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Insouciant Americans

Paul Craig Roberts
VDare.com
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:35 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Comment: From the Free Dictionary:'insouciant' [ɪnˈsuːsɪənt], adjective: carefree or unconcerned; light-hearted

The Underwear Bomber case indicates that whoever is behind these bomb scares is laughing at our gullibility.

How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is the most conspicuous of all? Umar Farouk Mutallab had a one-way ticket, no luggage, no passport, and his father, reportedly a CIA and Mossad asset, had reported him to the CIA and Mossad. Does anyone really believe that al-Qaida would choose as an airliner bomber a person waving every red flag imaginable?

This obvious question has escaped the U.S. media, a collection of salespersons marketing full body scanning machines for airports.

Would al-Qaida, with its extensive knowledge of explosives, have armed Umar with a "bomb" that experts say couldn't have blown up his own seat?
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Igloo

Ice Age Cometh: Death toll rises to 22 as Britain braces for coldest night yet


Times Online
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:52 UTC
Image
© Neodaas / University of Dundee
Nasa satellite picture of Britain doused in snow received by the University of Dundee
The death toll from Britain's biggest freeze for decades reached 22 today as the country prepared for its coldest night so far, bringing the promise of even more treacherous conditions.

Thousands of homes have been left without power, schools have closed and travellers have faced chaos as the weather hit roads, rail services and airports over the last two days. The disruption is estimated to have cost businesses around £700 million.

Councils continued to struggle with a growing salt emergency as police warned drivers in many areas not to travel unless their journey was essential.

The AA expect to have attended 20,000 breakdowns today - compared with about 9,000 for a normal Thursday - and warned that conditions were expected to remain "treacherous".

Meanwhile, the shutdown of an offshore Norwegian gasfield pushed Britain's gas infrastructure into emergency mode, forcing the closure of industrial companies in the north of England in order to preserve supplies to homes, shops and offices.

Although major airports stayed open, some air passengers had long waits for their flights, particularly at Gatwick, on the outskirts of south London, where more than 130 flights were cancelled. EasyJet had to axe more than 100 flights and British Airways was among other carriers that had to cancel some services.

The body of Philip Hughes, 45, from Slough, was recovered from beneath ice at the Lakeside Country Club in Surrey where he was watching the world darts championship. A spokesman said it appeared to have been a "tragic accident".
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Igloo

Ice Age Cometh: US braced for more heavy snow, wind chills as low as 50 below zero

Michael Crumb
Associated Press
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:44 UTC
Image
© Associated Press / Nati Harnik
Vehicles travel in white out conditions caused by blowing snow on Interstate 80 west of Omaha, Neb., Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010. A storm system with sub-freezing temperatures and high winds is traveling through the Midwest.
Des Moines - Snow was piled so high in Iowa that drivers couldn't see across intersections and a North Dakota snowblower repair shop was overwhelmed with business as residents braced Thursday for heavy snow and wind chills as low as 50 below zero.

Frigid weather also was gripping the South, where a rare cold snap was expected to bring snow and ice Thursday to states from South Carolina to Louisiana. Forecasters said wind chills could drop to near zero at night in some areas.

Dangerously cold wind chills were anticipated in the Midwest overnight, including as low as 35 below in eastern Nebraska, minus 45 in parts of South Dakota and negative 50 in North Dakota, according to National Weather Service warnings.

Another 10 inches of snow was expected in Iowa, buried in December by more than 2 feet of snow, while up to 9 inches could fall in southeast North Dakota that forecasters warned would create hazardous zero-visibility driving conditions. Wind gusts of 30 miles per hour were expected in Illinois - along with a foot of snow - while large drifts were anticipated in Nebraska and Iowa.
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Igloo

Arctic freeze and snow wreak havoc across the planet

Charles Bremner in Paris and Richard Lloyd Parry Tokyo
Times of London
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:59 UTC
Arctic Cold
© AP
A boy walks with his yak after fresh snowfall in Kufri, outskirts of Shimla, India
Arctic air and record snow falls gripped the northern hemisphere today, inflicting hardship and havoc from China, across Russia to Western Europe and over the US plains.

There were few precedents for the global sweep of extreme cold and ice that killed dozens in India, paralysed life in Beijing and threatened the Florida orange crop. Chicagoans sheltered from a potentially killer freeze, Paris endured sunny Siberian cold, Italy dug itself out of snowdrifts and Poland counted at least 13 deaths in record low temperatures of about minus 25C (-13F).

The heaviest snow yesterday hit northeastern Asia, which is suffering its worst winter weather for 60 years. More than 25 centimetres (10in) of snow covered Seoul, the South Korean capital - the heaviest fall since records began in 1937.
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Igloo

Britain Freezes Over: 'No end in sight'


The Independent
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:27 UTC
Big Ben snow
© Getty Images
Britain's big freeze showed no sign of easing tonight as heavy snow again brought swathes of the country to a standstill.

Hospitals cancelled operations, the Army was drafted in to rescue motorists and emergency moves to ease the gritting crisis were demanded as a further 1.5ft (47cm) of snow fell in some parts.

Crucial transport networks went into meltdown during heavy flurries across the south while hundreds of thousands of children enjoyed an extension to their holidays after school closures.

With millions unable to get into work on a day estimated to have cost businesses £690 million, forecasters warned the misery will continue into next week.

After striking Scotland and the north of England, the heavy snowfall moved south to the home counties and London - where it was set to continue falling over night.

Comment: Gas Supplies Running Out as Britain Shivers

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Snowman

U.S. Shivers as Temps Head Lower

Craig Johnson
CNN
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:41 UTC
Icy Temperatures in the US - Jan 4, 2010
© CNN
Cold spell covers most of U.S. This map shows how far from normal the temperatures have been since the start of the new year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Figures are in degrees Fahrenheit.
Much of the nation awoke to frigid weather Monday as below-freezing temperatures threatened to shatter records across the South.

"We're seeing freeze warnings not just into Central Florida, but down into the Everglades," CNN meteorologist Rob Marciano said.

Hard freeze warnings were in effect for much of the Florida Peninsula and the Southeast, according to the National Weather Service. Record lows were expected in the Gulf Coast states and into southern Florida, said CNN meteorologist Sean Morris.

Temperatures in parts of South Carolina got down to 14 on Sunday, Morris said, breaking the record low of 18 set in 1979.

The Big Chill is far from over.
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Gear

Flashback 1922: "Extra, Extra, Read all about it! Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Perish, Glaciers and Icebergs Melt!"


Watts Up With That?
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:14 UTC
Image
© Maksim-ThePeoplesCube.com
Roger Carr recently wrote in comments:
Help Wanted: I am trying to purchase (or plunder) a full copy of this story, mentioned here on this forum:
A Washington, D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: 'Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt'.

The article mentions "great masses of ice have now been replaced by moraines of earth and stones," and "at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared."
The original source of the story resurfacing recently was from an Inside the Beltway column of August 14th, 2007. The newspaper article was located in the Library of Congress archives by James Lockwood.
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Igloo

Glacial Rebound Here We Go: Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years, experts predict

Nick Britten
Telegraph.co.uk
Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:55 UTC
Image
© Telegraph
Parts of Scotland have had snowcover for nearly three weeks
Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned.

They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating.

And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder.

Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years.

On New Year's Day 10 extreme weather warnings were in place, with heavy snow expected in northern England and Scotland.
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Snowman

The UK Meteorological Office: slightly less reliable than tea leaves or cock entrails

James Delingpole
Telegraph.co.uk
Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:06 UTC
Image

Nothing to see here, move along please
One of my personal favourite Comedy Moments of 2009 came in the unlikely context of a BBC Radio 5 Live debate on climate change. The female presenter, as we've come to expect of the BBC, was quite shamelessly biased towards the Warmist camp, but this apparently wasn't enough for the show's resident weatherman. When his turn came to read the weather, he instead chose to deliver an impromptu homily on the seriousness of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I forget the exact words but his speech began something like: "Well I work for the Met Office and I'd just like to say...."

Dear, oh dear. The poor chap. I fear the time will soon come - if it hasn't already - when the phrase "I work for the Met Office" will command about as much respect as "I was in charge of the New Orleans levee defences in the run-up to Katrina" or "I'm head of security at Lagos International Airport." The UK Meteorological Office - established in 1854 - is supposed to be Britain's greatest authority on forecasting the weather. So how come these days its predictions are so risibly inaccurate you'd probably be better off consulting tea leaves or cock entrails?
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Cloud Lightning

The Coming Ice Age

David Deming
The American Thinker
Wed, 13 May 2009 06:00 UTC
Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.... Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models.... our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. ... By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age. Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration's announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.


Comment: The above remarks from this thoughtful article provoke the unavoidable speculation that the PTB are TRYING to induce another ice age with their global warming nonsense. Who needs WMDs when you can kill billions by starvation and freezing cold?


Image

Our near future?
Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously.

On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously.
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