Write this date down on your hands–Washington DC has been blitzed with 32 inches, with another 10 to 20 inches expected! Madonna just shrugs at that.

The snow has shut in nearly 230,000 federal employees, which takes care of almost all of anyone working in the city. They are forecasting that the budget of $6.2 million for snow removal has been blown through already. (At last–an exhausted budget that they can justify.) But oh, they also have the nerve to marry the terms “productivity” and “federal government“:

Today’s federal government closure costs federal taxpayers an estimated $100 million in lost productivity, according to Office of Personnel Management chief John Berry. This is the first government shutdown of 2010 and the second for this administration.

By the way, if you have lost faith in your fellow conservatives, go to the comments sections and see that they have launched a blizzard of their own. No ABC-viewing liberals want to chime in and offer to help out in the lost productivity? By God, they are creative writers, too–that Obama inherited the climate from a previous administration, that this is one “shovel-ready” job, etc. We always get no credit for being news consumers.

On the heels of the “see I told you snow” attitude, apparently now there is a state of budgetary emergency, as this snowstorm is costing Americans hundreds of millions a day:

Office of Personnel Management chief John Berry, who decides when to close the federal government, has said each snow day costs taxpayers an estimated $100 million in work government employees don’t do.

Why can’t they just subcontract this job out to India, too? Am I to understand that people cannot work from home for one day? Aren’t a lot of these people just computer terminal monkeys? Just how prepared are they in any emergency situation if their employees are rendered impotent by something like the weather?

If this is such an emergency budgetary crisis, just tell the people that they are burning through their vacation time if they sit home and do nothing. I guarantee that they will bust their humps to get to the office. I have never in all my time working in the private sector had a “snow day” off. DC has a fine subway system and other mass transit, but those were shut down as well. Is there a justification for shutting down the trains? I know the buses makes sense since there can be icy condition on roads, but are the trains in jeopardy?

Bear in mind that all of the Metro Transit Authority workers in DC are partly federally funded (as well as by neighbouring Maryland and Virginia). They also got a huge payday from the “stimulus” that gave them $202 million. Couldn’t a portion of that money been devoted to snow removal instead? Oh well. It’s basically a flake in the blizzard.

No one is doing this tally for how much economic impact the Vancouver Winter Olympics are going to have on commutes to work into the downtown, and that will last longer than any old blizzard. I think maybe we should have a tourist plow run up along Robson, chucking Swedes and Japanese to and fro.

This is suddenly tongue-clicking at budget problems that should never exist. 2011 looks to be projecting a budget deficit of $1.6 trillion. This “slowdown” per day will be 0.00625% of just that deficit spending. Even the argument that leaving them home forever would not have any significant change in their spending. (If they saved all that money by firing every single federal worker in Washington, that would make a difference of merely 2% of all excess spending.)

If the US federal bureaucracy is so paralyzed by the weather, move the capital somewhere else. Even Las Vegas and Florida have been hit recently by snow. There’s nowhere to run from this snow…except here at the home of the Winter Olympics, and even then we can’t get to work! If there’s no back-up plan for something as predictable as the weather, imagine the chaos Washington is in when there are real crises going on around the world.

Even though the Polar Bear Specialist Group claims that warmer temperatures and shrinking ice floe in the Arctic has significantly reduced the polar bear population, a U.S. Senate and Public Works Committee report says otherwise:

The “alarm about the future of polar bear decline is based on speculative computer model predictions many decades in the future. Those predictions are being “challenged by scientists and forecasting experts,” said the report.

But those predictings of dwindling polar bear populations haven’t stopped the US Geological Society from proclaiming that future sea ice conditions…

“will result in the loss of approximately two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population by the mid 21st century.”

Oh rly? Tell that to an Inuit:

Harry Flaherty, chair of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board in the capital of Iqaluit, says the polar bear population in the region, along the Davis Strait, has doubled during the past 10 years. He questions the official figures, which are based to a large extent on helicopter surveys.

“Scientists do a quick study one to two weeks in a helicopter, and don’t see all the polar bears. We’re getting totally different stories [about the bear numbers] on a daily basis from hunters and harvesters on the ground,” he says.

Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a biologist who has been researching polar bear populations in Canada’s Nunavut Territory for 35 years, seems to agree. “The study estimates from the Iqaluit area agree with those of local hunters, although the accuracy of the counts is doubtful in some areas,” he says.

Gabriel Nirlungayuk, director of wildlife for Nunavut Tuungavik Inc., is another doubter who questions the accuracy of helicopter surveys. “Helicopters have many limitations, including fuel capacity. They can’t go far out into the open water,” he says. But hunters crisscrossing the area by dog team, snowmobile or boat “are seeing polar bears where scientists and helicopters are not traveling.”

Forty years ago, old-timers living in the area around Hudson Bay were lucky to see a polar bear, Nirlungayuk says. “Now there are bears living as far south as James Bay.”

Perhaps it’s time for a polar bear hunt. $1000 a head.

Computer models are wonderful and generally accurate, unless, it seems, they are measuring arctic ice-flow, global warming, or the polar bear population. Other than those three minor things, they tend to be dead on.

At first they just came for the light bulbs and I did not speak out.
Because these days, I like to hide out in the darkness of my nice warm basement.

Then they came for the plastic bags and I did not speak out.
Because I was already using the replacement bag they had issued to me as per the minimum consumption laws made of 100% Polyester (imitation weave no less).

Then they came with this giant, tandem diesel powered monster of a truck to pickup and compost my “bagged” leaves and I did not speak out because I didn’t have any bags.
So they issued me their new paper bags with 100% of the 30% portion being recycled paper, or a 70% loss in real trees.

Then they came for my oil and I did not speak out.
Because they had already confiscated my Smartcar and recycled it into a wheelbarrow that they forced me to use every Earth Day to help them discover new sites to plant more and more and more trees.

Then they came for the BBQ and I did not speak out.
Because it doesn’t matter what the F*&% you do to a vegetarian hotdog, it still tastes like $hit.

Then they came for the air conditioner and I did not speak out.
Because by this time, the inevitable cool climate trend had cycled in once again as it has for billions of eons all by it’s poor little self, for reasons we do not and may not ever understand.

Then they came to register me to vote, and I did not speak out.
So they impaled my poor little weed infested, pesticide free front lawn with one of their plastic Green Party reelection signs.

Finally they came for me and I COULD not speak out.
Because there was nothing left to give, or take.

Hot, cold, warm, cool. Whatever and whenever the world is going to heat up or cool down, or even possibly stay exactly the same as it has been for the last 2000 years, one thing is for certain: NOW is the time to panic.

Der Spielgel Online is reporting today that climotologists throughout our doomed planet are stumped as to why global warming seems to be stalled. It’s a real mystery to the consensus crowd. What a dilly of a pickle:

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community,” says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. “We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”

Keep in mind that these are the same *experts* that claimed if world governments didn’t band together and cough up hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars immediately to combat the global warming *crisis*, the world would disappear within a matter of a few years, or months, or as some claimed, weeks or days.

But the science is settled, we have consensus! What the devil is going on? Remember, the same *scientists* that claimed consensus on this issue now can’t figure out if the lack of global warming in the last ten years is due to sunspots, ocean currents, or lack of midnight basketball courts for marginalized, inner-city youth that are still suffering from the effects of colonialism in Africa by evil, white, heteronormative males.

And in other news:

In 2002 Responsible Travel became one of the first travel companies to offer customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter the planet-warming emissions generated by their airline flights.

But in October, Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more.

“The carbon offset has become this magic pill, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card,” Justin Francis, the managing director of Responsible Travel, said in an interview. “It’s seductive to the consumer who says, ‘It’s $4 and I’m carbon-neutral, so I can fly all I want.”‘

Offsets, he argues, are distracting people from making more significant behavioral changes, like flying less.

Oh, do tell?

You mean to say that the very same people that buy indulgences to prove their *green-ness* are the same people who are knowingly and willfully destroying the planet? Go figure.

So, it would be like an unelected leader of the world green movement telling everyone that they must cut back and conserve, change their lifestyle and pay more in taxes to fund environmental projects, meanwhile, the mouthpiece lives in a 20 room mansion, consumes $2400 a month in electricity alone, even “consumes more than 20 times the national average” in natural gas, owns three boats and a fleet of gas guzzling SUV’s and other cars, yet because he pays a stipend for offsets and other nonsensical solutions to a problems he made up, well, this is perfectly fine and responsible?

If you need to buy offests to assuage your guilt about what you’re doing to the environment, you’re a weak, delusional and all around stupid person. When the revolution comes you will be the first to go and I welcome that day. I live in a house with a blue box, a smaller blue box, a green box, high-efficiency stove, fridge, washer, dryer, cfl bulbs, a high efficiency air conditioner, programmable thermostat, etc, so the chances of me ever feeding the loser machine by buying offsets are somewhere between never and eff you gently with a chainsaw.

I’ve done enough and so have you. Now is the time to burn the planet alive.

The tens of thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, and environmental activists that are swarming Copenhagen this weekend don’t care about the environment one bit. If they did they would teleconference the whole thing. But they will fly to Copenhagen in private jets or Boing 747’s, hire Mercedes, eat endangered foods and exploit the local population for their every need. They are earth rapists and the enemy of mankind. They need to be stopped by whatever means necessary. They are stealing our money and exploiting the world’s poor. They are evil assholes who should be beaten with large sticks.

Put it this way - these thieves are flying to Copenhagen to talk about a non-existant problem, to find ways to steal billions of dollars to fix the non-existant problem, and will meet again in 3 months to again talk about the non-existant problem. On OUR dime.

I’m sick of these pigs. Liars, thieves and deviants the whole lot of them. And to think we’re subsidizing their perversions.

How effective has the Obama Administration been? It’s made everyone just a little more conservative, or at least reminded them that they always were. People are still in the majority in thinking that the Earth is getting warmer over the past few days (it’s not), but more are not embracing the idea that it is because of humans. I can’t wait to be told how much we “hate science” now. Why there was a drop, according to one of our loyal BC warming druids:

Andrew Weaver, a professor of climate analysis at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said politics could be drowning out scientific awareness.

“It’s a combination of poor communication by scientists, a lousy summer in the Eastern United States, people mixing up weather and climate and a full-court press by public relations firms and lobby groups trying to instill a sense of uncertainty and confusion in the public,” he said.

(more…)

Yesterday I discussed the impact of the treaty to be voted on at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this December. I don’t know what possesses these people to host these things in the most frigid times of the year in places like Denmark, but there you are. They probably think they are seeking refuge from the central regions of the Earth, which are all now on fire.

(more…)

Much like Camus, Lord Monckton must argue absurdity itself. Camus made the argument that all life was absurd, with the absence of God permitting a meaningless existence. Monckton faces a similar uphill battle, with him arguing that the absence of freedom is keeping us in the same superfluous task.

(more…)

Spotted at Belmont Club.

I don’t know too much about this Climate Change thing that so many people have gotten into over the past decade or so. I know some folks say it is a religion of peace. Me, I’ve never had much of a religious/apocalyptic bent, so it’s just never interested me enough to look into it any deeper than I have, say, Scientology or palmistry.

But, whatever the truth or falsity of their promises of salvation: I do know that I would far, far rather the earth spirits’ wrath burn the planet to a crisp than see these people and their thoroughly fascist aesthetic succeed. Better to be slightly warmer on one’s feet than be pressed into a chanting, letter-shaped mob of anonymous, faceless Action-Takers on one’s knees.

 A massive natural gas discovery in Northern Louisiana  has shifted America’s energy landscape once again”

Even conservative estimates suggest the Louisiana discovery — known as the Haynesville Shale, for the dense rock formation that contains the gas — could hold some 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s the equivalent of 33 billion barrels of oil, or 18 years’ worth of current U.S. oil production. Some industry executives think the field could be several times that size.

Huge new fields also have been found in Texas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. One industry-backed study estimates the U.S. has more than 2,200 trillion cubic feet of gas waiting to be pumped, enough to satisfy nearly 100 years of current U.S. natural-gas demand.

Tsk, why are all the pretty ones so daft? I guess not needing to think has that effect on you, like when you don’t have to, or even want to, think about how real wealth is generated.

(more…)

Environmentalists have been very happy lately because rising gas prices have meant less cars on the road and more conservation. Yay momma Gaea! I’d like to be the first to wreck their happiness, by telling the filthy tree huggers, rising gas prices has led to an increase in the average Joe six-pack raping momma Gaea. Yay earth rapists!

More area residents will be heating their homes with wood pellets, coal and fireplaces next winter than anytime in the recent past, as they seek alternatives to skyrocketing fuel oil and natural gas costs.

Sales of pellet stoves and related equipment nationwide is estimated to have increased more than 50 percent in the first half of 2008, according to one industry source.

The cost for a home totally heated by pellets and using three tons of wood pellets per season is expected to be in the vicinity of $750 to $1,000 this winter, she said.

An Attleboro area home using 500 gallons of fuel oil that cost $1,275 to heat last year with fuel at $2.55 per gallon could well cost its owner $2,170 this year at the current average price of $4.34.

Either by hook or by crook, I will not live in a world where I can’t rape its natural resources.

When faced with financial ruin, people will explore any avenue to cut their costs. If this means burning coal, so be it. If this means chopping down a few trees, so be it. If this means filling up their stoves with the eyeballs of puppy dogs, so be it. Sure, the environment is important to people, but do you know what is far more important? Not dying of starvation. And that’s where environmentalism ends with most people. If you’re making money hand over fist, then sure, you don’t mind shelling out a few nickles for the environment. However, if the choice is between steak or giving away hard earned loot to some jackass who wears a jean jacket with a stupid button with an even dumber slogan about the environment on the stupid button, well, the environment can burn to the ground for all the average schmuck cares. I know this to be true, for I am a schmuck like you. Schmuck.

It’s a disco inferno