You're getting warmer

Well that's fun. Looking out the window at sunlight playing on an ice covered birch tree with two cardinals poised on the branches. Very pretty. And while I do that I can read where Bin Laden's released a statement on global warming.

According to him, the US is causing floods in some places and droughts in other places, by our wanton consumption of more than our share of the world's resources. Bin Laden wants everybody to boycott US businesses. I hope he includes US airlines in that, but I kinda doubt it.

A very good thing about the recent Memphis coldness is nobody got killed last weekend. A bad thing is some people were stalled at local bus station, four days straight, trying to get to St. Louis. Yeah, I thought the same thing too, why would anybody want to go to St. Louis?

But, people are hard to figure out sometimes. Some people want to ride a bus to St. Louis, and other people sit in the basement of some house on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border jabbering into a microphone about global warming.

Myself, I'm a skeptic on the topic, and not because of things like incovenient data being suppressed, or this latest thing about Himalayan glaciers.

Yeah, started out they admitted quoting an Indian scientist, then it was they accidentally transposed numbers, and Himalayan glaciers aren't melting in 2035, it was really 2350. And then it was European glacial melt data came from somebody's Masters' thesis. I swear, it's hard to keep up with these people! Most recently, it's that most all "scientific" data about worldwide glacial data came from article in a mountaineering magazine, which was taken from antecdotal reports from mountaineers.

Look, I know a few mountaineers. I quite respect them. Just have to point out though? A sizeable portion of the mountaineer community tend to say "Dude" often, and also support "medical" marijuana, if ya know what I mean?

But my skepticism on global warming doesn't stem from this furious backstepping on glacial melting. Nor even that the face of global warming is that insufferable, sanctimonious twit, Al Gore.

Naw, I'm a skeptic because I can't figure how to honestly take the Earth's temperature. A biased person can skew results by placement of the thermometer.

That said though? Maybe 100 million homes in Asia are going to want electrification in the next twenty years. Where will that power come from? Coal is plentiful, that part of the world. You want a 100M more homes powered by coal fired electric plants? What's that gonna look like? What about 150M or 200M additional homes powered by coal?

I like birch trees covered in ice, but I realize there must be some point at which human activity can seriously change the atmosphere. Don't want my grandchildren eating soylent green and waiting for the St. Louis bus, after all.