Politick

Greenland Saved! Al Gore Called for Icing UPDATED

The most strident, the most hysterical warning in An Inconvenient Truth is that the ice on Greenland was melting at a prodigious rate, the meltwater was seeping all the way down to the bedrock on which the ice sat, and we were facing a potential catastrophe when the ice lubricated by this melt water slid off the land and fell into the ocean, creating huge tidal waves and potentially raising sea levels by an astounding 20 feet in short order.  (The IPCC view remains a more modest rise of a few inches.)

Thus it should come as a great relief to find that all these claims have been shown to be wrong.  The melt water is not seeping all the way down but refreezing part way.  The earthquakes that Al Gore thought were evidence of a great pending instability have turned out to due to glacier calving not ice slipping and sliding off the surface.  Most significant, the retreat of the glaciers has slowed and may be reversing. They are now back to 2000 levels.  And their fastest ice melt remains back in the '30s, before anthropogenic global warming was thought to have started. 

UPDATE 5/18: a more recent study concurs.  Gore's argument of a catastrophic sliding off of ice is unsupported. 

The Barack O'Bama Irish Song

We are all mongrels now!  Worth a listen and a moment to celebrate the meaninglessness of race.  Barack may be more Irish than African.  Let the world embrace him for who he is, not what he is.  Lyrics here.

Polar Bear Alert! Sea Ice Back to 1979 Levels! UPDATED

You gotta wonder how soon Al Gore will turn up on SNL as a comic foil.  In the past two years, global temperatures have reversed the warming of the past 30 years.  In the past two quarters, Arctic sea ice is back to levels last seen in 1979.  You can say two years is too short to generalize, but you can also say the blip from 1979-1998 is also too short to conclude that man-made carbon dioxide is about to result in runaway warming.  In either event, spending untold $Trillions to prevent an uncertain calamity is now being seen as the colossal Folly it always was.  Rather than saying the Polar Bears are now safe from an horrific lack of ice, better to say WE are now safe from this hysterical lack of common sense. 

UPDATE:  This news article generated enormous interest and alarm from the AGW advocates.  The report is accurate, as indicated here with pictures, in that the extent of sea ice did match the 1979 extent, but this does not mean the ice itself is as thick as it was in 1979.  A good analysis is here. The scientists' reaction the story is here.  But then another shoe dropped: sensor drift from the satellite data had under-reported the polar ice extent by a huge 193,000 square miles (500,000 sq km), the size of Spain! This calls into question the purported rebuttals to the original story.  Satellite data from Japan shows the ice in 2009 is running ahead of the polar sea ice of any of the past four years (2005-2008). 

New Stock Market Terms

Well, we all learned the old monikers - "Don't confuse brains with a bull market", or "Bears make money, Bulls make money, but Pigs get led to the slaughter".  Now even the tried and true names need a bailout  Here goes:

CEO -- Chief Embezzlement Officer

CFO -- Corporate Fraud Officer

BULL MARKET -- A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius

BEAR MARKET -- A 6 to 18 month period when the kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewelry, and the husband gets no sex

VALUE INVESTING -- The art of buying low and selling lower

P/E RATIO -- The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing

BROKER -- What my broker has made me

STANDARD & POOR -- Your life in a nutshell  

STOCK ANALYST -- Idiot who just downgraded your stock.

STOCK SPLIT -- When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your assets equally between themselves

FINANCIAL PLANNER -- A guy whose phone has been disconnected

MARKET CORRECTION -- The day after you buy stocks

CASH FLOW-- The movement your money makes as it disappears down the toilet

YAHOO -- What you yell after selling it to some poor sucker for $240 per share

WINDOWS -- What you jump out of when you're the sucker who bought Yahoo @ $240 per share

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR -- Past year’s investor who is now locked up in a nuthouse                       

PROFIT -- An archaic word no longer in use.