Warming Winter Update
April 24th, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
I finally got around to checking out NASA’s global temperature monitoring data for March of 2009 and sadly March’s temperature map shows a continuation of this winter’s above average temperatures across most the vast majority of the Earth’s land masses. Only Alaska and the Canadian Rockies, out of all the Earth’s ski domains, got a break from the above average temperatures. Here’s Nasa’a March 2009’s map.
For the record, here are the links to the January and February maps again.
It is discouraging to see so much of the Earth growing warmer, but even more discouraging is to read an op-ed in today’s Washington Post that apparently is designed by its authors , or the Post’s editorial board, to try to tamp down enthusiasm for the alternative, greener, less carbon producing energy production methods President Obama was highlighting on Earth Day. If you read the authors’ bios at the end of their opinion piece, you’d think they are pro-alternative energy folks with lots of street cred: “James R. Schlesinger was the first secretary of energy and established the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Robert L. Hirsch is senior energy adviser at Management Information Services Inc. Previously he managed the federal renewables program at the Energy Research and Development Administration, the predecessor to the Energy Department.”
Schlesinger’s bio should also have mentioned what he has been involved in recently, not what he did back in the 1970’s. Thanks to Wikipedia here’s an update: Director of Peabody Energy (the largest private coal producing company in the world), Director of British Nuclear Fuels, Director Seven Seas Petroleum, Inc. headquarters in Houston, but incorporated in the Caymen Islands (let’s not pay any taxes to support our troops Mr. Former Secretary of Defense Schlesinger!)- and oops- Seven Seas has filed for bankruptcy; reason FRAUD!-”heck of a job” directing Jimmy!!! Wikipedia says he has written numerous opinion pieces that are skeptical on global warming. On the sort 0f green side, he is on the advisory board of GeoSyn Fuels a company developing a low-cost method to convert biomass into energy.
Dr. Hirsch also has a long history in the oil business (Exxon and ARCO) and in nuclear energy and in the defense industries. See Wikipedia
Today’s Washington Post sure isn’t the Washington Post of the 1970’s when its editor Ben Bradley had the balls to let Woodward and Bernstein pursue the Nixon and the Watergate story! Oh, and guess who is Chairman of the Executive Committee of The Nixon Center- James Schlesinger!
Part 2 of this post will look at the issue of alternative energy and the ski industry, and an alternative look at the industrial “alternative energy” world that Schlesinger and Hirsch envision.
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