Roger L. Simon: Baby, it's cold outside ... Is this bad news for Al Gore?

It's pretty chilly here in the land of perpetual summer (LA) and I could only nod when I checked out this link from PJ about record cold weather all over the place. It also includes news the Russian Academy of Sciences is predicting a new Ice Age. I wonder if my fellow Academy members will pick this up when judging this years' documentaries - Al Gore's global warming extravaganza is among the Oscar favorites in that category. [Stop being disingenuous. You know they'd still believe in Global Warming if Palm Springs turned into Antarctica. -ed. You're right. They'd think it was a "Happy Feet" promo.] But meanwhile, what is really going on here? Are we supposed to worry about global warming, hurricanes, tsunamis and bird flu (remember that?)? Or are they all just temporary aberrations in the great glide of time? I've decided I'm going to try to be happy for ten minutes and ignore the whole thing. The good news is, we've booked a nice hotel for cross country skiing in the Methow Valley over Christmas and there's going to be plenty of snow! [Barring sudden global warming.-ed. Right, right. I forgot about that.]

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I really feel like I'm in a 1970s time warp:
Miniskirts,
Platform shoes,
The Sovs are back, and poisoning people,
Ortega's back in Nicaragua,
Iran's making rude noises,
James Bond's at the movies and Rocky's next,
the hippies are having a love-in,
and
now they're talking about the next ice age.

You have obviously not been enlightened. Haven't you heard? Extreme cold is evidence of global warming! Of course, so is extreme heat. So whether it's cold or hot out, global warming is occurring regardless. Same holds whether we have a bad hurricane season or a good one, the polar ice sheets are thickening or thinning, etc.

I've tried this "it's happening regardless of evidence" argument in other contexts, but somehow I can't pull it off the way Al does. Only the religious types listen to me.

Swim suits and plenty of suntan lotion for the Methow Valley in December. Yes, sir.

If you get stuck on Highway 20 and you're in cell phone range, gimme a call and I'll come pull you out. :-)

Once upon a time I dug into their "cold = warm" argument and don't find fault that particular premise (as I suspect most don't) but it's still amusing to watch them peer down their Bob Hope noses at the peons that just don't understand.

As to their whole "human caused" global warming schtick? They've got jack, they know it, so they just talk loudly and try to suppress any infidels, but more infidels are coming out of the woodwork every day, so perhaps the world economy will survive their zeal for "doing good" at any cost after all.

To my fellow commuter, the light coat on the dogs portends a mild winter.
He swears by them.

The global warming is real alright. It's not another Y2K. Whether it is man made or not is irrelevant.
But I'm not worried about it. Our ability to adapt and overcome has not been tested on a global scale, recently.
If we have survived accidentally over millennia, imagine what we could do on purpose.
We will do some amazing things when the time comes.

I wonder how many sqaure feet there are in Gore's house? Or perhaps I should say houses. These folks are yammer away about global warming oblivious to the fact that they are every bit as much a part of the problem as the rest of us are. If there is a problem. It seems to me it is an excuse to keep the third worlders living in a state of pristine poverty, cooking over dung fires while Gore flies around in private jets spewing tons of crap into the air and complaining about the environmental impact of Man. And the plane puts out a lot of pollutants too.

Why "Xmas", is space too short for "Christmas"? What's next "Hanuk" for "Hanukkah" or "Rommadammadingdon" for "Rommadon"? Look, I'm no, as Andrew Sullivan was say, Christianist, just a simple Christian, but with the constant assault on all things Christian and all things being offensive to one group, wink-wink nudge-nudge knowhatimean knowwhatimean, or another; can't we take the extra micro moment and spell out the whole word, it's not like its a slang word or whatever, just the basis of the whole Judao Christian movement of the last 2,ooo plus years.

Okay, Esbiem, Christmas - you got it. (Wish there was a Hanuk , btw. You know us crime writers - from the Hammett school of brevity.

I wouldn't exactly say that Christmas is "the basis of the whole Judeo Christian movement of the last 2,000 plus years." I'll grant you the Christian part. But us Judeos don't buy into that part of the story.

On the subject of abbreviations, I remember some standup comedian years ago (might have been Jerry Seinfeld) talking about the abbreviations for the months of the year, and noting that if you abbreviate June to Jun, you've really got to be in a hurry.

"I wouldn't exactly say that Christmas is 'the basis of the whole Judeo Christian movement of the last 2,000 plus years.'"

Leaving aside the Judeo part, the statement is correct: EASTER, not Christmas, is the basis of Christianity. Jesus's birth is essentially unimportant; Christ's death and, more to the point, resurrection, are.

Well, you know when Bush told Rove to set the orbital weather controls to squash hurricanes this fall, in a failed attempt to affect the elections, that put a break on global warming. Thus the cooling. :-)

And that makes about as much sense as Gore's documentary, and has the virtue of being more interesting.

Here is an excerpt.

.. "everytime there's a triumph in the world a million souls hafta be trampled on.-altman Its true. But treasure each triumph as they come."

Something's fishy here. In her statement, I noticed that she didn't squeeze in a Bush bash. And, amazingly, she ends it with a God Bless.

In fact, I know nothing about Altman, but I'm not in disagreement with the quote. I can imagine Ghengis Khan saying something similar. It all depends on what you call a triumph, I suppose.

And what do the public statements uttered by Lindsay Lohan, Michael Richards, Danny DeVito, Dixie Chick Natalie Maines, Laurie David, Wesley Snipes (regarding his tax delinquency) and Tom Cruise have in common? They all plumb depths of dumbness. These people may look good (for now) and display some exceptional talents in the entertainment industry, but deep thinkers they ain't. They have shallow if not totally vacant minds. Richards was a slob prior to his abusive sputtering of racial epithets, now he's a slob that grovels. The Dixie Chicks' collective intelligence is as thin as eggshells. Snipes is arrogant and ignorant. This is off topic of course but excuse by screed. I'm sick of overpaid and insulated celebrities who dumbs as a box of rocks, and for all that Al Gore is another BS slinger. Screw him and the Power Point he rode in on.

The Methow Valley, hey? There isn't any better place in the world for xc, but there are WAY too many Seattle far-lefties there. Keep your affiliation with Pajamas and our own scandalously not-liberal Gerard Van der Leun quiet, and maybe they will let you live. And ski without harassment.

"EASTER, not Christmas, is the basis of Christianity. Jesus's birth is essentially unimportant; Christ's death and, more to the point, resurrection, are."

Never been able to figure that one out. You mean if Pilate, or a few Jews, or Mel Gibson, hadn't unjustly killed Jesus, then his life would have been pointless, and no one would be able to get into heaven?

I thought the point of his life was his very, very difficult message about how we need to live our lives.

While Christians try to educate me on that one, here's something I've never gotten straight from the Jews: if someone on a streetcorner in Brooklyn calling himself a "Jew for Jesus" is an nothing more than an oxymoronic (and moronic) ex-Jew, why aren't Leonard Cohen, Allen Ginsberg, and the zillions of Jewish American hippies like my dad who embraced one eastern religion or another in the sixties similarly ostracized?

BTW, global warming appears to be real, much to the inevitable chagrin of the Arab oil oligarchs that I thought everyone here hated.

Markus: I'm no expert, but I'll take a stab at it. Ex-Jews who have embraced Buddhism are just ex-Jews. They don't claim to still be Jews. Jews for Jesus claim to still be Jews, while saying that Jesus was the Messiah. That kind of disqualfies you from being Jewish.

"It's pretty chilly here in the land of perpetual summer (LA) and I could only nod when I checked out this link from PJ about record cold weather all over the place." Just imagine how much colder it's going to be without global warming.

For AlGore any good news on the weather is bad news.
http://thehatpeople.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

From WAPO.
"At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.
"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.
"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.
"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"
"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House."

The "impending ice age" story is an amusing diversion for those of us non-members of the global apocalypse club. But I highly recommend this link http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/06/nas-schizofrenic-climate-report.html to the same blogger Roger cited above, regarding the recent release of the National Academy of Sciences report on "surface temperature reconstructions" over the last 2,000 years. This important document, which is of course being grossly misreported (or not reported at all) as usual in the MSM, essentially destroys the claim that there is "scientific consensus" about global warming.

According to the report (and the summary of findings in the executive summary, which you can easily access through the above link, is only 5 pages) the only real "consensus" is that temperatures right now are higher than they have been for about 4 centuries, as opposed to the several millenia claimed previously. Since the "Little Ice Age" ended about 1850, what we essentially know is that temperatures in the last century are higher than during the little ice age (which is, ahem, why they call it an ice age.) The report says we know little about temperatures before 1600 and almost nothing before 900 (when we think we know temperatures were about the same as now---query about mass extinctions, coastal inundations etc. circa 900.) This is very big stuff, and it absolutely obliterates the claim that "most scientists" (this is the NAS) are in consensus about the GW alarmists claims. This isn't some lone dissident out there, this is the NAS. The report itself is a consensus report, and shows they ain't got jack, as someone above commented.

Also, read the same blogger's commentary (or listen yourself) on the available sound transcripts of the conference relating to the report. It reveals that the "hockey stick" is now toast, among other gems. Big stuff, I think, for those interested.

Esbiem, not to be pedantic, but the 'X' in 'Xmas' is not a Latin 'X' but a Greek Chi, which has been the symbol of the Christ since the earliest days of Christianity. 'Xmas' may be an abbreviation, but it's one that's sanctioned by tradition.

As for global warming, I imagine that the cavemen who saw the glaciers retreating from much of Europe and North America sat around their fires and complained how global warming was going to screw up the mammoth hunt. The fact is, the climate changes. We'll deal with it.

November 29, 2006: Baby, it's cold outside ... Is this bad news for Al Gore?

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