricia had been a clay shooting champion since she was nine.

You've got to read this full story. You'll enjoy where this little girl shot the first of her attackers :)

Unfortunately, I couldn't find main stream news sites discussing this story in more detail. From what I can tell, it may have appeared in a November 2006 printed copy of an NRA publication, as this is how have I seen it posted as on various gun friendly discussion boards and forums.