Monday Afternoon
Good support for additional showers mid to late afternoon and possibly into the evening. But we are finally seeing a change in the upper air wind pattern. As has happened on a regular basis this summer, an upper level trough – not as strong as several we’ve seen this summer – is digging southward from the Great Lakes and will push away the persistent humid and shower-laden weather we’ve had since Friday. Another cool, dry air mass will be moving in tonight and tomorrow. With more sunshine, daytime highs should be just a little below the highs of the past four days, BUT with much lower humidity, it will feel much better at least through Thursday.
What’s in a name?
After World War II our Earth settled into a gradual cooling trend. So much so, that by the late 1960’s into the 70’s, climate specialists (I use the term loosely) were proclaiming the arrival of a new Ice Age. Then, a funny thing happened. Earth started warming. The fervor started slowly but really picked up in 1988 when that world-famous scientist Al Gore (he has one college-level science class to his credit – got a D) and astronomer James Hansen really got the ball rolling on the global warming scare. At the time, I was very curious about the fuss being made. After all, our Earth has been slowly warming since the last ice age ended roughly 12,000 years ago. Yes, there have been long periods of ups and downs over those years, but the long term trend has always been up.
Oh, but this time was different! Now, it was OUR fault. Anthropogenic Global Warming! This was something new and we’re going to save the world. I’d been in the weather business over 20 years at that time and I’m thinking…”hmm, human produced changes in our weather/climate. Didn’t we study about that for quite awhile back in college in, of all places, Climatology class?” Of course we did. Mankind has been altering, changing, manipulating, and doing numerous other things to Earth for thousands of years. The surface of the Earth today wouldn’t even recognize itself from a picture of the earth 1000 years ago. Has our weather/climate changed because of our activities?
YES! But, we don’t know in what ways. You can’t make as many changes as we’ve made and not have an effect on our atmosphere. So, what have we done about it? We’ve adapted. And, if we want to continue as the dominant animal on the Earth, we’re going to have to continue adapting. The “newly discovered” AGW was laughable. The talk about reversing AGW was even more laughable, even to the point of being hilarious (to me).
As we head through the 1990’s, the fever keeps growing. More and more “studies” come out proclaiming the horrible future that awaits. I’m thinking how difficult weather forecasting is with a 1-2 day window. Things usually get very iffy by days 5-7. And, these climate studies are ALL based on computer “climate models” which have never been proven to work. Somewhere during my trip through the 90’s I had one of those “Duh” moments. This is NOT science. This IS political!
Crossing over into the 2000’s, two additional important things have happened. On the political front a new administration whose science advisers actually believe this climate mysticism and are pushed it on us. So far we’ve spent 100’s of millions, perhaps billions, of our tax dollars on studies based on models that do not work (phony science) AND projects that produce high priced energy to replace the lower priced energy we should be getting. Think of all the truly useful things that could have done with that money if it had been placed into rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure. ADAPTATION
The second important event so far this century has been that global warming has stopped. No warming at all this century! When it became obvious that the warming had stopped, the climate alarmists were pretty nimble – have you heard “global warming” much in the past 6-10 years? Certainly not, suddenly our greatest fear became Climate Change. This is pretty stupid, of course, since our climate is always changing” but the perpetrators have been very skillful proclaiming that this is the next big threat to our existence.
But, now that Earth has not warmed for well over a decade, that climate change thing just doesn’t sound right either. So, I’ve picked up on a few government releases in the past week or so now referring to Climate Pause. Don’t they know that our climate never stops or pauses? Our tax dollars are working hard!
Stuff
Valhalla must have the world’s best drainage system for their greens. And the drainage on the fairways seemed very good as well. Nice job.