Posted on 01/21/2013 8:02:15 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
"The Sun is god!” cried JMW Turner as he died, and plenty of other people have thought there was much in his analysis. The Aztecs agreed, and so did the pharaohs of Egypt. We are an arrogant lot these days, and we tend to underestimate the importance of our governor and creator.
We forget that we were once just a clod of cooled-down solar dust; we forget that without the Sun there would have been no photosynthesis, no hydrocarbons — and that it was the great celestial orb that effectively called life into being on Earth. In so far as we are able to heat our homes or turn on our computers or drive to work it is thanks to the unlocking of energy from the Sun.
As a species, we human beings have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands — when the reality is that everything, or almost everything, depends on the behaviour and caprice of the gigantic thermonuclear fireball around which we revolve.
I say all this because I am sitting here staring through the window at the flowerpot and the bashed-up barbecue, and I am starting to think this series of winters is not a coincidence. The snow on the flowerpot, since I have been staring, has got about an inch thicker. The barbecue is all but invisible. By my calculations, this is now the fifth year in a row that we have had an unusual amount of snow; and by unusual I mean snow of a kind that I don’t remember from my childhood: snow that comes one day, and then sticks around for a couple of days, followed by more.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Right now I’m in PA. Back in the 50s/50s, I was in NW suburbs (Arlington Hts) of Chicago (1955-1967).
On that chart, a few NRs, besides 0”-14” yrs. I can’t get to AH’s page, since I’m not ‘signed-up’. AH wasn’t that far north of Joliet, but I do remember the continual snow covers. Not sure I trust their numbers. I also do remember the ‘57, ‘62 & ‘67 blizzards, before we moved to NJ.
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/01/31/the-10-worst-snowstorms-in-chicago/
In the teens here and single digits tonight and tomorrow night. We are getting snow but have not gotten much this winter - west Michigan. Started our fire in the woodstove earlier than usual today.
I believe it. Haven’t you had an ongoing spring/summer drought, for some years now? I grew-up in Arlington Heights (’55-’67), and do remember ~3 blizzards thru those years.
What makes you think so?
There is a famous communist mayor of London we keep hearing about. Think he is the one.
It’s been a year since a one inch snow. 2012 was pretty dry, but 2011 was a wet year.
Nope. That would be ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone. Boris is quite, quite the opposite.
The man you’re thinking of has been out of office almost 5 years.
We’ve got 4 degrees here in Davenport with a -16 windchill.
You’re welcome to it.
Okay. My mistake. Thanks for the correction. Not the red commie. Glad to see they got rid of him.
What a load of poop.
Thatcher only got (slightly) ‘green’ around 1989. Ten years into her primeministership.
The origins of the global warming scare
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
The hypothesis of man-made global warming has existed since the 1880s. It was an obscure scientific hypothesis that burning fossil fuels would increase CO2 in the air to enhance the greenhouse effect and thus cause global warming. Before the 1980s this hypothesis was usually regarded as a curiosity because the nineteenth century calculations indicated that mean global temperature should have risen more than 1°C by 1940, and it had not. Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.
(More details at the link.)
Was Margaret Thatcher the first climate sceptic?
“Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to warn of global warming - but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy”
‘A persistent claim made by believers in man-made global warming – they were at it again last week – is that no politician was more influential in launching the worldwide alarm over climate change than Margaret Thatcher. David Cameron, so the argument runs, is simply following in her footsteps by committing the Tory party to its present belief in the dangers of global warming, and thus showing himself in this respect, if few others, to be a loyal Thatcherite.
The truth behind this story is much more interesting than is generally realised, not least because it has a fascinating twist. Certainly, Mrs Thatcher was the first world leader to voice alarm over global warming, back in 1988, With her scientific background, she had fallen under the spell of Sir Crispin Tickell, then our man at the UN. In the 1970s, he had written a book warning that the world was cooling, but he had since become an ardent convert to the belief that it was warming, Under his influence, as she recorded in her memoirs, she made a series of speeches, in Britain and to world bodies, calling for urgent international action, and citing evidence given to the US Senate by the arch-alarmist Jim Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
She found equally persuasive the views of a third prominent convert to the cause, Dr John Houghton, then head of the UK Met Office. She backed him in the setting up of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, and promised the Met Office lavish funding for its Hadley Centre, which she opened in 1990, as a world authority on “human-induced climate change”.
Hadley then linked up with East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to become custodians of the most prestigious of the world’s surface temperature records (alongside another compiled by Dr Hansen). This became the central nexus of influence driving a worldwide scare over global warming; and so it remains to this day – not least thanks to the key role of Houghton (now Sir John) in shaping the first three mammoth reports which established the IPCC’s unequalled authority on the subject.
In bringing this about, Mrs Thatcher played an important part. It is not widely appreciated, however, that there was a dramatic twist to her story. In 2003, towards the end of her last book, Statecraft, in a passage headed “Hot Air and Global Warming”, she issued what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views.’
Was Margaret Thatcher the first climate sceptic?
“Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to warn of global warming - but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy”
‘A persistent claim made by believers in man-made global warming – they were at it again last week – is that no politician was more influential in launching the worldwide alarm over climate change than Margaret Thatcher. David Cameron, so the argument runs, is simply following in her footsteps by committing the Tory party to its present belief in the dangers of global warming, and thus showing himself in this respect, if few others, to be a loyal Thatcherite.
The truth behind this story is much more interesting than is generally realised, not least because it has a fascinating twist. Certainly, Mrs Thatcher was the first world leader to voice alarm over global warming, back in 1988, With her scientific background, she had fallen under the spell of Sir Crispin Tickell, then our man at the UN. In the 1970s, he had written a book warning that the world was cooling, but he had since become an ardent convert to the belief that it was warming, Under his influence, as she recorded in her memoirs, she made a series of speeches, in Britain and to world bodies, calling for urgent international action, and citing evidence given to the US Senate by the arch-alarmist Jim Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
She found equally persuasive the views of a third prominent convert to the cause, Dr John Houghton, then head of the UK Met Office. She backed him in the setting up of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, and promised the Met Office lavish funding for its Hadley Centre, which she opened in 1990, as a world authority on “human-induced climate change”.
Hadley then linked up with East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to become custodians of the most prestigious of the world’s surface temperature records (alongside another compiled by Dr Hansen). This became the central nexus of influence driving a worldwide scare over global warming; and so it remains to this day – not least thanks to the key role of Houghton (now Sir John) in shaping the first three mammoth reports which established the IPCC’s unequalled authority on the subject.
In bringing this about, Mrs Thatcher played an important part. It is not widely appreciated, however, that there was a dramatic twist to her story. In 2003, towards the end of her last book, Statecraft, in a passage headed “Hot Air and Global Warming”, she issued what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views.’
Thanks for the link.
I was genuinely unaware her ‘greenness’ went back that far.
It seemed only to become public around 1989, when Co2 and the ozone became big news. In fact, she was criticised by some here as bandwagonning.
I will happily admit my part-ignorance on this one.
Now you can educate others about it!
In related news...
Half of the land in Northern Hemisphere is covered in snow!
http://iceagenow.info/2013/01/northern-hemisphere-covered-snow/
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